Bit of a lie in this morning whilst I caught up on MAFS!! After a quick coffee I packed my bags to leave Athens & head to Lesvos. My friend dropped me at the airport & it was a very smooth & easy bag drop process with ah hour wait for the plane to board. Seems incredible to me as a non-smoking Aussie that they still have smoking rooms in airports but it’s not uncommon in the Middle East or here in Greece. Sponsored here, of course, by Winston!
A very short flight later & I arrived at the Island of Lesvos which is only 5 nautical miles from the coast of Turkey & home to the camps of the ‘Asylum Seekers’ or as they are known here ‘Illegal Immigrants’.
Maria & Aris pulled up just as I walked out into the sunshine & after big hugs we headed to the port of Mytilene for a real souvlaki by the sea. It was just what the doctor ordered & I can’t convey the feeling of peace that descended upon me when I took in my surroundings. The sea, the green of spring, the quaint old buildings & the relief that I was in the country rather than the crowded, noisy city. Not that I didn’t enjoy Athens but I am a country girl at heart & being by the ocean is what my soul needs.
Petra, where I’m staying, is an hour’s drive from the airport so when in town my hosts often do their shopping. The supermarket is next door to the camp where the immigrants are housed & there were many of them in there. It’s a bit of an eye opener to say the least, realising that these people are here with a view to going onto another country but stuck here, in a sort of no man’s land, no way of moving forward & no way of being sent back. It’s a life so foreign to my own that I can’t help but ponder the state of their mental health. This also makes me wonder what the locals must have thought when in 2015 over 500,000 illegal immigrants/asylum seekers descended upon the island, 10,000 of them arriving in just one day! It’s daunting to try & imagine what things must have been like for all involved. I’m sure that over the next month I will begin to learn more about it.
Shopping done we piled back into the car & continued to climb up into the hills & the north of the Island. It’s spring here & the wildflowers are blooming after more rain than is normal for this time of the year. We stopped along the roadside so I could take some pics. There are anemones, orchids, chamomile & wild oregano all growing on the side of beautiful old stone terraced fields dotted with old gnarled olive trees.
It’s pruning time here for the olives & lots of people are burning their cuttings so the air is smoky with the smell of burning foliage. As I said previously part of the reason I chose to come in April was because of the season & even on the drive home I wasn’t disappointed. The air is redolent with the fragrance of jasmine, cow manure & smoke all overlayed with the tang of sea air. It might sound odd but this is the smell of peace to me, I feel more grounded & connected that I have done in the past 10 days.
Another quick stop in Kalloni, in the centre of the Island, was on the cards so that I could see the resident storks. Apparently this pair come every year & have been doing so for a very long time. They lay their eggs here & raise their chicks. This nest has been in residence for years. It’s right in the middle of the town, surrounded by tavernas, shops & traffic but the storks don’t seem at all perturbed!
We passed salt flats on the way to Petra with some flamingo’s wading around in the waters. The piles of salt were huge & it’s quite an industry here with Greek salt being sent all over the world to be processed. A little research reveals that Lesvos yields the second biggest salt harvest in Greece, producing about 40,000 tons a year. Germany & Canada are the biggest importers of Greek salt & in 2019 the export of it fetched about 3.5 million euros.
We arrived in Petra at sunset & Maria & I walked from the seafront to the Paradise suites where I will be living for the next month. From the small bit I saw of Petra it’s beautiful & right on the water. There are about 800 residents in Petra & I’m sure over the next four weeks I will get to meet a few of them as I sit in the coffee shops watching the world go by.
I anticipate life will be lived at a much slower pace here with beach strolls, book reading, yoga, writing & drinking tea on my balcony. My room has everything I need to be self sufficient & is homey with its little kitchen & what appears at first test to be a comfortable bed. My pics will probably mainly be flowers, old buildings & food from now on so if that’s boring you’d better look away!
