October 6: Lindos—Kritika
We’d planned to spend the morning visiting the Lindos Acropolis, the area’s main archaeological site. Chris was even open to the idea of riding a donkey!
Alas, as is increasingly the case when we travel now, the line to get in to the site was discouraging enough to dissuade us. And the donkeys seemed very, very small. Instead, we watched other people ride up the cobbles to the acropolis.
We walked around the hillside to get some good views of the Mediterranean. The hill below the Acropolis is a great place to gave off in the direction of Cyprus—the world beyond the Aegean.
Then it was time to leave Lindos. We dragged our suitcases back up to the parking lot to await Panos. Rhodes is not a place to travel if you’re not prepared to do at least a modicum of physical labor!
Panos drove us up the east coast of Rhodes past the apparently famous Anthony Quinn bay. Who is Anthony Quinn, you might ask. It turns out that he was a Mexican-American actor who got cast in Greek and other ethnic roles in movies in the 1960s. He played a Cretan soldier in The Guns of Navarone, which was filmed in Rhodes in 1961. This performance led to his star turn as the titular character in Zorba the Greek. While Quinn was in Rhodes filming Navarone, he bought the bay now named after him; his plans to create a film-making center there didn’t pan out, but Rhodians still use his name for the bay and are probably the main people responsible for keeping the memory The Guns of Navarone alive.
Along the way, Panos explained that Kritika was settled by Muslims who fled Crete in the early 1920s. Panos dropped us off at our AirBnB, where we were greeted by Stephanos, father of the Kostas who runs the online listings.
I’d chosen this house based on its alleged proximity to a supermarket—just 500 meters away—and on the mistaken belief that it was actually in Rhodes City. I was wrong on both counts.
We started a load of laundry and then walked south in search of the promised supermarket.
Kritika itself is basically just a single row of houses facing the beachfront road, some of them (like ours) with new houses built in the back yards. Though websites call it a “traditional village,” there’s not much there.
After a much-longer-than-expected walk, we arrived at a little shopping area featuring a Thai restaurant, a Korean restaurant, and a “Supermarket”, really a convenience store specializing in sunscreen, cigarettes, beach toys, and booze. A grocery store this was not.
NB: the word “supermarket” in Greece doesn’t necessarily mean large grocery store in the American sense. Though “minimarkets” are pretty consistently small to tiny, supermarkets can also be very small.
We gave up on shopping for supplies and decided to walk the other direction, north toward Rhodes City.
Arriving in town, we discovered that half the businesses in Rhodes are car rental establishments. On the spur of the moment, we decided that we needed our own wheels. It would be easy to park in front of our house, and a car would make it possible to visit places that were otherwise inaccessible, like, any store that could sell us food (and this was BEFORE we discovered how dicey the bus and taxi situation was).
We asked for something cheap. They told us we could pick it up the next morning.
Transport secured, we walked into town to see what Rhodes City was all about. What it appears to be all about is traffic, along with lots of shops and restaurants for tourists.
We dined at a restaurant on the beach at the northern tip of the island, where we could watch planes flying overhead and ferries coming in and out of port. (Shout out to the fun FlightAware app!)
