Hiking through Paradise

Lesvos is not that well known as a paradise for walkers. But it is one of the best secret walking treasures of Europe: it is never overcrowded, least of all by walkers. Only a few travel companies promote the island as a destination for hikers and there are a few books with walks on Lesvos.

The lush green nature and the agrarian character of the landscape of Lesvos make it a landscape of many varieties with open fields and terraces, oak, chestnut and pine forests and, of course olive groves. On every walk there are hills or even mountains offering grand views of the landscape, the sea distant Turkey or other islands such as Chios. Secret tiny archaeological sites can easily be the highlight of a walk. Or tiny churches and little rural villages that give you the opportunity to have a break in the shade. The landscapes are so different you are bound to encounter more than one on any walk.

The roads can be single donkey paths (monopathis), to centuries old half-forgotten kalderimis (the old, with big stone paved main roads of the island), to the broader sandy or dirt roads, and of course, if there is no other way to get there, you can take to the asphalt or bitumen. You will meet farmers travelling by pick up or donkey to or from their land holdings and many of the ‘farms’ you pass may be just a few wooden sheds with iron utensils holding water for goats, sheep and sometimes cows or pigs. Wandering chickens will not be bothered by you, some dogs might happily greet you, unless they are tied to a chain, and cats? Oh yes, some will be scared of you but others will harass you for a cuddle. Then there are always song birds, or the occasional lonely tortoise or hedgehog, the only living creatures you run into.

Impressive huge plane trees, century old and whimsically formed olive trees, impenetrable hedges of strawberry, laurel or mastico trees linger along the roads. Dark green ferns hide in shadowy places, bright exotic flowers light up the scene near waterfalls, and in spring orchids glimmer in fields mostly filled with other spring flowers. In autumn there are fig trees, wild apple, chestnut and wild wine branches all presenting you with their hearty bounty of health-giving fruits. Does this not sound like paradise?

It’s a paradise that will only be disturbed should you get lost. But however quiet the landscape may seem, in most places you are never so far away from where people live and work and in most areas there will be always a farmer in his field who you can ask for directions.

Most walkers are not happy when their walking tour book turns out to have wrong information in it. If a walk that takes some kilometres just gets you lost and wandering for several more, it’s not surprising people are reduced to tears. It happens, but it may be that they didn’t read the directions properly. Writers do make errors (and plenty can go wrong when their descriptions are translated) but there’s another facet —the landscape is always changing. Lesvos is an island that moves on. A fence may be suddenly closed with a chain, a friendly field may be walled in, a side path made invisible by overgrown vegetation, a ‘dry riverbed’ you have to cross may now be full of water, a road completely washed away, or, when the book clearly states that it must be a dirt road next, you suddenly find yourself on concrete.

Serious people writing about walks regularly check them and re-issue new versions or put changes on the internet. The English walker Mike Maunder is such a writer and does a comprehensive job updating his walks. He published his first walking book in 2000: Mithimna Walks (Mithimna is the other name for Molyvos). A year later came the second edition with corrected and new walks: On Foot in North Lesvos. The third edition was in 2003.

Mike has never stopped walking and looking for new things to say and new walks to try. Last year he teamed up with a Dutch walking companion, Sigrid van der Zee, who lives on the island, and only last week they published a joint edition (the fourth) ‘On foot in North Lesvos’ and next year they are putting out a book of walks for the whole island.

If you want to walk all over the island, there is also ‘Lesvos, Car Tours and Walks’ by Brian and Eileen Anderson (ed Sunflower). If you are afraid of getting lost, you can go with a guide. The German Eva Trauman offers accompanied walks in the North-east, the centre and south of Lesvos.

You can always can walk on your own, without a guide, an organisation or a book. But I feel sure you would then most likely miss some of the beautiful places the walk lovers have found and described for you. Walking on Lesvos is walking in paradise, but it is always good to know where you are heading.

(With thanks to Tony Barrell)

@ Smitaki 2010

Getting lost with the Andersons

I dare to do it about once a year: take a walk with the Andersons. Which means that I walk with friends, who think it's an important challenge to do all the walks that the English couple Brian and Eileen Anderson present in their book 'Lesvos, car tours and walks' (publisher: Sunflower Books).

Regular readers might remember that I wrote earlier about their walks: a lot of troubles (see 14 November 2005). Because a walk from the Andersons means a complex searching tour where getting lost is the number one risk. It generally takes me a year to build up the courage to do another of their walks. Because I trust that my Anderson-walking-friends should by now know all their tricks. They nearly did all 28 featured walks. I should say they tried to walk them all, because it is not often you walk the paths the Andersons describe.

Yesterday we were ready to do tour number 14: a walk from Mixou, Plati and back to Mixou. Mixou is an enchanting village that we visited for the first time. It is between the Gulf of Yera and mount Olympos. In the guide we were warned that the walk was pretty steep. And it was, entering the valley of Mixou. It didn't take long before we asked ourselves if we were lost. Maybe somewhere we took the wrong road, because we reached the beautiful spot where the small church of Agios Ioannis Theologos looks down on the Gulf of Yera, a place we should reach coming back. So we decided that we probably did the walk the other way round.

We did not see that many cross roads so we walked and enjoyed the astonishing landscapes with magnificent sights over the Gulf of Yera and the first 'leg' of Lesvos, where mountains hide the capital Mytilini and where, above the mountain slopes, Turkey looms as if it is part of the island.

When we were looking for Agia Anárgyri, we walked up and down some wrong roads. We thought we were at the half way mark of the walk when we finally reached this church that lies in an idyllic oasis under huge plane trees and pine trees and where a little stream always runs across the property. After a cooling rest we continued our road in the direction of Plati, which meant that we had to climb another pretty big mountain. According to the Andersons the highest altitude of the walk sould be 400 metres high, but when I walked on that rocky plateau and looked at Olympus which was watching us from not far away, it seemed to me that we were as high as the top of this second highest mountain of the island. Wild sage, known on the island as wild mountain tea, was growing everywhere. This herb tea is known to grow pretty high in the mountains. Everything went well, until the wide path turned into a small track. We saw a car parked by the road and we met a farmer carrying a jerry can. He came from the direction that we had to take. Was he out of petrol and did he get petrol somewhere? It was the question that kept us busy when the track took a deep dive into a narrow wood full of strawberry trees and other low bushes. It was a pretty dangerous path full of little loose stones. We seriously asked ourselves if this path was indeed part of the walk of the Andersons. We and our overstretched muscles were relieved when we finally arrived on a normal mountain track. We took the direction we thought led to Mixou, but again we were wrong. And this time totally lost, because the road ended just like that.

So there you are high on a mountain slope, seeing below you at the other side of a deep valley the church of Agios Ioannis Theologos, where hours before we took our first rest. How could we get there? Nobody wished to take the track cutting through the bushes. Too dangerous and too tiring. The only thing we could do was to follow back the mountain road climbing up the mountain. You can imagine what we were calling the Andersons. Their walking books should be forbidden. Everybody complained about them and my friends, champions at doing walks, only did one of their walks without getting lost.

So we got ourselves up that mountain slope until we reached a crossroads that we'd crossed before! Saved! So finally we started to descend on the path that gave us so much sweat and tears on the way when we started. We decided that we should ban the Andersons from the island. They walk too fast anyway. Everybody in our company knows that you always have to double the time they give for a walk. If you are passed by a fast moving cloud of dust and you see some legs moving, those are the Andersons who shoot by over the paths like rockets.

Strange in a way, because the Andersons also published a book called 'The orchids of Lesvos'. How can they walk that fast and discovering orchids at the same time? I have to admit that the walk was great. Not only the far off views were breath taking, it was especially the flowers which took your breath away and your tiredness. Fancy Fair Anemones (see 20 March 2007) stared at us in their cheery colours, poppies in all shades of red, merry white daisies, purple crest lavender, pink, white and even small yellow sun roses coloured the green bushes. It was full of small bright blue lupins, yellow, purple and white clover. But there were also many orchids. I never in my life saw so many naked men. Ha, ha, on the naked man orchid it was (Orchis Italica). There were hundreds of them, often in company with the pink Four corner Orchid (Orchis quadrapunctata) and diverse Serapia orchids. We saw some very beautiful white Anatolic orchids (Orchis Anatolica var. albiflora) and a rare sample that connoisseurs do not agree which name it has: the bumlebee or horse-fly orchid (Ophrys fuciflora/scolopax/holoseriscea). In total we saw 12 different orchid species on this walk. There were that many that even the flying by Andersons would have noticed them.

When we were nearly down we were wondering where the actual walk number 14 started. We stopped at a building built with 'B2' blocks, where we should have taken a crossroad within 10 minutes of the start of the walk. We had no excuse that we did not know what B2- blocks are, because that expression for concrete blocks we could remember from another walk of the Andersons. The crossroad we should have taken was as clear as it could be. Our friend who read the map was so exited about the beginning of the walk that she completely overlooked this important clue...

That does not mean that the Dutch translations of the Anderson's walks are always right. It may be that the translator made mistakes, like is done in the translations from English into Dutch of the walks of Mike Maunder, which we know also get a lot of complaints. Nobody ever succeeded in doing walk number 12 of the Andersons without getting on the wrong roads. And number 14, well, we have to redo that one. I think yesterday we saw most of the tracks in that area, so if we get lost the next time, we will know the way back!

Copyright © Smitaki 2007