The flight over involved sitting among fifty or so people in our section of the aircraft who were flying to Kos for a wedding and so all knew, or knew of, each other and were keen to get reacquainted or drunk. I felt as though Siggy and I had gate-crashed someone’s party. The children were better behaved than the adults and I worried what might happen in the seemingly likely event that the flight attendants ran out of alcohol.
As a result there was no opportunity to have forty winks and little opportunity to start reading ‘To Kill A Mockingbird’ which required far more concentration that I was able to muster.
The arrival area of the airport was fairly typical and the only significant difference in comparison to Skiathos was that there was a decent gents toilets with fully working urinals. The coach transfer was pretty quick to where we were staying – The Mayflower Apartments – in fact we were the first drop off.
The Mayflower Apartments were at the time the number one hotel in Tigaki and supposedly the whole of Kos (our rep told us) on TripAdvisor. Even so it initially felt like a bit of come down in comparison to the Skiathos Premier in Troulos. The block we were in appeared to be a little dated, but the staff and hotel facilities were all excellent and everywhere was clean. It was a couple of hundred quid cheaper than our usual Skiathos fortnight so I can’t grumble. We had an apartment with bedroom, reception room, small kitchen area and a shower room. More about the shower room later.
The main strip of the seaside resort Tigaki on the North coast of the island of Kos was about ten minutes’ walk from The Mayflower, which I’m going to refer to as ‘our hotel’ for the rest of these posts for the sake of brevity. We unpacked quickly and then ventured out to the main strip. It was getting late and my belly was growling, so we ducked into the first taverna that looked like it had a free table – the elaborately named ‘Seven Dayz Mama’s kitchen of Kos’.
I ordered a pork chop and some chips – it was a ‘tapas’ kind of deal where the concept was you order a lot of different plates. A while later four chicken souvlaki arrived and I proceeded to tuck in and quickly got ticked off by one of the serving staff for eating someone else’s order. Sorry mate. He was offered my chop but didn’t want it. So while he waited for a new batch of kebabs to be cooked up I tucked in and tried not to show my amusement at causing trouble on day one. It’s the curse of the English not to complain when the order is wrong and then get in trouble for not complaining! It seemed like a case of damned if I do, damned if I don’t. A large Mythos helped me cope with the embarrassment.
We then had a wander around noticing bats flitting around quiet spots and the backlit menus outside of tavernas covered in bugs which looked more like baby crickets than mosquitos to my untrained eye.
Memories cocktail bar had been recommended to us by Siggy’s sister who had visited Tigaki the previous year and stayed at the Mythos Apartments a few doors down (in second place on TripAdvisor fyi). I had something called an Acapulco to drink and we immediately noticed that the cocktails were all about two Euros cheaper than in Skiathos. Yes I’m naturally going to be doing a lot of comparing, given that our last three summers were spent in Skiathos. Siggy typically chose a White Russian as her first drink.
It was late and we were tired out after the stressful flight over so we decided to try and find a supermarket to buy some water. We’d left it too late and found everywhere closed. So we walked back, missed a turning and if we hadn’t been on a straight road might have got lost. This seems to be par for the course for the first night somewhere new. Luckily a tactical bit of landmark spotting by Siggy earlier that night meant that we got back in time to the hotel to buy some water (and a couple more drinks) from the hotel bar which is open until 2am.
There seems to be a lot more insect life around Tigaki than Troulos. We had to do a seek and destroy around our apartment before we settled down for the night. The curtains didn’t quite fit the width of the French windows onto the balcony which bothered me until I found the next day that there was a pull across blind outside the windows that totally blocked out the outside light.
All photos (c) Matthew Haynes 2015
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