Trawler Blogs

Read our new Blog section below – FOR FOODIES.
Last November 2014 when we left our second home – our Nordhavn 46 “Envoy” in Greece’s Lefkas Marina, we expected to be back cruising by April this year. Unexpected circumstances prevented that and just last week we returned to Lefkas to check on Envoy, as part of a wider trip to visit our daughter in London and my brother and his wife in Scotland. We knew it was too late in the season to do any cruising – winter weather generally arrives by early November and it normally takes about two to three weeks to prepare Envoy and a week to winterize her after cruising. So this trip we’re using Envoy like a motel unit – to do some land-based exploration.
On arriving aboard Envoy up on the marina’s hardstand we found everything OK with no surprises – more on Envoy technically in next post.
Obviously Greece has featured a lot in the news recently with their financial crisis and the refugee issues. We arrived into Athens, spent one night there and then made the five hour bus trip to Lefkas.

This 16th century church is nestled in the basement of a new multi-story building in Athens

So far we haven’t seen any refugees or any visible signs of the crisis. We’ve no doubt that a lot of hardship does exist, but people are out and about, tavernas are bustling and several Lefkas shop owners told Di it has been one of their best seasons ever. But we have heard that Greeks can only withdraw six Euro per day from banks or ATMs. The areas where refugees are flooding into Greece are the islands adjacent to Turkey, such as Kos and Lesvos – a long way from here.
We hired a rental car for eight days to explore some inland areas we’ve not visited previously and will mention that in our next posting.

FOR FOODIES Yes “foodie” is a real word and refers to a person having an enthusiastic interest in the preparation and consumption of great food. During our unexpected sojourn home in New Zealand I took on three months consultancy work with some old friends. One of them, Vivienne, told me she regularly reads our blog, is not particularly interested in the technical stuff, but when we mention going into this or that “taverna” would like to hear more about what we eat. So this new section is dedicated to Viv, and we’ll get it going properly when we come back to the Med next year.
While staying in the village of Papingo high on the slopes of Mt Astraka looming 2,436m above sea level we stayed in a traditional inn.

Papingo is set high in rugged mountains

We weren’t particularly hungry and opted for a simple three-course organic vegetarian dinner, which turned out to be stunning with all of the ingredients coming from the inn’s garden and surrounding fields:
– Zucchini salad: smallish light green zucchini sliced lengthways very thinly with a potato peeler, doused with finely-chopped phenyl, whole red pepper corns, olive oil mixed with lemon juice and garnished with sliced lemon
– Fried porchini mushrooms: porchini mushrooms are the ones with very ragged edges. Our host, Kostas, said they gather about 100kg of mushrooms every third day from the fields around the inn. These were served fried in olive oil and garlic, and garnished with rocket leaves and ground pepper.
– Green beans: coarsely sliced lengthways and lightly cooked in a tomato pasta sauce heavily diluted in olive oil. We’re definitely going to try and replicate this back home.
Of course this was complimented by obligatory glasses of passable local red and white wines at ridiculously low prices.

Our traditional taverna served organic vegetables fresh from their own garden

Trays of porchini mushrooms drying in the sun