Day 12 – Sifnos

Apart from the crystal blue waters and picturesque villages, Sifnos boasts more than 100km of well-marked hiking trails making it the dedicated hiking island of the cyclades. I mean I couldn’t care less about this but Louis seemed to think that while we were here it would be a disgrace if we didn’t go for a hike and reenact the ‘good old’ Duke of Edinburgh days. I don’t know who’s more of the plonker… him for suggesting it or me for agreeing!

We set off early to try miss the high heat of the day. We weren’t really prepared to go walking all day. We both wore our toms and had no hiking gear or equipment. Nonetheless, I had prepared us well with our map. Before we started our first climb, Anna needed some sugar so we stopped for a chocolate pastry that cost €2!! She didn’t even finish it.

The hardest part of our hike was the first hour in which we had our steepest incline up the side of a cliff. It wasn’t actually as hard as we expected but we were still sweating out all the sea water we had accumulated over the last 2 weeks. When we reached the top, the only sounds you could hear were the horns from the ships and ferries, who today seemed to be playing games with each other and overdoing it. One even started hooting ‘dun, dun, dundundun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dundun’ -you know the song, right? There was also nobody else hiking (I wonder why) but we did meet some French people going the other way, surprise surprise.

The rest of the hike was full of more picturesque views and we even got to explore some abandoned mines and an apparent Hollywood sign replica with actually nothing on it. When we finally arrived to Apollonia, the main village, we were glad to sit down and relax as walking downhill on the stone slabs was actually much harder than scaling the cliff earlier that morning.

The unfortunate thing was that there was nothing opened in Apollonia and the shops or cafe’s that were open weren’t very good. A bit of an anticlimax to the hike. Nevertheless, after wiping the sweat off us and cleaning up in a public toilet, we found a small cafe that we could sit in the shade and relax with food and drink.

With nothing left to do in Apollonia, we decided that we would just get the bus back to Kamares and do something there. With no option to buy tickets in shops and getting on the bus through the rear door, I thought we were getting a bus ride for free. We didn’t – a young girl then came round and made everyone purchase a ticket – so close.

Anna was struggling after her big day and needed to take a nap when we got back. During this time, I managed to do a wash, clean our bag which had now contained buckets of my sweat, booked our accommodation in Syros (after Athens) and tried to kill 2 flies that were annoyingly stuck in our room. After about 30mins of running around the room swinging a book, I managed to direct them out the door. Buzz off!

When Anna had recovered (slightly) we had our bruschetta before going to the shop to choose what pasta sauce we wanted tonight. This was a new shop that we visited earlier and they had finally been able to locate the light-switch. Earlier, we had to use our phone torch lights to know what we were looking at. It was just like Holister, only the men at the front of the shop had a 6pack of beer instead of muscly abdominals. “Hey welcome to the pier.”

After booking even more boat tickets, we sat on the beach to watch the sunset right beside 4 boys who were trying to get their frisbee down from a tree. Once they got it down, they found it more appealing to get things stuck in the tree and so they started firing their frisbees and spades at all speeds and all directions towards this tree. It was quite amusing and luckily we narrowly escaped any damage.

With spaghetti for main course and a kinder bueno for dessert, we had gone all out for dinner tonight. 2 courses last night, 3 courses tonight… I’m in luck. Maybe tomorrow she will provide an amuse-bouche? Anna managed to blow the fuse in the apartment with all her excitement. Either that or she doesn’t know what ‘maximum level’ means on a kettle.

After a busy day full of activity, it was time for bed whilst we watched ‘My man can Greece’, a truly horrible show but a good watch nonetheless.