And so it begins.
A quick primer on the Corfu Trail. The “trail” is about 100 miles long, yet the island is only about 40 miles in length. The trail gets its length from weaving back and forth, from the east coast of the island to the west coast and back again.
It was conceived by a Corfu woman that wanted to bring long distance hiking to her home island, and to support her love of walking. She has painted yellow marks on stones, walls, trees, telephone polls, fence post, etc. to mark the way, not unlike the Camino de Santiago in Spain. Most people hike the distance in about 10 days, each day called a “stage”. The guide book says you can camp along the way, but there aren’t any campgrounds or public lands. You camp on private property, asking permission first. We opted to stay in hotels each night, enjoying the comforts of a shower and a bed. I was able to find a couple sets of GPS data for the route and loaded them in the Gaia GPS app on my phone so I can navigate via GPS We will take 13 days to hike the trail instead of the recommended 10. A couple zero days at key beaches will give us a chance to swim and relax.
We were awakened at 6:00am this morning by our alarms. Our plan was to get an early start and hike during the cool of the morning. We had fried eggs, yogurt and some bread for breakfast, then packed our bags and were out the door a little after 7:00am.
There was a nice cool breeze blowing, the temperature about 64ºF. We walked the streets of Kavos south until we were on a double track dirt road climbing steadily up toward the southern most tip of the island.
Along the way we passed by a monestary in ruins.
Eventually, we descended to a beach on the west side of the mountain. As we were enjoying the beach and taking some pictures, Andreas, the German we met yesterday on the bus caught up with us.
We spent a few minutes talking, then he pulled over to the top of the beach to make a pot of coffee and have a breakfast. Sally and I continued up the beach to the other end, about a mile in length,
then scrambled up the collapsed road bed and began the climb to the ridge above the beach, at least a couple hundred vertical feet.
As we walked up the old dirt road that was severely rutted from erosion we were constantly surrounded by butterflies. Not keeping an official count, I would guess about 5 or 6 species. Beautiful.
We started down from the ridge above the beach into the interior of the island and were soon caught by Andreas. We walked together for the next few hours, getting to know each other. He is 62, a guitarist from Cologne in Germany, suffering economically due to the pandemic as his group, a swing orchestra aka Tommy Dorsey has not had a performance or a rehearsal in 18 months. In his economic slump due to COVID he felt obligated to sell an expensive guitar he had owned, played and loved for 30 years. On his way to the purchaser he got in a car wreck, broke a finger on his hand that holds the neck of the guitar and is now unable to play. That is bad Karma. It has been two months since the accident, so he holds hope his hand will heal so he can play again.
Being the first day on the “trail” I was relying on the GPS and electronic map to guide us. So far all had been great. There are three options on the GPS data I had downloaded, a purple track someone had recorded, a red track from another party and then a line of dots representing the actual route. Sometimes they separated from each other, each taking a slightly different road, but they always joined back up within half a mile. As we descended from the ridge above the beach we came to a T in the road. All tracks went right. In a 100’ past the T the purple track turned left down a dirt road. The red and dots stayed on the road. The road climbed. The purple descended and rejoined the road in less than a quarter mile. I chose the purple track. All was great, at first. Then, as the tracks began to converge back on the road the purple track had us climbing a very steep embankment to get back on the road. We climbed up through the scrubby trees and brush to find where the locals throw their garbage off the road. We climbed through their trash, Sally needing a hand up through a few trash littered steep parts and regained the road. Whoever recorded the purple route just lost our confidence.
I’ll stick to the dotted route. I noticed from this point on that at every intersection of roads where a decision had to be made as to which way to go, Andreas now checked his GPS rather than just following me. I think our garbage pile incident rattled his confidence in me.
The first and only town we passed through on the way was Spartina. It is composed of about 4 houses. One of those houses has a coffee shop down below the street level in what we would call their back yard.
The whole town is high on a hill and the terrace for the coffee shop has a beautiful view east over the southern part of the island and the water beyond. At first I couldn’t tell if it was a quickie-self-serve-mini-mart kind of place or a sit-down and be served shop. An elderly woman came out to wipe a table. We sat down and she took our orders for cokes all around. An elderly guy dressed in work clothes came out, chatted a bit in broken English and Italian and the disappeared. He returned with a plate of cucumber slices and olives coated in olive oil saying “from my garden”. What a kind gesture, and very good.
When we got up to leave he returned with four shot glass containing an orange liquid and a glass of clear liquid, obviously wanting to share a drink with us before we left.
Now, I don’t drink, but I was not about to try to explain to this kind man who understood very little English that I don’t drink alcohol. To him, it would seem that I was refusing his hospitality and come across as very rude. We toasted each other downed the shots. He was very pleased. 
The route continued northeast through olive groves and fields. Andreas continued to check my decisions at each fork in the road (who can blame him-after the garbage hill incident I would be checking too). It was now nearing 11:00am and getting warm and we were getting hungry. Just before we stopped to eat, Sally took a misstep and fell to the ground.
Other than her pride, she was not hurt and we continued on for a little while before finding shade under an olive tree to stop for lunch. A couple chunks of bread torn from a loaf I was carrying (couldn’t cut slices because I hadn’t found a knife to buy yet), a slice of pre-sliced Gouda cheese and half a candy bar we had purchased at the coffee shop and grumbly stomachs were satisfied. Andreas decided to sit and rest a while longer. Sally and I only had less than two miles to go to get to Potami and our lodgings for the night. We wanted to complete our walk before it got any hotter. We said goodbye to Andreas and continued on.
There was little shade in these last two miles as we entered the town and walked the house lined streets. We knew our place was to the right on a street bordering the near side of the canal that runs through town.
We turned right and found workers cementing slate back into the street surface. They had torn up a a line of it running down the street to install pipes of some type below the road and were putting the stone road surface back together. We saw a place called the River Restaurant with a sign saying “rooms to let”. We were thinking that must be it when a healthy looking man in his mid 60’s told us it had been closed for years but he knew what we were looking for and led us down an alleyway to a back building, explaining he knew the person who ran the place. We thought it was one of the workers who had just left the job site to help us out.
No one was at the apartment house, but he ran around to the other side to fetch him, returning shortly to say he wasn’t about. We sat down at a table in the shade to wait and began to talk to our benefactor. He is from the Netherlands, on vacation here for 5 weeks, heading home tomorrow. He was a high school teacher of math and computers. Very nice man.
Shortly a young woman (30s) and an elderly woman (60s?) came around the corner with a key and let us in. As with last night, we are the first (and only) guests of the season and they aren’t really set up to efficiently process us.
It took a few minutes to learn the place; the elderly woman proudly showing us the cooktop and dishes, washing machine and deck, etc and we were soon alone. We gathered a load of laundry and got it started, then returned to the room, me to write, Sally to take a short nap. Before the laundry was done (well over an hour) we decided to go to the store for groceries. We weren’t sure what time they closed and didn’t want to miss the chance to resupply for tomorrow.
Back at the room we hung our wet things on the patio/porch and walked back to the canal for dinner. We were again the only ones seated, at a table on the canal. Unable to escape our rut, we shared Moussaka and Greek salad yet again.
We were going to do something different but Rebecca, our waitress, said her aunt was the cook and made the best Moussaka ever. It was tremendous.
After dinner we walked the one mile to the eastern shore of the island, sat on a beach lounge chair and FaceTimed the kids, then did the same with Cindy.
A quick walk the mile back to our apartment, organize for the morning and it was lights out. We planned to get an earlier start tomorrow, so we would finish earlier in the day, before the heat.
What a great day! Magnificent olive orchards, ancient ruins, an amazing beach walk, walking with Andreas, getting off route and climbing through garbage, a great encounter at the coffee shop, kind, helpful people, a great dinner and connection back home. Can it get any better than this
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