Rhodes, Chios and Chalki Lead the Greek Island Experience
She “fell in love – not with the lad but with the landscape”… that’s what award-winning historian, author and broadcaster Bettany Hughes said of her backpacking in Greece experience in Telegraph Travel.
Hughes returns this time with her daughters some 25 years later to the shores of the Greek islands she loved most: Chios, Rhodes and Chalki.
Chios, she says represents the “cosmopolitan, finely crafted, multi-ethnic mosaic the eastern Mediterranean has always been”.
She speaks if its glamorous, rambling, high-walled estates and soft microclimate that nourishes fruits and nuts as well as the island’s famed mastic gum (masticha Chiou).
Hughes was yet again impressed with the Greek breakfast: “piping hot Greek doughnuts melting with local honey and toasted sesame seeds, cheese fresh-milled that morning, mandarin cake with lemon marmalade or rose-petal jam”.
The Rhodes experience at a family-run inn involved everything from cucumber, honey, yogurt and pomegranate face-packs and rose, grenadine, mandarin, cardamom liquors to cookery lessons by the pool and wine-tasting at sunset sitting at “a Downton-worthy dining table laid out by the sea’s edge”.
With just 250 permanent inhabitants, Chalki took her back in time when local fishermen dove into the waters to bring up sponges. A stay in a sponge merchant’s house was the ultimate return to nature.
Bettany Hughes’ whole Greek island-hopping experience can be read here.