Papigo (Papingo)

Read here for some tourist promotional stuff about this region of Greece - then book your next holiday (make it autumn, it is possibly cooler than you like but it is definitely beautiful, and remember there is no such thing as cold weather - just the wrong clothes!)

It is not a place for high heeled shoes. I have asked F to add some maps to give this a little bit of layout

The first map is Greece mainland. We live in the bottom circle. We are visiting the top one.

The second map is this area with Monodendri, Vikos and Papigo circled.  The orange dots are some of the places I have reported on.

Vikos and the arrow indicate the locations for today's post. We packed up in Monodendri and said goodbye to our lovely hotel hosts, who wished me a bon voyage.  It was 28 October - a national celebration day and public holiday in Greece (see Linda's explanation here) and the tourists were out in force. We drove to Vikos, a beautiful tiny village overlooking to top end of the gorge we have been 'viewing' the bottom end of the last few days.

There we parked near their church, supervised the roasting of chicken, walked a small loop round the village which took in a farmyard with chickens and something F described as a pony.

Let me digress - en route to Vikos there we were driving along in some flat countryside near Kato Pedina when Mr B stopped to let F photograph one of these on the road. Its mate stuck its face in my window.  This one is called Donkey. 

I have a Donkey.  It neither looks nor smells like this:

Errrrggggghhhhh!  Not good!  I had to be on alert for ages after that - and here was a similar looking (and smelling) beast in with chickens in the Vikos farmyard.

Moving right along.  We found a herb garden with a shop selling mountain doctoring...

And some really great views down the same canyon thing we had looked up yesterday.

and a flag for national day...

F would have liked to walk the trail through this gorge but hadn't done enough research before she booked this holiday (which was decided on and done 4 days before we set off) and didn't come properly prepared for it.

Vikos is the place she would have set off from and we would have had to pick her up in Monodendri, but she knows that even well prepared, it isn't sensible to walk it on her own.

Coffee at a local cafe was disturbed by a rather forward Tiggerish teenager that wanted to sit on F's knee.  I ignored the developing situation.

After our little sojourn in Vikos and our small investment in their economy, we continued on to Papingo. We could see the road to Papingo on the other side of a ravine from  Vikos - it is not for the faint hearted.

F was a bit anxious. She had made a mess of the hotel booking and managed (by accident) to book us into a hotel with a 'strictly no pets' policy. Apparently that applies to me. 

I  charmed the hosts.  They let us stay and I am dictating this from a very  comfortable alcove off the reception area, with a wood-burning stove to keep me warm. F won't let me go exploring though; she keeps telling me not to push my luck.  My luck? She made the mistake, I sorted it out.

The major natural attraction here is some rock pools between big Papingo and little Papingo.  F and Mr B clambered as far up the ravine carved out of the mountain by water cutting through layered sedimentary rocks. The different layers are different densities which means the water makes some fantastic sculptures.

There are loads more picture spoiled by bad poses of my humans. There are probably squillions of better images online. They dam this to make a swimming pool in summer time.