They call me Malaka

 After a heavy night of drugs and booze, we slept a bit in this morning knowing we had a very few things to accomplish having seen the majority of the island yesterday.  I went and got JW a coffee and she had a bit of breakfast at the hotel while I choose to be hungover on an empty stomach.  We then hopped in the car and headed towards Agiasos, but with 2 wrong turns we wound up in Agios Fokas instead, which was way the fuck out of the way.  We drove past an army camp and saw th well of Achilles and then parked the car to go see the temple of Dionysus, which was way out of a jutting rock next to a church.  There were also a couple of lonely donkeys and we said hello to them.  Then we got chased by a couple dogs before we backtracked and head towards Vatera.

Originally we were supposed to be booked at a hotel in Vatera, it was called the Aphrodite and was highly recommended by Matt Barrett, but alas it was closed, but I thought I would be nice to drive by and see what we were missing.  We pulled into town and saw this magnificent spread of a beach hotel, with a pool and lovely beachfront, and it was entirely closed down.  In fact the entire village of Vatera seemed to be under construction.  We parked the car and saw a young lady painting poles and asked her if she worked for the hotel, and she said you want to talk to John, which we did, and were lead inside where John and his wife were sitting, and they met us with such exuberance it was the typical Greek hospitality.  We chatted about many things including John’s very large song catalogue, and my very large song catalogue, and then we promised to meet again and said goodbye.

After the meeting we went down to the beech and I picked out a couple rocks for my army band mate Rebecca Meads who when asked what she would like from lesvos simply said, bring me a rock.

After the rock collection, we hopped back in the car and drove towards Agiasos.  The road was beautiful, pine trees everywhere and we arrived at the village just in time for lunch, so we wandered the streets looking for food but everything seemed closed.  Finally we found a cute cafe that served food and decided to eat there.  It was excellent.

From Agiosas we took the coastal road to Plomari, the ouzo capital of the world.  We had a tour of the Barayannis factory, family owned since the 1800s and makers of the best ouzo in the world.  The tour was pretty cool with samples at the end and I can still not taste the difference.

After Plomari we just decided to go back to Mytillini we took the main road and sped down it like crazy people.  When in Greece, drive like an American.  We got to the hotel and decompressed a bit before walking over the huge castle.  It had just closed, of course.  We walked around it taking pictures and at one point crossed a closed gate to get a better picture when a member of the military came out of a hole in the ground and told us we could not be there.  It was then that I realized that Mytillini was facing Turkey and had a very strategic position in the Aegean.  We wandered back the other way and went around the castle until we reached a very nice walking/jogging/biking path that went around the city.  We took this back to the hotel where Stella was back at the front desk.  We.re gonna miss that gal.

Some more decompression and then we walked to the other side of the harbor for dinner at a cute mom/pop place called Avagio.  It was fine, but not great and the homeless guy harassing the table next to us turned out to the be distraction we needed.

Back to the hotel to pack up as we leave for Chios on the 6 am boat tomorrow.  Fun times.