I am plucking away at a Spanish guitar up at the top of the hills overlooking the seas as the sun sinks into the evening horizon. It is calm and peaceful as the wind chimes sing eerily over my chords. My friend and travel companion is reading and the people we’re staying with are preparing our last dinner on our last night here. There is a quiet bliss here – this is what you look for in a relaxing holiday, the silence, which is only broken by the rhythm of the tides or the whistling of the wind, to contemplate life with all of its excitement ahead seeming like the storm out there somewhere in that never-ending water, so distant from the present.
Naxos (the largest of the Cyclades islands off Greece) is a beautiful island and it has not yet been completely invaded by tourists and hotels. Yet there is enough to excite the visitor. The beaches are splendid and are probably the most attractive feature of the place. We spent most of our time at Kastraki as it was nearest to us but the two best beaches were the isolated and
beautiful Pyrgaki beach and the more vibrant St. George’s Bay which was right next to the main town. We spent many lazy afternoons just lying on the beach before going out to the town in the evening and these beaches are just as good as any that you’ll find in the med.
The town is full of bars and restaurants and there are two clubs, one of which was only open on Fridays and the other was impossible to find. We spent most of our time drinking cocktails. I think I must have tried up to 20 different cocktails throughout my week there. Most of the bars were good but the highlight was definitely the one called Bintsi where you could sit right next to the water. However, the nights were hardly wild. When we got drunk we only got merry, not smashed, and we were probably the only people there who were looking for excitement. There was that one night where we probably should have been chucked out of a bar and it was certainly my fault. We were watching the Man Utd vs Arsenal match in a bar and being an Arsenal fan I got very upset when Arsenal conceded two stupid goals and then had a last minute goal disallowed meaning that we lost a game which we had absolutely dominated. Like Arsene Wenger I instinctively had to take my frustration out when van Persie’s goal was (rightly, unfortunately) disallowed. However, unlike Wenger, the cocktail glass which I smashed into the table was a bit more fragile than the water bottle which Wenger booted. Yet it was Wenger who got sent out to the stands while we sheepishly walked away of our own volition. The rest of the evening was spent with me ranting, making stupid phone calls to people back home and nicking crap from the market stalls – this did result in me gaining some pretty nice (almost certainly fake) Ray Ban sunglasses.
Other than the bars and restaurants the main town does have some interesting historical sites with the Sanctuary of Delian Apollo (I have no idea what significance it holds but we got some photos of it as it is apparently the main feature of the island) and a castle also. There were also plenty of shops with all sorts of Greek souvenirs and there were also some very pretty churches. We did go for a couple of long walks around the island and saw some of the villages at the top of the hills in the middle of the island from which we were able to see some wonderful views of the island. There was one walk in particular that will stand in my memory, walking along Pyrgaki and down Kastraki where we walked through the sea whose tides massaged our feet after we had climbed all sorts of boulders to get over the hill between the two beaches. It was a long and yet so peaceful walk which seemed to provoke some sort of meditation in us both and I think that it was doing this that I got the closest to feeling at one with Nature that I have ever come. The longer the walk went on the more it reminded me of Jack Kerouac’s Mount Desolation in ‘Dharma Bums’ – I just wanted it to go on and on as was the feeling of peace that filled me.
This is no place for anyone who looks to holidays as either a means of getting absolutely wasted or of experiencing an exotic culture (incidentally these are the things that I usually look for in holidays), but it was ideal for relaxation and contemplation with the beaches, cocktails and stunning weather (hot but not too hot). It allowed me to contemplate the excitement ahead of going to university (I went last August) and yet like a storm in the ocean, uni seemed so distant to where I was at that moment. It was an ideal place to escape and let go of the usual noise of life back in the UK. It was only football that interrupted the meditative state of that holiday in Naxos.
