A day walk on Naxos

Sunday October 30
Naxos

Last night we ate at our local restaurant where I'd helped in the kitchen - the food was great.  I tried the fetta and eggplant rolled in bacon, the stuffed zucchini and the pide.  All nice.  Then we got chatting to a couple of Norwegians who have an apartment they rent all year round - only a couple of doors down from our AirBnb.  They told us about a group that goes walking every Sunday so we decided to give it a go.

We arrived at the bus pickup point with no idea where we were going - magical mystery tour.  There were about 50 on the bus - Greeks, Norwegians, Swedes, French, English, Australian....  The bus trip was on a narrow, steep windy road for about an hour.  I think we ended up at a place called Moni and walked to Halki.  It was only about 5km, but we stopped every 10 minutes for a 5 minute rest!

Ancient Olive Trees - someone said some are a couple of thousand years old!

Missing the home variety though.  Plenty of eucalypts in Greece

Lots of ancient churches from Byzantine era

Halki (or Chalki) is a very quaint little village.  It has a distillery that makes the drink Citron.  Citrons are something between a lemon and an orange, but much larger.  They use the leaves to make the drink.

This still is still used today

Huge glass vessels, presumably for storing the drink.

Back in Naxos, I felt like I still needed a walk, so went for a wander along the beach and out to the Temple of Apollo, thought to have been built around 530BC.

And watched the sun set over Paros.