Musings of a morbid mind

The general ravings of Scott Baldwin

Saturday, January 22, 2005

Bad Experience on Poros

As I promised earlier, I was going to say a bit about our bad experience in Poros.
When we got back to Athens we found some really cheap accommodation, and started to plan out our final days in Greece. We decided that the next morning we'd go to one of the Greek Islands. We chose Poros for it's convenience (and because I'd heard of it), and went down to the port. We found a tourist agent selling tickets for the ferry to Poros, and asked what times the ferries were. He told us we could get one that left Athens at midday, and then left Poros at 6:00pm. This sounded good, we could go over to Poros, find somewhere nice for lunch, have a bit of an explore, then head back to Athens and be home in time to go dancing later that night. We glanced briefly at our tickets after we left the shop to discover that the ticket actually said 1:00pm, we went back to the tourist shop and the agent agreed that it was 1:00pm and denied ever mentioning midday. I didn't know because Niki did all the conversing with such people in Greek. So there went 1 hour of exploring time. We caught the Ferry at 1:00pm and arrived at Poros at 2:00pm. The island was obviously very touristy, but because we were there in the off season, most things had closed down, but it was still a beautiful island. Most people there used a motor scooter for transport.


and there were sailing boats and fishing boats everywhere you looked.



We tried to hire a motor scooter, but the guy didn't have insurance for foreigners, so we were stuck with walking. We met an English lady who was living on Poros and she suggested a restaurant for us to have lunch in. Lunch was fantastic, and after a lot of food and a couple of jugs of wine we stumbled out of the restaurant, and headed back towards the wharf where the ferry would depart from. We stop off on the way to have a coffee, thinking we had plenty of time, and at 5:00pm we left the cafe for the wharf. We were about a hundred metres away from the wharf when I noticed that a ferry had just left and it looked like the ferry we should have been on. We ran back to the ferry agent on Poros who informed us that yes that was our ferry, and it was the last ferry out of Poros for the night. We were not happy, we looked at the tickets and sure enough they said 5:00pm, and the agent in Athens had told us the time the ferry gets back to Athens, not the time it leaves Poros. We complained to the girl at the Poros ferry agent, but she said there was nothing we could do about it as we should have checked our tickets, to which I retorted that I was beginning to believe that it was a standard trick the Greeks play on unsuspecting tourists to try and squeeze more tourist dollars out of them.
So even though we had already booked accommodation in Athens and left our suit cases there, we were forced to find accommodation on Poros for the night. It left us with a bad taste in our mouths and a 50 Euro whole in our wallets.

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