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Saturday, April 15 extending into the early hours of April 16 must have been the least expected day we've had in four years. We started the day in Skala Kamirou, about 50 km south west of Rhodes City. We'd gone there to be a in good position to see the ancient ruins at Kamiros and then to continue counterclockwise around Rhodes island.

Although Skala Kamirou is the terminus for the ferry to nearby Halki Island it is about as small as you can get: three restaurants, two small pensions/hotels, and something too small to be called a shop and just big enough to be bigger than a kiosk. In addition there are a half dozen houses and about as many fishermen working boats out of the port.

We didn't know any of this when on Thursday we took the daily bus from Rhodes City. We just trusted to luck and it almost ran out, although at first it didn't seem that way: the bus let us off in front of a hotel and we were rather happy with its appearances, modern and near the sea. It was shock and awe, however, to learn that it was filled. At that moment we didn't know there was a second hotel; nonetheless we didn't worry. The second hotel, or pension, was 300 m further along, almost at the pier. Jan went to investigate and came back reporting that it had a place for us, although pretty small and without private bath. In the meantime the manager of the first hotel came back and told Gerry he'd had a cancelation. Did we want the room? We chose the one near the pier for its ocean view and balcony and trundled our bags over.

The next day, Friday, we got to see not only Ancient Kamiros but a Crusader castle, Kastellos, just south of Skala Kamirou. The first was impressive for the high quality of the ruins; the second for its castle perched on a crag surveying the coast. We were up early and took the first and only bus of the day back north to Kamiros and had the site to ourselves our first hour there. As other tourists started to arrive we were ending our visit. Our choice was to hitch-hike or wait two hours for the one daily bus back to Skala Kamirou. We of course chose hitchhiking and waited only a short time to be picked up; it was a Russian tourist with his daughter; we learned from him in halting English interspersed with German that he had been a programmer working in Munich for the last eight years. Jan was frustrated because he wouldn't respond to her Russian in Russian. Gerry often speaks French and his interlocotur seems to not comprehend that Gerry is speaking French. Was a similar thing happening to Jan? Anyway, he was going to the Kastellos castle and we were very happy to tag along.

We walked back to Skala Kamirou, about 2 km, and at the end of the day had at dinner at one of the three restaurants, where we were the only customers, it was that dead. The friendly proprietor told is that the next day, Saturday, there wasn't a bus further south. Second awe and shock: we hadn't been careful in checking the bus timetable. There was, however, a bus at 9:00 a.m. that would get us back to Rhodes City. So the day this blog entry is meant to talk about, Saturday, we got up early and were out at the bus stop at 8:00 trying to hitch 25 km south toward Monlithos, the site of another castle on another, reportedly more impressive crag. In the next hour about half a dozen pickups passed us, all obviously locals, probably mostly fishermen. None stopped. At that hour there weren't any private cars -- important because tourists and Albanians and Bulgarians are much more likely to pick us up. The tourists were all still in bed and the Albanians and Bulgarians were all probably on Mykonos and Naxos.

So at 9:00 a.m. we took the bus north to Rhodes City and there, after an hour, started around the island clockwise, towards Lindos, the site of a third giant Crusader castle, and underneath it the ruins of an ancient Greek city. Just before getting on the Lindos bus we met a young German, come to kite surf. In coversation he revealed himself to have been a dope-head at 16; his parents had consequently sent him off to a specialized boarding school in Burlington, Vt, where he spent all of his time smoking pot and not learning English or anything else. This day he wanted to get to Kattavia, about twice as far as Lindos, but there was only a bus about 2/3 of the way, to Gennadi. Gerry proposed to him that we share a rented car.

In Lindos we got off the bus and the guys went to look for the car while Jan watched the bags. The bus stops on the highway and it is a 500 m hike into the village of Lindos. Or what used to be the village of Lindos, since it is now a giant tourist trap. If you know Mykonos and Carcassone, you'll appreciate Gerry's horror when he describes it as three Mykonoses wrapped inside a Carcassone. In other words, there was nothing but restaurant and bar and bar and cafe lined up one after another along narrow lanes that imitated what a Greek village used to be like and gave a giant claustraphobic feeling. Indeed, sitting above it all, on another crag-mesa was the magnificent Crusader castle. But that wasn't visible from the village.

With difficulty Gerry found a rental-car office. But it was closed and it turned out one did business with it by going to the Lindos Taverna. So be it. There Gerry talked to the rental manager via cell phone. Gerry apparently asked too many questions and was too price resistant; the man told him that the cost of the cell phone call was greater than his potential profit and that they should call it a day. In other words, he didn't like Gerry and wouldn't rent him a car. We're happy that Greeks are no longer so poor!

So as there were no hotels, pensions, or dolmatia (rooms to rent) visible, and as Lonely Planet said that the ones that existed (if invisible) were expensive and as it was raining enough that we didn't want to drag our bags around we decided to go back to Rhodes City. We decided to leave for Kos and not make any more attempt to go around the island: we'd seen Lindos from afar and that was good enough. The beautiful Rhodes landscape farther south probably didn't match Crete and so we wouldn't really miss a lot by a precipitous departure.

When Gerry got back to Jan he found her talking to an English couple from near Liverpool. They had concluded about the same thing: their day trip away from the package hotel wasn't going to be a success. While we all waited for the bus a taxi driver proposed that he'd take the four of us to Rhodes City for slightly more than the bus fare. We agreed and headed for town. The woman was an English literature teacher and during the ride Jan and she continued a conversation about books which Jan lapped up. The man sat in the front seat and talked with the taxi driver, a Greek-Canadian young man, more Canadian than Greek. He'd come to Greece on vacation and met a girl and stayed. An hour later we were in town and had the driver drop us at the ferry office just opposite the port.

There, to our pleasure, we learned that in 2.5 hours, at 18:00 a ferry would leave for Kos. We parked out bags on the terrace of the non-descript cafe at the entrance to the docks. There Jan read her current Russian book (White Guard by Bulgakov) while Gerry took a walk for nearly two hours; then we got on the ferry. At 18:00 we didn't see a flury of activity: no ropes being cast off to release the ship; in fact, in the 45 minutes we'd been on the ferry hardly anybody or any vehicle had gotten on. At 18:15 we went to inquiry. For unspecified reasons or possibly because of bad weather or just because the port authorities wanted it that way we wouldn't be leaving until 21:00. There went our hopes of getting to see in the daylight the passage past the Marmaris (Turkey) peninsula, past Symi Island, and along the Dacha (Turkey) penisula. In April, 2002 we'd been there and now wanted to appreciate them from the see.

At 21:00, as now really expected, we didn't see a flury of activity:no ropes being cast off to release the ship; in fact, in the last 45 minutes hardly anybody or any vehicle had gotten on. More inquiries and we were assured that we'd leave about 23:00 or 23:30. In otherwords, we'd arrive in Kos at 3:00 a.m. Before we'd gone to the ferry office we had decided to stay in Rhodes if that was what it took to arrive in Kos at a decent hour. We'd been sandbagged. We were stuck. And so we stuck it out, at first sleeping in a no-smoking lounge, but getting chased out by a party of Gypsies (Albanians without cars) that smoked and made a great amount of noise. The food service on the ferry was rotten and we'd emptied our usual stash of food to lighten our travel load.

At 0:300 Sunday we arrived in Kos. There we were rescued by a man who wanted to rent his hotel rooms. At first we wouldn't deal with him because his English was so bad. But he was the only seller and we were the only buyers and so in the end we made a deal. And as it turned out the room was pretty good, the sheets were snowy white, he bed soft, and we were soooo tired. By 4:00 a.m. we were in bed and we slept and slept.