Rhodes has a lot to offer, especially in late spring. Oleander bushes bloom everywhere in riverbeds that are already dry. The mountains are high, the villages beautiful. We ride the quad bike along all the dirt tracks, no matter how dirty, heat up a dry riverbed and get lost in the middle of nowhere.
Just a few kilometres south of Rhodes Town, everything becomes pleasantly empty, wide and quiet. Sometimes we don’t see a car for hours. Every few hundred metres there is a small monastery or a chapel at the side of the road. Sometimes little shrivelled black nuns come out.
The crickets chirp, a thousand birds chirp in the woods around Epta Piges. It smells of rosemary, thyme and many other herbs that I don’t recognise. The further away you get from the major “sights” and roads, the more beautiful Rhodes becomes. That’s why we imagine we have to hike 15 kilometres to the Moni Thari monastery. We leave the small road and make our way along goat tracks through bushes devastated by a forest fire. Not successful.
On the highest cool peaks stands an abandoned chalet hotel from the 1920s. In the former dining room, a comically coiffed guy in a tailcoat asks me if I could lend him a typewriter and an axe. Distraught, I stumble back down the path to the road through the wild goats.
In Gennadi, in true Frank style, I put the keys in the car and slam all the doors. It doesn’t matter. Poles work at the hotel. They get everything open.
Rhodes is beautiful and fun. A typical 400-metre stretch of road signs: 50 km/h, clear road, 20m 70 km/h, then another 50, clear road, 80, 30, 50. If the Greeks do everything like their signs, I’m only surprised that the crisis didn’t come sooner.
Frank Woelky, born in 1973. Kitesurfer since 1998. Since 2006, I have been combining kitesurfing and web design on trips lasting several months off the beaten track.