The Small Cylades – Schinoussa and Donoussa

Then the most relaxing part of our holiday began. We spend five days on two very little Greek islands. 206 people live on Schinoussa, Donousa instead has 263 inhabitants. Petroula recommended these islands to us because even for Greeks they are very unknown and therefore less touristy.

In Schinoussa camping is forbidden. So we slept with our mattresses and sleeping bags directly at the beach. During the day there were some locals around us but at night we had the whole beach to ourselves. We ate, swam, snorkelled, read, chilled, made music and had very good home made wine from a restaurant close by. At the second day we already had kind of a cozy home. Hans „organised“ a solar lamp and some pillows and life couldn’t´t be easier these days. Then we took a ferry to Donoussa. There´s a free camping site and we were excited to meet some new people. But what happened there was kind of strange. There were quite a lot of young alternative people, most of them from Greece, but also some internationals. When we arrived, we immediately felt weird. Nobody said „Hallo“ or anything to us and the whole atmosphere was spooky. The people were sitting in front of their tents, nobody talked, made music or other things you would expect, when a bunch of alternative people come together at the end of the world. We built up our tent and went to the beach bar at the evening. Also it was not easy to come in touch with the people but we tried hard and met finally a guy from Denmark and one from Greece. We asked them what´s the problem with these people on the island and they explained to us that they really try to do nothing. And doing nothing really means doing nothing. So we got an idea as to the reason why everybody was so closed. The people who made vacation there probably didn’t want to experience something, they just want to be on their own. But after two nights we were happy to travel further on to Albania. We left Greece with mixed feelings. First thing: we spent a third of our money in that one week. The buses an ferries were expensive and also when we went in bars we spent plenty of money. Second problem: the Greeks. We met some really friendly people but if you compare it with the Balkan countries the most of them are closed and unfriendly. Salesmen in shops and barkeeper most times ignore you at the beginning. Then they are pissed off if you want to buy something from them or if you have a question. But all in all we had a very relaxing week, perfect weather and overall lot´s of fun. Next Stop Tirana!

Athens

We spent two days in Athens. Lemonia, a friend from Petroula offered us a place to sleep. Just some pictures of the city:

What we ate:

Delicious Souflaki for not much money!

And what we did:

At the Syntagma square we played some street music. After one hour our guitar case looked like that:

It seemed that the Greek people are not very exited by German street musicians. We didn´t care at all and stated to improvise some songs. Then suddenly a few Iranian guys came and started to dance.

They broke the ice and at the end we got some groupies and also some money.

At the end the Iranian guys and the Greek girls danced together to „Pure Vernunft darf niemals siegen“ from Tocotronic – certainly one of the best memories of our trip!

From Ohrid to Athens

In general borders are very good spots for hitchhiking because all cars have to stop and the drivers can see you easily and often you can even ask them, if they have the window down. We tried it once, we tried it twice, we tried it maybe 100 times and what happened at the Greek border was just spectaculary shitty. All the drivers reacted like stupid assholes. Most of them didn´t react at all when we asked them, others just looked at us like we were ghosts. It was really strange because so far we only met very friendly and helpful people and the Greeks at that border did not even said „no“ or something else to us. They acted like they could´t understand what we wanted from them or completely ignored us. So the first impression of Greece was really bad. The concept of hitchhiking is not very well known in Greece but when I heard that it´s hard to hitchhike there, I just said „Ah, come on! There are friendly people everywhere!“ Then we figured out that a possible reason could be that the Greeks thought we are from Macedonia. The two countries don´t like each other because of that -> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macedonia_naming_dispute

The only nice guy over there was this beautiful peacock, which was at the border.

After two hours we gave up and decided to hitchhike back to Bitola to catch a bus from there to Greece. By the way: the first car stopped and gave us a ride 🙂 In Bitola we figured out that there are no buses to Greece and we have to go over the Greek border to catch a bus from Florentina, a city in the north of Greece. It started to rain, again nobody picked us up and we started to become pissed off. After an hour we took a dubious private taxi to Florentina. After all we were very happy to catch a bus to Athens, even though it hurt our hitchhiking-honour doing so.