Feb 2011 Photos

Above is an olive grove in Lardos, just a couple of days after the floods. These yellow flowers proliferate at this time of the year. I'm not sure what they're called in English, but the children love to pick them and suck the stems, as they taste like lemon.

Above is the river-side lane just outside Phil & Vicky's home, which was inundated with muddy floodwater on Friday January 28th. It's hard to imagine from looking at this pastoral scene, that the waters on Jan 28th were a full meter higher than where I'm standing on Tuesday Feb 1st. There's a bit of blurb at the bottom of this post about what happened to Phil [Gareth] and Vicky's home.

"I'm a lumberjack and I'm OK!" Here's my beloved doing what she enjoys most, getting her hands dirty. Whereas many women prefer to sit in cafes with their high-heels on, my other half is much happier getting stuck in. Here she is when we were up in the hills replenishing our wood supplies with the chainsaw recently.

Just after collecting the logs, this is just above Asklipio village, looking up the river valley. 20th January.

These are the scenes the tourists sadly don't see. the citrus groves are so beautiful during winter time.

This is a corner in Asklipio village. In winter time these trees are so beautiful with all their gorgeous orange fruit on them and such a lush green carpet below.

Clicking on any of the images above ought to open it on a new window

February 9th, 2011. Another bright sunny day when it'll reach 21-22ºC in the shade. No clouds to be seen. It's hard to imagine that just a week or two ago it was raining and blowing so much that several villages on this island were declared emergency areas by the island's governing authorities. Lardos, just a few kilometers north us us, had a raging torrent flowing through the middle, which made it impossible to tell exactly where the usual river banks were as homes and businesses were flooded in what resembled a mini-Queensland, some up to a height of two metres.

A couple of friends, Phil (Gareth) Anstee and his wife Vicky, live just metres from the river bank in what is usually a peaceful backwater (another unintentional pun there) on the edge of the village. Their single-story home was inundated with a torrent of muddy river water and Phil actually videoed while the electricity poles came down and their lights went out at dusk a couple of Fridays ago. Then they climbed out through a window and evacuated, leaving their home and all that was in it to its fate.

Here in Kiotari we closed up the windows and brought down the shutter on our front French windows, the ones that afford us a view down the green valley below to the sea about a kilometre and a half away. The log-burner was glowing cozily and we settled in for a night of listening to the buffeting that was going on outside. Next morning dawned bright and with broken cloud. Venturing outside, the worst we suffered was water on our shed floor, which often happens when it rains really hard, which isn't too often if the truth be told. It's just that, when it does, it makes up for lost time! We were blissfully unaware of what had happened just a short distance away from here, in the villages that were set low in valleys, like Lardos, Pilona and Arhangelos.

It was actually the next Monday when Philip called on the phone to tell us what had happened to their house. For some reason or other we'd not heard any local news over the weekend and so we weren't aware of the floods that had wrecked lots of people's homes. Phil was amazed that we hadn't heard, but when he gave us the picture we agreed immediately to go over the next day and spend all day helping with the cleanup operation.

If you want to see just how bad it was in Arhangelos and Lardos villages, check out these links:
http://www.guide2rhodes.com/news/200/Rhodes-was-drowned--by-intense-rainfalls

Phil & Vicky's house is just a couple of hundred metres up from the bridge in this one:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PyOYuddvfc0