The car we hired from Thomas, a local car hire car company, was crap. I was noisey, gutless and if the air conditioning was on, barely made it up the steep hills. There were a couple of times I offered to get out and walk just so the little car could make it up a steep slope. Despite the crappy car, we had a wonderful day touring around the island.
Amorgos has one main road that goes east to west along the spine of the mountain. On one side of the long narrow island, the road runs on the north face, it crosses over some where in the middle and runs on the south face. There are fantastic views which ever way you look – although best for the driver not to look at the scenery too much as the road is shared with large numbers of goat herds with very large numbers of goats.
Our day driving was uneventful but beautiful. There was stunning scenery at every turn, on every hill, out over every craggy coast. We stopped to visit small villages, drank Greek coffee, swam in turquoise watered coves, and lunched at a taverna in the middle of nowhere – that is except for more cats, a clutch of traditional Greek houses and a beautiful olive grove. The lunch was exceptional.
After our day of driving, we decided to stay local for our final day and not do much other than have a swim. In the afternoon we decided to head to a taverna, have a drink and watch the ferry come in. When we rounded the corner, we saw the usual crowd for the ferries but as we neared the closest taverna, we noticed a group of protesters. As the ferry came in, the group moved forward chanting and holding up signs. The signs were in Greek but we noticed a word in English, “murder”. It didn’t take much to work out the group were protesting against the ferry line, Blue Sky, for the death of a man in Athens just a few days before. We had seen the footage on the Greek news when we were in Paros, after hearing about what happened on the ABC Radio app earlier that day. The footage was sickening. It showed crew from the ferry pushing a man off the back loading deck as he tried to belatedly board the ferry.
While we were watching I did a quick internet search to see if the protest was just happening on Amorgos or if there were protests elsewhere. Protests were happening in all port around the country. Not only that, there will be a national strike by ferry and port workers on Wednesday 13 September. Robert and I were due to leave the next day, 12 September by the small local 7:00am ferry.
The following morning, we went down to have a coffee and noticed the small local ferry, was still in the port. We had been very confused in recent days about what time and where the ferry goes, as its timetable changed from summer to winter programs while we were on the island. We assumed the ferry was leaving at 8:40 today instead of 7:00am but we would find out when we went to buy our tickets after coffee. A man walked, or rather danced, his way past us. He pointed and waved before tripping up slightly, we wondered to each other if he was drunk or just a lively person.
Our coffee was leisurely as we again watched the pair of kittens practicing their fighting skills and talked of the different yachts in the harbour. The town went by at a slow pace and we were happy to enjoy it. Other tourists sat around in coffee shops with their bags waiting to get on the ferry. It was then we noticed the ferry wasn’t loading, people were milling about but nothing was happening. The small ferry still hadn’t left at 9:00am. We walked down to the ticket seller. It was closed and a small, frustrated crowd with their travel bags was hanging around outside. Talking to the group was the dancing man we saw earlier. He was saying there was a strike.
“Isn’t the strike on Wednesday”, I butted in.
“Yes” he replied, “that will be a national strike” he informed the crowd in a voice that sounded like doom “but today there is a strike and maybe tomorrow too. The man here who sells the tickets, he won’t come today because he is too scared all the tourists will yell at him and he does not want that. Everyone is stuck”.
The frustrated crowd looked at each other, no one could quite place if the man talking was sane or not – maybe because of the crazed look, or maybe they just didn’t speak English. We all slowly walked away from him.
Later in the afternoon the ticket seller was open. We bought tickets for the following morning. The ticket seller assured us the ferries would be running. “Today no, but tomorrow yes, there are ferries” he said to us. We found out the reason for there being no ferries was due to the high winds and not a strike. With that we placed our hope on getting a ferry to our next destination, Koufonisia.
Although there would be worse things that could happen then being stuck on Amorgos.
The seat of my pants 
Looks lovely there 😊
LikeLike