Rhodes revisited

We first went to Rhodes in 1988 when Clare and Charles were seven and five respectively. We booked a two week holiday in a beach hotel with half board and I remember dinners were served school dinners style on long tables. We rented a car, that didn’t seem to break the bank in those days, and drove all over the island. We visited Rhodes town and enjoyed lobster dinners and on one day we took a ferry to Symi. These were before mass tourism and sadly those days are gone.

Last month we went back, just Juni and I this time, on a Voyage Joules Verne tour. There were triggers to memories of that first visit but we also saw what happens when mass tourism hits. Rhodes has perfect summer holiday weather, it doesn’t rain in the summer and you’re just about guaranteed sun every day, and that means it attracts lots of tourists.

The number of tourists going to Greece in total has increased three fold since the early 90s and about 3 million tourists now visit Rhodes every year. Tourism now dominates the local economy and lots of the nuance which we would have seen thirty years ago is no longer visible as shops, bars and restaurants have developed an apparently single uniform offering. inter alia this has resulted in the sameness and blandness of the food on offer, even in the more expensive restaurants.

However it was still a great holiday. Here’s my list of the five highlights

Our hotel, the Rodos Park: it really was first class and is the eighth in a sequence of excellent VJV hotels (four in Jordan and then three in Genoa and Piemonte) this year. I might grumble that the bedrooms were a little small but the beds were firm and the air conditioning worked a treat. The breakfast buffet was outstanding with an excellent fresh fruit offering and a prompt supply of coffee to start the day. The pool area was just what you’d want: long enough that you could swim in it for exercise and enough space outside that there was always somewhere to sit.

Actually we had a choice of hotels, the other was the Rhodes Bay but we picked the right one. With the Rodos Park we were within easy walking distance of both the old and new towns.

The weather: non stop sunshine and 30 degrees or so every day. Maybe even a little too warm.  We were told that it rarely rains in the summer but that there’s enough rainfall in the winter to fill the aquifers and to enable Rhodes to be a net exporter of water. Of course it’s the driver behind the mass tourism boom and a contributor in part to the terrible fires earlier in the summer so it’s a mixed blessing but after the rain we experienced in Italy earlier in the year this was a pleasant change.

Lindos: largely unchanged from 30 years ago. A pleasant white washed village with narrow streets, shops and cafes then the 300 step walk up to the Acropolis with wonderful 360 degree views. I remember our visit last time when Juni and Clare rode donkeys up to the top. This time I walked .

By contrast Symi (see photo above) has changed considerably. It’s more heavily developed, but still with the charm of a smaller island, and it’s visited by more and bigger ferries. I seem to recall a much less crowded and smaller ferry when we went over last time.

Rhodes’ multi layered history: Not as much culture as you get in Italy and a much simpler history but visible reminders of, successively, the Minoans, Romans, Byzantine Turks, catholic Knights of St John, Ottoman Turks, Italians and, finally, Greeks. All the time our tour guide Maria said the islanders kept their culture and this is evident in the essential Greekness of the island today. However will it survive mass tourism but will this turn it into a plain vanilla community? You just hope not.

The crisis on day 4 which wasn’t: Our minibus broke down but amazingly Maria summoned up a big bus to take us to lunch and by the time we’d finished that a replacement minibus had arrived. Doesn’t bear thinking about how much worse it might have been. I guess because it was not high season there was plenty of spare capacity in the system

Sadly although we were on time for lunch at a ‘traditional village’. It was no great shakes but a simple mass market, low cost, ‘mezze lunch with local wine’. The wine was undrinkable, in fact I don’t think I had a decent glass of wine all week, but the day was saved by a bottle of excellent Alpha beer.

We book-ended our holiday with faultless travel there and back, thank you Ozgur and Cambridge’s Happy Private Hire and Ryanair (!), and the luxury of fast track security going out and immigration on the way back. The latter remains one of Stansted’s best kept secrets.

And finally I noted a few disconnected facts on my diary:

• I’ve successfully done Wordle everyday
• I’ve drunk five Greek beers: Alpha, Eza, Fix, Xanthos and Mythos
• I’ve finished reading It’s All Greek to Me by John Mole
• I’ve had fresh fruit, eggs and coffee for excellent breakfasts everyday
• I’ve done 10 lengths of the albeit not very long pool four times
• I’ve worn my shorts every day including evenings
• I’ve not really enjoyed a single glass of wine