31/07/09 – Saronic Islands – Ageistri to Aegina (via Moni)
We awoke in our nice little bay and decided to start the day with a refreshing swim (lucky I had no running today otherwise it could have been a bit tricky!). We then decided to explore Ageistri, the little island we were connected by shoreline to. We took out the dinghy and Ben rowed us over to the rocks.
Then we did a bit of scrambling up rocks (it would be wrong to call it rock climbing!) to get to the top of the hill that we could see. It was full of very prickly plants and so by the time we were back at the boat, we were a little scratched and bruised but proud of our explorations. John, our instructor was not surprised that we’d already (to put it in his words) "circumnavigated the island by land and sea" before anyone else was up! We all had breakfast on the boat, Nathalie doing a sterling job of swatting away flies, as she’d had to do earlier in the week in Vathy and Poros, when we were bombarded by the creatures. We suspect that her green flip flop had become renowned as a wasp killing device amongst the ‘wasp community’. By this stage, she often only had to show the flip flop to the wasps and they would flee, fearing for their poor little lives! During breakfast, I did a little experimenting – I had an apple that had gone bad so I decided to see if the fish liked it – as you can see from the photos, it went down rather 
well!
After breakfast it was time to set off for our last day of sailing. It became apparent that ‘some people’ were required to go and get the shoreline from the rock it was tied around and Nathalie and I were nominated. We got ourselves into the dinghy and very cleverly pulled ourselves along the shoreline to the rock (it was much quicker that way). Apparently that wasn’t really the point and Ben and John, determined to see us actually row, released the entire shoreline into the sea, so we had nothing to pull ourselves back on AND we then had to pull up a really long, heavy, wet rope from the sea into our little dinghy – getting rather soaked ourselves in the process. Apparently this and our fantastic rowing style was entertaining to everyone in the boat, who kept taking photos. We were very proud of ourselves and demonstrated what a fab ‘shoreline recovery team’ we were!
We stopped for lunch near Moni, where there was a chance for a swim, some snorkelling and for Ben to collect yet more shells from the bottom of the sea for me. I’m surprised he managed to swim back up to the surface under the weight of all of the shells he collected! Now I just have to decide what to with them all!
We arrived back in Aegina and got our certificates (mine was ‘Competent Crew’, Ben’s was ‘Day Skipper’). Then we decided we’d quite like to hire a scooter and explore the island of Egina, as it looked quite good fun. We were taken over to the hire place by someone our instructor knew and when we arrived there, were intrigued to discover that they also had quad bikes, which looked fun too. After a little think, we decided to get a quad bike, so we set off, Ben taking the first turn. We had been given directions to get to the nearest petrol station but were not entirely sure we’d taken the right turns. luckily we found a petrol station before the quad bike ran out of petrol, which was quite a relief. We then explored the roads back to Aegina and onto Perdika – the route is described underneath the map below.
Our quad biking route took us from Aegina town around the coast to Souvala for petrol then down through Kipseli and back to Aegina. From there we went south along the coast road through Faros, Marathonas, Aiginitissa and to Perdika (where we stopped to explore and have an ice cream by the sea!).
We wandered around Perdika for a little while before deciding on a restaurant with some interesting ice creams and a lovely views (as you can see from the photos above). As usual, we opted for the ice creams with names we didn’t recognise and so we had no clue what was in them! They were very nice although I suspect one of the types of ice cream contained some form of cherry! We had to get back soon after that as we were going for dinner in Aegina. First hurdle to overcome was finding our vehicle – and would you believe it we even struggled to find a bright yellow quad bike in a car park – no hope!! We had planned to take it in turns on the route back but I was enjoying driving the quad bike so much and Ben was having so much fun filming the route with the camera, that I ended up driving us all the way back to Aegina. We returned the bike to the man from the hire place (who was amused by the change of driver!) and set off back to the boat to get ready for dinner.
We had a lovely meal at a restaurant called Hippocampus, were Ben and his mum and sister had eaten last year. They had some very interesting cocktails (peach mojito and strawberry mojito) and a great assortment of greek dishes, which we all tried lots of. Interestingly, instead a menu, they presented us with cold versions of plates of food which we then had to choose from. Which would not have been a problem had there not been about a hundred dishes (I may be exaggerating slightly, but it was a lot like the memory test on the generation game – only without the cuddly toy!). Again, very full, we made our way back to the boat for our last night’s sleep afloat. We needed it – the next day we would be up very early to get the dolphin and start the journey to Athens for part 2 of the holiday!
For all the photos of our trip, checkout our photo album by clicking here.
For the scrapbook entry showing the route of where we travelled, click here.
To view all of our Summer Holiday 2009 posts, click here.