Rhodes - Day 4

Cereal for breakfast again today, it was a bit cloudy and remained that way most of the day, although it was warm.

We drove to the west of Rhodes again today, first to the port of Scala Kameiros to check ferry times for Sunday as we intended to go on a day trip to the island of Halki.

Then we drove to Kritinia Castle to the south of the town and parked in the castle car park. The castle sits on a prominent hill at the coast, and can be seen for much of the valley inland which was our intended walk for today.

We'd printed out a walk route from the Internet, which goes from the castle to the village of Kritinia and back again, through the mainly agricultural landscape. As it turned out, the walk description seemed to have been written a number of years ago and a few of the buildings and paths it mentioned were changed or non-existent. We managed to pretty much follow all the route though.

We passed many olive, apricot and citrus fruit plantations, plus fields of other things like cabbages, onions etc. We also saw a hare on the path in front of us.

Eventually we climbed up as far as Kritinia village, where the first building we found was an old chapel, Ayios Ioannis Prodromos, with two prominent cyprus trees outside.

We had a drink (Fanta Lemon) in the village square, which had great views over the valley. It was very quiet though, only us in either of the two taverns in the square.

We then walked back down the valley, this time taking a little-used path through a gorge to the coast - it was very scratchy with thorny bushes.

At the beach was the ruin of an early Christian Philimon basilica, where we stopped for a rest and a snack.

Back near the start of the walk we climbed up to Kritinia castle itself and had a look round, it was mostly ruined and free to get in.

We then drove north to ancient Kamiros, a ruined city occupied from the 8th century BC to the 3rd century AD, when it was abandoned after a second major earthquake. The houses and temples were very interesting.

After this we went to Embonas, the highest village on the island just below the highest mountain, Ataviros. By this time it was extremely windy so we just had a drink inside a taverna and a short walk round.

Later, after going back to the apartment, we went out for dinner to Lambis Greek restaurant in Pefkos, where Shirley had lamb kleftico and Scott had a mixed Greek plate. The food was not bad but not as good as the previous night in Taverna Nikolas.