Nederlandse Versie

NEWSLETTER THE GREEK ISLANDS - NIEUWSBRIEF DE GRIEKSE EILANDEN
Snow in Greece & I have booked my trip.

Hello lovers of the Greek islands, here is the update of my website The Greek Islands. If you have received this newsletter by mistake or if you want to unsubscribe please reply to this email and write "unsubscribe" in the subjectmatter.

It took a while but here is the first newsletter of 2008. Maybe you have already booked your first trip to Greece for this year. For many people in Holland it was a problem to book a flight only ticket to islands like Samos, Lesvos of Chios. Since one of the Dutch companies, Martinair, no longer flies on European destinations, the remaining two, Arkefly and Transavia are more or less monopolists for flights from the Netherlands to the Greek islands, and they were holding on to their tickets for the travel agents. Result: you could only book a complete holiday with hotel. Only for Crete, Rhodes of Corfu it was no problem. In the meanwhile it has improved a little bit, since the same tickets that you normally book at Transavia you can now book indirectly at the travel agents. I have spend many hours sitting behind the computer the past week to decide where we are going this year. We just couldn't make up our minds. In the end we decided to go back Samos, just like last year. We liked it very much and we were both feeling a bit homesick. The ticket was more expensive than we hoped for, a little over 380 euros, which is 45 euro more per ticket than we paid last year. It is probably to blame on the fuel prices and not to forget we have to pay the travel agent extra fo the reservation (in this case 20). Anyway, we are leaving. Within a day I had also booked all the hotels. The start will be in Limnionas in the southwest of Samos. We really enjoyed ourselves there last year. It was in our point of view the discovery of the last couple of years. Above are some of the pictures that we made last year. We stayed with a spicey Greek lady with a funny and hospitable character. The place where we were stationed and the suroundings were really great, with such friendly people and peace and quiet. I recommend it to anybody that is longing for Greece as it used to be years ago. The village has a beautiful beach, nice tavernas and there was the possibility to make nice walks in the area. We have found a few lovely small beaches just for ourselves. Limnionas was a special place where we felt right at home. After Limnionas on Samos we want to go to the nearby island of Fourni for a whole week. Ik don't know the island yet but I have heard many praising words about it. Fourni is a small island just west of Samos, in between Samos and Ikaria. Actually it is more like a group of 12 small islands, of which two are inhabited. It is supposedly still pretty unspoilt and a good place for stretching your legs and make walks. You cannot rent a car on the island. There are not many roads you could drive on anyways. There are walking tracks and there are bays with small beaches. From Fourni it is, if I am to believe the ferry schedules, also easy to make a daytrip to the opposite small island of Thimena (10 minutes sail) or Ikaria (50 minutes sail). The ferry leaves at 7.30 in the morning and returns again the same day at the end of the afternoon. The schedule says that this goes on every day of the week except fridays and mondays. After our visit to Fourni the holiday will allmost be at its end. The last three days we will be staying in a studio in Ireon on Samos. Ireon is a small coastal resort not far away from the better know Pythagorion, but with the difference that it is less touristicly devellopped here. It is more quiet, there's a nice beach with lovely restaurants and especially there is a good atmosphere. To us Ireon was also one of the discoveries of last year, so this is why we opted for this village. We wil be staying at Eleana Apartments, that is quite centrally located at a two minutes walk distance of the sea. She had a lot of nice comments from enthousiastic people in her guestbook and it was inexpensive. More about Samos and where we are going to stay you can find on the Samos pagina. MORE NEWS - snow in Greece
Maybe you already had read about it or seen on it television: a few days ago, it snowed in Greece. On the mainland of course that happens more often, but on the islands is still rather exceptional. I received a number of photos sent from Sifnos from someone who probably was in shock in that moment. There are some more on the Sifnos page. Also new is a Karpathos page. I haven't been on the island yet, but with the help of pictures and information of other people it has become quite an interesting and cute page.

Okay people, that is it for this time. Thanks for the attention. I wish everybody lots of Greece for this year.
Kind regards, Hans.