Naxos

Ahhh, Naxos! This was my favourite place in Greece. I absolutely loved it and highly recommend visiting.

It is such a beautiful, laid-back island with lovely shops and restaurants, gorgeous scenery and beaches, lovely old towns to explore and heaps of back country to hoon around on the quad bike. It isn’t quite as touristy and polished as the rest of Greece and the people were lovely. We ate some fantastic meals here and found a little old shop with sacks of herbs, bags of olives, prunes, plastic bottles of home-made wine and big rounds of local cheese which we shopped in for dinner at the Pension a couple of times. We found the best beaches here, some sandy and some pebbled. We hired a quad bike again and spent most of our time driving out around the fantastic countryside, visiting little towns, checking out all the amazing scenery and visiting the beaches.

Beautiful view of Naxos town in the evening.

Ben sun baking

We spent a lot of time swimming and sun baking at the gorgeous beaches. Ben snorkeled around the rocks and the pebbles were lovely to sun bake on.

The very different scenery in the back country, looking out over the hills that we drove around. We would drive up over the mountain ranges and come across gorgeous views to the ocean and then down into valleys with lush green farms. The smell of goat was quite powerful when we drove past them. The goats were everywhere when we drove around: up trees, on rocks, hiding under the road overhang...

Our luxury model quad bike: note the lock box on the back. This was 150cc (rather than the 50 we had in Santorini) which means it went much faster. We would get whacked in the face by big bugs- which actually hurt quite a bit- while we were driving along.

The ’portas’ or temple entrance to the town of Naxos. We spent our evenings up here with some beers or a bottle of wine admiring the sunsets and people watching before we had dinner.

Dinner of meat balls (they have the best tinned meat balls), dolmades, white beans in tomato sauce, olives and fetta (from the owner of our Pension-see below) and bread from a local bakery.

The excellent Pension Sofie where we stayed. It was owned/managed by a father and daughter. They were so friendly and invited us in to their kitchen where they gave us fetta, tomatoes and wine that the Dad had grown and made himself on his farm outside of town. It was really well priced and a great place to stay.