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I think I need to start this story about a year ago. Around Christmas last year a tiny seed of a travel idea germinated in my head.

Dodecanese, Greece

Nickjenkins
2003-11-20 16:38:39

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bear the psychological scars of ridicule at the hands of a bunch of foreigners when, much to our amusement, he ploughed straight off the track and headfirst into the safety barrier. He certainly carried a menacing scowl round our portion of the track for the rest of the evening.

Not only were we entertained by the next door automotive academy but my marine engineer friend was there again with his wife. They were quite surprised to see us since we had been heading in the opposite direction but I sat down to chat to them and explained our change of plans. While talking about the next possible destination I picked up an interesting tidbit from them.

We were speculating about heading for a tiny port on Kalymnos called Vathi. According to my local friends there was a bit of "politics" going on in Vathi and while it shouldn't deter us from going we should probably be aware of it. When I inquired what kind of politics I was informed that a new taverna had been built in Vathi by some aspiring businessman. The current taverna operators had apparently decided that this might be more competition than they would perhaps enjoy and dynamited the taverna into the ocean. Now this sounded a little far fetched to me and perhaps a bit of a tall tale but as you'll see there was some evidence to support the story.

In any case we headed off after dinner and retired to the boat once again for post-dinner drinks. The stars weren't nearly as bright but good wine and the proximity of ice cream supplies and hot water made up for any lack of rural charm.

The next morning presented something of a sailing challenge. We could have returned down the west coast of Kalymnos, the way we had come, but we wanted to detour to the east, towards the coast of Turkey. The channel between Leros and Kalymnos is only about three hundred meters wide at some points and in antiquity the two islands were in fact ...