Water Everywhere--Lakes, Baths, Springs, & Aqueducts

We just enjoyed a few days riding around in Northern Greece. For ages, we've wanted to go to both Lake Kerkini, which is very near the border with North Macedonia and Bulgaria and also Kavala, a coastal Northern Greek city. The weather finally turned nice enough to enjoy a little trip. In addition to discovering these two places, we stumbled on a few pleasant surprises nearby.

Lake Kerkini

We spent a couple days near Lake Kerkini and hired Vasilis, a boater known as the lake expert (he apparently helps boaters when they got lost in lake fog), to take us out to see the lake birds. It's not peak bird season but we had a nice time in the crisp, moist, and misty morning air. We got to see flamingos, pelicans, grebes, and more cormorants than we've ever seen. But as is often the case in Greece, it's not just the scenery that's interesting--Vasilis and his wife, Ariadne, who came along, were fun to chat with and after the boat ride, they bought us coffee and koulouri (a sort of Greek bagel) for an extended conversation. Ariadne is a retired English teacher, so we were lucky to have her there for the more technical aspects of the tour and conversation. Captain Vasilis speaks almost no English. We are happy to realize that despite its difficulty, we have definitely (perhaps Sam especially) continued to absorb the basics of the language--we were able to speak to and understand a good bit of what Vasilis had to say. Yay! After our coffee chat, we headed to lunch at a restaurant they recommended. As we left, we saw our server head over to the water buffalo pen (the lake is known for having lots of them) and he tossed them a few bales of hay. So he serves the water buffalo, then serves them up to humans (not us!).

Agkistri's Turkish Bath

After lunch, we decided to go up to an old Turkish bath, built in 950AD, for a hot plunge. This drive took us within 400 feet of the Bulgarian border and we arrived in the teensy town of Agkistri. Actually, 'town' is generous. It's a patch of a few buildings and not much more aside from the stray dogs. You wouldn't expect to find anything worthwhile there. But the bath was amazing. They have a series of private thermal pools but we managed to have 45 minutes of private time in the oldest of them all. A complete, silky water treat! Much of northern Greece has mountain springs and you often can hear the roar of mountain springs. On the drive we got to stop at a gorgeous rest stop--a series of decorative stonework water fountains all perpetually pouring out delicious, fresh spring water.

Kavala

The next day we drove to Kavala, which is on the coast due east of Thessaloniki by a couple hours. On the way we noticed that there were some interesting looking ruins, so we took a detour to see them. Unbeknownst to us, those ruins are on the religious tour track, so it was us, packs of cacophonous Greek school kids on field trips, and bunches of stoic, mostly elderly American pilgrims. From there it was a short but windy drive down to Kavala. It's called one of the more attractive small coastal cities, or some such silliness. I swear, every place in Greece has some undisprovable superlative like "...one of the most holy villages of under 1,000 population with no more than 70 goats amptheatrically set between a gulf and pointy mountains", but Kavala really is lovely. The place we rented had an incredible view of the sea and Thassos, the nearby island. The old town of Kavala is a convoluted maze of incredibly narrow roads--some wide enough for a car, some only wide enough for a moto, and some that look like roads on a map, but are actually just staircases--and unfortunately Google Maps doesn't know how to tell these things apart! So although we were quite close to the rental apartment, it took a crazy amount of time to find it. But luckily we and the car were unscathed.

Beware the Power Monitoring Yiayia

It felt great to get away for a few days and see some new things, breathe some clean country air, and experience lots of peace and quiet in nature. We did have a few weird experiences with the two places we rented. Older Greeks in particular are zealots for disconnecting anything from power supplies when not in use, especially water heaters. Every host, when you arrive, will show you the circuit breaker for turning on the water heater only when necessary. The spiel includes telling you it'll take 20-30 minutes to get hot water, and that you should turn it off after you take a shower. Our elderly host, who lives on the floor below the first place we stayed, must have gone into our rental place while we were gone to turn off the heater! At the Kavala place, the young manager of the place insisted that we pay in cash (which is often a sign of trying to skirt taxes; "black money" as they call it here) and was very far from welcoming. She generally seemed like the wrong type of person to be in the tourist industry. But these niggles were minor things compared to feeling like we managed to make a prison break after so much time stuck inside!