No, it was not a real dog! I did a double take too when I saw it hanging there. It was just a very realistic child’s stuffed toy that had got wet and was being dried on a clothesline.
WINDLASS UPDATE:
The parts finally arrived! Two weeks and two days from Australia. We had been told that the backlog from the trucker’s strike might mean it would be six weeks or more before we could even think about getting our parts. [I suppose sacrificing that goat to the ‘delivery gods’ must have really helped.]
Here is the problem. This is looking inside the windlass “gearbox” and you can see the worm gear has lost its middle teeth! This would not have been too bad except the teeth distributed themselves into to the cog of the main gear and one through the side of the gearbox case (This was where the oil was leaking from.).
We managed to put Humpty-Dumpy back together again but only after having to get a local engineer to cut the old gear off in a lathe(!). Reassembled and back in action, the anchor windlass is spookily as quiet as a sewing machine.
THE INTERIOR – EXPLORING LEFKADA ISLAND (BY SCOOTER)
Lefkada is technically an island, although it is connected to the Greek mainland by a swinging road bridge. The swinging bridge opens once an hour and there is always a mad rush as boats make their way through the canal before the bridge closes again.
Lefkada island is mountainous but the inland, away from the coast, conceals a surprising terrain of hills and fertile valleys.
Lefkada’s highest point is Mount Elati (1182m). As it is located roughly in the middle of the island creates as a natural barrier between north and south, as well as east and west parts of the island. The main roads tend to follow the coast “around” the mountains. To avoid the traffic, we choose to take the small roads “up and over” the mountains.
Some of the roads were little more than tracks. Others were reasonable but little used and had the roadside vegetation often growing out into the road.
As this is an earthquake zone you also have to keep your eyes open for the odd rock that may have rolled down the hill and onto the road…!
And of course, the goats! Luckily on a scooter you could usually ‘hear’ the goatherds and their clanking bells before rounding the bend. (Often you could smell them as well !) – If there were a shady spot they might all be standing under the tree in the middle of the road.
Feral goats were worst, as they had impressively sharp horns, no warning bells and were a bit unpredictable when grazing along side the road. I am pretty sure the scooter insurance did not cover goat attack! (PS – Before you email, No, I am not wearing a Bowie knife, that is the design on my swimming trunks.)
Then there might be the odd road block – where some poor lost person in a camper van is backing up a single lane road as there were few signs preventing them from taking the wrong road, and no place to turn around.
Once we reached the top of the mountains the views were spectacular! This is the view from Mnimati (1157m) – just below the highest point and the centre of the Island.
The trip back (3000 ft) down the mountain on switchback roads was pretty exciting. The scooter did not have a clutch and gears, rather it had some kind of weird and wonderful automatic transmission – while I am certain is great on a flat surface around town – was not really designed to go down vertical mountain roads. At least we had good brakes.
We trekked up dusty tracks to find ancient monasteries and stopped at Kerasias Springs, just outside of the village of Sivros.
Cold clear water has flowed out of the mountain here for centuries supplying the villages of Sivros and Vournikas with their only source of fresh water.
Twice we have hired scooters to explore the interior of Lefkada Island.
On our first trip was to the north part of the island inland where we went up Mount Stavrotas and visited the scenic mountain village of Karya. Where we joined the locals to have lunch in the main square under the shade of two huge plane trees. At Karya we also visited a unique embroidery folklore museum.
The Museum is the home of a local family (five generations!) of lace makers. The house is still lived in but part of the house has been preserved as a museum/memorial to one of Karya’s greatest lace makers who developed the technique for “blind stitch” embroidery – he design looks exactly the same on both sides of the cloth.
Our guide is the last surviving member of this family of lace makers. It was his grand mother who developed and taught the blind stitch technique to women in the village. The remarkable thing is that she only had one hand and in her later years was almost blind! Here Cathy is being shown the technique in the place where she used to do her work. (The old woman’s picture can be seen in the background.)
Not bad for Cathy’s first attempt! (Actually this is one he had prepared earlier.) The house (the museum) was a fascinating time capsule of Greek life over the last hundred years and showed how a whole family worked, ate, and slept all in the same room – complete with an inside well for water.
Everywhere you look you can see very old buildings that were destroyed in the 1953 earthquake. Quite often, rather than rebuilding the same site, the ruins were left standing and new buildings, sometimes the whole village, simply moved up the hill and started again.
Lefkada’s island history dates back to the Neolithic period (8000 BC).
One of Lefkada’s most famous residents was the German archaeologist, Wilhelm Dorpfeld, who spent much of his life trying to identify Lefkada as the home of Odysseus. Many of his excavations (like the bronze age one above) can be seen today. Dorpfeld was buried at his home overlooking one of our favourite anchorages - Tranquil Bay in Nidri.
We are moving on tomorrow – heading south toward Crete and exploring more of Greece as we go. We will remember our time spent in Lefkada – with friends and family, as one of the highlights of our journey so far.
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