I don't like re-tracing our steps, it doesn't fit with the spirit of our project, to go places we haven't been before. I take Gill's point that the same road going in the opposite direction is tantamount to making different journey; nevertheless it remains the novel prospect of familiar territory.
Does observing somewhere from another angle really make it new? I think this is a philosophical question rather than a geographical one!
Anyway, whatever philosophical stance we might adopt, geographically, once again we are safely esconsced in the Plateria Camperstop. As I connected the Ehu I noticed we were parked in exactly the same slot as we had been ten days ago. I made a conscious to embrace anew the spirit of adventure by plugging us into the socket next to the one we had used before.
A van arrived with Danish plates. They had driven through Poland, the Czech Republic, then south through the Balkans. How was Albania? I enquired. They were positive about it. They were on an open ended trip, planning to fly home from time to time. I gave them the details of Camping Scarebeo in Sicily and the airport parking near Pisa where we stored the van in 2015/6. It's impossible for me to avoid going into full scale outraged re-moaner mode every time I recall just how our freedom to roam has been curtailed.
We decided to stay one night at the camper park before moving to Camping Elena about 2 Kms down the road. We needed a Lidl and this meant driving into Igoumetsita before settling down in a site for a few days. Sadly, we have got to the stage where we have no idea which day of the week it is. Friday we discovered, and in Greece the weekends seems to involve celebrations into the small hours - once again from a nearby restaurant Greek folk music until 2.30am. This time it was not death by a 1000 bouzoukis but torture by some sort of primitive woodwind instrument full of eastern promise. It was very loud very fast with more of a pan-Balkan vibe than Hellenic. Indeed if it had been wafting through the airwaves rather than from the Italian restaurant next door you might have identified the radio station as Iranian, Bulgarian, Turkish, Lebanese, or Moroccan. So much of the traditional music of Europe and the near East has a common Eurasian root, probably because back in the mists of time we all migrated from Africa via Turkmenistan.
On our previous visit to Plataria we were a little tardy getting to the bakery and devastated to discover that by noon they had run out of cheese and spinach pies. This was definitely a matter we needed to put right, so we unloaded the bikes and pedalled along to the village. There was hardly a soul about. We concluded that the entire community must be sleeping off the after effects of last night's Balkan hooley. This did not explain why the two pies we bought at 10.45am were the last in the shop. Maybe half the people from last night's shenanigans piled back to Yanni's to make it an all nighter, then were struck by the post ouzo munchies at 7.00am, and forming an orderly queue outside the bakery before it opened almost cleaned it out of spinach and feta pies.
Whatever the reason, we were delighted we managed to snaffle the last two. We found a bench facing the beach and consumed our pies thoughtfully while watching the ferry from Igoumetsita slowly chug its way towards Lefkimmi across a glassy sea.
Greeks today no longer can claim to be paramount in art, architecture or philosophy, but they are still top dog so far as cheese pies are concerned, we agreed.
Stopping for brunch in Plataria ensured we drove through Igoumetsita at exactly the same time as most of the population headed out for a pre-lunch 'tête-à-tête' in one of the scores of cafés lining the seafront. Many diners appeared consumed by suicidal ideation, leaping in front of a British motorhome their preferred way to end it all. Our arrival also coincided with the regional finals in Greece's most popular emerging sport - 'haphazard parking'. I think we spotted a few potential future Olympic champions on our way to Lidl. We made it, stressed but unscathed as ever. There were a few other vans in the car park, A Toyota Hilux de-mountable, a Landover Defender conversion as well as the usual cute VW camper and German coach builds more or less identical to ours. The Lidl car parks of southern Europe - definitely a moho tribal gathering place.
We retraced our steps, yet again avoiding crowds of pedestrians tired of life, slaloming through randomly parked cars, past the port, up the pot-holed hill, back towards Plataria. Just before we reached the turn-off for Camping Elena we happened upon a petrol station with cheap diesel. At €1.79 per litre it's as cheap as we've seen in weeks, so we topped up. "That should get us north of Rome", I speculated.
Arrival at Camping Elena is memorable for three reasons. The first is entirely predictable, the approach to the place is terrifying, a steep slope - at least a 25% decline, hairpin bends, overhanging olive branches, jutting dry-stone walls, the usual thing. The second reason is a tad surprising, but not entirely unexpected, given the first; the layout of the site was just as vertiginous and the roads as narrow and hazardous as the way down to the site. The third memorable aspect was entirely unpredictable, the guy who runs the place is a dead ringer for Nick Cave.
Clearly Nick understood the challenges posed by the layout of his site for the driver of a 7m van, he directed us personally into a particularly tricky pitch on a hairpin bend, ensuring we were safely tucked into our space with a sea view that would command the premium rate. Who is going to argue? I was happy simply to arrive in one piece.
Camping Elena is basically the same proposition as Camping Kalami which can't be more than 2km to the north - both steeply terraced sites with restaurants and a narrow shingle beach offering excellent swimming in the sheltered bay. We used both, I think I preferred Kalami because the the beach is a bit wider and the facilities more modern. It also seemed to have a more mixed group of campers. German tourists predominate in both, but Elena is like the Bundersrepublic de-camped to Greece, I estimate 90% of the clientele were German speaking, which is ok, just a bit weird, to visit Greece but only mix with Germans.
In this respect our particular pitch proved to be Elena's most multi-cultural spot, next to a couple of tiny pitches reserved for small tents. Over three days they were occupied by an Albanian couple who we rarely saw, a skeletally thin backpacker with dreadlocks, a pair of Polish bikers on a roadtrip and a single woman from Switzerland who seemed to be sleeping in her car. They were all under thirty and despite differences in culture, dress, demeanor, girth and behaviour they had one thing in common, they all had a hammock, even the backpacker and the girl sleeping in her car. I decided it was a millennial defining thing, have hammock, will travel.
The things I will remember about our stay here...
It was a fabulous place for a swim, no, that is not me trying to swim in a fedora..
The sunsets over Corfu were spectacular...
The place sold their own olive oil - in re-used plastic water bottles, a sure sign of zero km produce...
It's the third place we have stayed over the years with a moveable grey water drain... Greece 2, Sweden 1.
And the weather's changed, right on cue - the equinox, a few degrees cooler - in the twenties not the thirties, one morning we woke to temperatures in the low teens. It felt chilly. How will we cope with a the Pennines in November?
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