Last evening we returned to the super cheap restaurant in the local village, only to find that we had been duped by the oldest trick in the retail book, the loss leader. We ate more or less the same as we had the previous night but for no obvious reason the bill for our second night came to €10 more. Never mind. The food was good and the price was still less than the average we have paid in Greece.
We were up relatively early for us and decided to get going promptly. Extracting ourselves from the tight position inflicted upon us by our German neighbours proved much easier than I was expecting and Basil was soon cruising down the open road.
I have mentioned before the proliferation of petrol stations in Greece. Today on one stretch of road, no more than 800 metres long, there were seven or eight petrol stations. The surprising thing was that the price for diesel at these stations varied between €1.54 and €1.34 per litre. Who on earth ever pays the highest price for diesel when they can save 20 cents a litre by driving less than half a kilometre. It’s a mystery to us.
Our target today was a national nature reserve called Axios-Loudias-Aliakmonas National Park, a bit of a mouthful to say the least. It is one of Greece’s most important wetland habitat but that didn’t mean SatNav knew how to find the particular bird observatory I was looking for. Initially SatNav took us through the back streets of a village only for us to come to a dead end. I researched for a better route on Google Maps and we ended up winding along three miles of rough farm tracks before we found the place (40.468245, 22.584553). We now know that we could have got here on less than a kilometre of tarmac, which we will of course use for our exit tomorrow.
We immediately found that the observatory was closed, but not to be deterred I got out my birding lens and binoculars and went in search of birds. It is a huge wetland area and there are clearly many species residing here, but unfortunately there are no footpaths to get you near to the best areas. Of the many birds I saw the most interesting was a Sardinian Warbler and numerous Black Winged Stilts, neither of which I have seen before.
At least as interesting, when I went out after lunch I found a huge, what I though was a snake, crossing one of the tarmac paths. As I got closer I could see it has ear holes, which being a nerd, meant I knew it was a lizard, or in this case a legless lizard. At well over a metre it was far too big for a slow worm. It turned out, when I had looked it up in my reptile guide, that it is a Glass Lizard, which is indeed a legless lizard with jaws so strong it crushes snails as one of its main food sources.
I also found two tortoises, one of which Sarah picked up for closer inspection and Sarah found a third tortoise later.
It is a lovely isolated place to stay overnight, but we have been joined by three other motorhomes and a couple of cyclists with tents, so not as isolated as we initially thought.
Tomorrow we are considering spending the day, and possibly night, in Thessaloniki if we can find a place to park and stay which feels safe in Greece’s second largest city.
