Written by Agnietė Žiūkaitė
On the morning of July 31st I woke up with excitement, which soon disappeared as I looked through the window. The day began with chaos. The clothes I washed the day before and left out to dry outside, where now drenched with rainwater, my shoes now had a swimming pool inside of them. The day was definitely not going according to plan, but I pulled myself together, grabbed all my things from outside to dry in the house and rerouted.
After repacking and getting dressed I ran through the rain to the bus stop and prayed the bus would come on time, which of course didn’t happen. When it eventually came it took us to KTEL Makedonia Bus Station. I bought a return ticket to Kavala for 30 euros, which in my mind was a decent price. The bus we took was quite nice, it had air conditioning and comfortable seats. The sun slowly started to come out and I didn’t even realize how fast the 2 hour and 20-minute journey passed by. After arriving in Kavala, we decided to walk around and get a coffee. We didn’t even check the bus to Keramoti because we knew it was going almost every hour. After wandering around the city, we walked back to the same bus station and bought the ticket to Keramoti for 5 euros and 20 cents, but the bus was not direct. We first went to Chrisoupoli and then switched to another bus that was going to Keramoti. We found the bus without any hassle, and it shortly started taking us to Keramoti Ferry Dock, which made the transfer very easy and relaxing.
We spotted the ferry ticket office on the other side of the road and bought the next ticket to Thassos. The ferry ride was beautiful, you could see the mountains that covered the entire island, seagulls flying around the boat, the water was so clear that you could see the fishes fighting over the breadcrumbs that people were throwing in the sea. The breeze felt wonderful in the warm summer weather and in no time, we were in Limenas. The town was quite small and easy to get around. Our hotel, was about 15 minutes away from the ferry. It was a budget-friendly hotel, but it had everything we needed: towels, air conditioning, even a mini fridge. The only odd thing about the place was the fact that a 10-year-old boy gave us the keys to our room, but we didn’t ask a lot of questions, we left our luggage and went out to explore Thassos.
When we were walking, we saw a sign that pointed to an Ancient Theater, which we thought would be interesting to check out, so naturally we did. The walk up the hill was not really worth the view, but because we decided to take an alternative way back, we saw a beautiful cliff with a restaurant nearby, it was one of the most majestic restaurants I’ve seen. It was located on the edge of the town, next to a cliff, while you were sitting there enjoying a glass of wine you could see The Church of the Holy Apostles on top of the hill with trees in the distance, the golden sunset light reflecting on the various textures, you could hear the waves hitting the rocks. As we walked towards the other side of the restaurant, we noticed luxurious, white beach chairs and a sign that said Karnagio Beach. I soon realized that I wanted to do the next day. We talked with one of the staff members and they informed us that there was only one available beach chair set for the following day. Of course, we reserved it and the next day we returned. We had a wonderful day there, we both ordered a coffee and a burger. The burger was honestly better than I thought it would be, it was juicy and well balanced, the coffee, on the other hand, was pretty bad. After lying in the sun and swimming the whole day we wanted to do something fun.
On the third day of our trip, we rented a quad bike, which we got from a very interesting place near our hotel. The bike looked like it was in good condition from far away, but up close it had a number of problems, for example: the lights were not working, the trunk had a rubber band instead of a lock and the parking break was not really working like it was suppose to, but again we didn’t really ask a lot of questions we just agreed to it because it was the cheapest option. After a very bumpy ride we reached our first stop, which was Marble beach. Like the bike it was nice from afar but had many issues up close. There were so many people you literally didn’t have any space to sit down or even pass by to the beach without touching somebody’s umbrella or blanket. When we finally reached the water, we just put our things on the rocks and went for a quick dip. We soon got very annoyed by the load music that was playing at the beach bar and left for our next stop.
We continued our way through the rocky roads of Thassos to the Golden beach, it was quite nice, with more space to relax and enjoy nature. We admired the sandy beach for a couple of hours before getting back on our bike and driving away to the next one. Paradise beach was by far the best place we visited, but it was the hardest to reach. We left our quad next to the road at the parking lot and walked down the hill for about 15 minutes. As soon as we reached it, I immediately regretted not coming there earlier. The water and trees around the cliff looked like they were from a fairy tale. While I was swimming closer to the rocks I was marveling at the water flowing through them with vines hanging from above. As I looked up, I could see the moon slightly shinning, it was truly magical. When the sun slowly started disappearing out of the horizon and hiding under the mountains, I knew it was time for us to head to our hotel. The ride was steady and calm, I felt at ease riding through the serpentines of Thassos.
The next day we woke up slowly without a care in the world. We spent our last remaining hours at the beach, looking at the water glistening and playing with the sun. As midday struck, we started walking back to the ferry and returned to Thessaloniki the same way we came.
Watch the video : https://youtu.be/U5CG6Gu92eY
