Donkey trail

My tracker says that today I completed a walk that lasted over four hours, burned over 1,000 calories, and was classified as 'hard'. And it's absolutely right.

Mid-morning, we decided to go for a walk. PY had found a guide to a 'donkey trail' up the nearby hills to the village of Lakones. We wanted to get to the cafés at the top, which reportedly had stunning views.

The initial part of the walk was towards Paleokastritsa's beaches and, just before arriving, we turned left up a hill. The initial part is quite steep on the road, past a couple of tourist-looking villas to the brow of a hill. The trail diverges from the road here; this initial part was enough to put me off. It was steep with minimal grip, not helped by my trainers, the soles of which are now worn to nothing. I found this initial climb so difficult we nearly turned around. I persevered to where the path became stony, a more obvious trail up a hillside, in parts almost stepped, but I found all of it very hard going. I was drenched quite quickly. Luckily, although it was hot and sunny, much of the hike was through trees, which provided sufficient shade that sunburn was the least of my worries. It was fine in places, but I struggled with the steeper parts.

About three-quarters of the way up, a concrete pipe diverts water under a small concrete road. We took the wrong turn here, walking along smoother road surfaces with more gradual inclines. It was only when we realised we'd missed the correct path that we returned and hit our conundrum. I felt I couldn't go on up the hill, nor did I want to return down the trail; I genuinely feared that I'd slip and seriously hurt myself. PY did not want to take the much longer roadway down in the heat, and, of course, there’d be many blind bends on the edges of cliffs. We hit an impasse.

After a while, another couple appeared coming down from the village, and I was convinced to try the last part because the word 'steps' was mentioned. In fact, after a short continuation of the path, it does appear that somebody tried to create stone steps before they, wonderfully, turned into paved flags. That made the walk into the village easy.

The instructions told us to head out of the village to one of the places with the views. Initially, we were heading for The Golden Fox, but there were so many tour buses heading in that direction that we stopped at Dolce Café, which seemed to have almost identical panoramic views of the scenic bays back down in Paleokastritsa. I don't think PY has seen me glug so much cold water so quickly. But after that and a coffee revived me, I was able to appreciate the view.

I decided to attempt to head down the trail, but if it was too much, I'd abandon it and take the road. It was, however, much easier heading down, and the parts of the path where I feared I'd slip vanished while we were up in the village because it all appeared much more secure. We even managed to make it back to the hotel for lunch.

After lunch, we had a lazy afternoon, later with a couple of beers by the pool. We were the only people still sitting outside when the pool bar closed. We found a rogue ping-pong ball on the terrace and decided to play: at least we hit the ball backwards and forwards for a while.

The evening concluded with a fire-eating show in which one of the resident entertainers walked on glass, stood on nails, and performed a fire-eating display. It was impressive, but the coffee and brandy after our long day meant I was ready for bed by the time they'd finished the show.