OUR LITTLE GREEK GEM
Paxos is tiny but its big heart and laid-back vibe will win you over, says Catherine Ostler
No airport, one road (more or less), snaking round it; just three villages. this is paxos, a salty, bumpy, 90-minute crossing by boat fromm Corfu into Gaios harbour. it’s the smallest of the ionian islands, just eight miles long by two wide, a place where most things can be left until tomorrow and where visitors, mainly italians, English and athenians, return year after year to do not much at all.
there are no discos, waterparks or important ruins. But for the three lightly tanned children in front of me on the rocky empty beach, there is an enormous amount to do. Mainly, exploring.
For my son, Nathaniel, 11, it means searching for creatures and putting them in a bowl for identification. For my daughters, Clemmie, 12, and angelica, eight, it’s splashing about in the sea and trying to catch silvery fish with their hands.
We are staying on a hill above the village of Loggos. our villa has enough outside seating for the children never to settle in the same place twice and is surrounded by bursts of bougainvillea and geraniums.
oranges drop on to the ground ready to squeeze and terracotta floors welcome hot, bare feet. Crickets chirrup in the garden alongside a roaming hen and its chicks. and there’s a panoramic sea view unchanged since classical times.
Yannis, owner of the Gaios travel agency and the island’s boatmaster-in-chief, takes us on a boat tour up the east coast, where we see a string of inlets and above them the green wash of firs and cypresses that hide the discreet coastal villas of swish italian interlopers.
Like his fellow paxiots, Yannis is hardy, proud and a true mariner. He doesn’t hide his opinions, either. Even the children are gripped. His critical, yet informative, tone ‘reminds me of granny’, says Nathaniel. He explains how time here is measured in tourism: ‘May is wedding season, august is italian time.’
Paxos is part of Greece and yet, as Yannis says, it feels separate. it has been occupied by romans, Normans and the French. the Venetians gave it its olive trees and most elegant architecture and the British built the roads.
No wonder the people are sceptical about the mainland. there is no immigration crisis, but they suffer from a Greek economy that’s as flaky as feta.
We cross a rough channel to arrive at Vrika bay on the neighbouring antipaxos island, with its white talc sand and Caribbean- like sapphire glassy water. We stop for grilled sardines at a taverna. Later, as we circle paxos, we see one particularly lovely, deserted bay.
Yannis tells us it is called Kipadi and, two days later, here we are down a dirt track, after several wrong turnings and screechy three- point turns that have the children cheekily asking how we can be lost on an empty island the size of a plate. there is a reward: a cove to ourselves.
of the three villages, Loggos is the most attractive, a few shops round a harbour scented with warm, sugary dough from its bakery. Gaios is a sprawling, whitewashed place offering diminutive cups of good coffee, home- made ice cream and a stationery shop that can’t have changed much since the Fifties.
Carnayo is Gaios’s most imaginative taverna. the chef will come and cook at villas, too, as he does for us one night (arranged by the thinking traveller). He barbecues fish and serves stuffed vine leaves and chocolate puddings.
Food is oddly good all over paxos. Even the children like it. in fact, they love the small pleasures and big views. the island is well-disposed to host a gentle, easy family holiday, one in which you might actually have a conversation.
We plan another boat trip, but it never happens. instead, we watch the sunset from Erimitis’s top- of-the- cliff bar and compare pebbles with sand with shingle.
the rhythm of the week became villa, taverna, beach, villa, taverna, beach . . . the only vexing questions, which taverna, and which beach is best? We’ll have to come back to resolve that.