Roast an Ox

Our Traditional Stone House in Vafes has a fireplace the size of a small bedroom.

You could roast an ox in here.

There is a cat sized hole up there.

Fortunately 'tradtional' has been modified to include hot and cold running water, flush toilet, electric lighting (it definitely needs lighting, window are not abundant, and are very small and up high so the only view is of the sky.  How did people - read women - work in places like this?).  The update also includes aircon, but it's the fireplace that pleased me most.  I could see a Tigger sized hole in the fireplace wall just above my reach. F stated confidently that it doesn't go anywhere, but I'd like to establish proof of that for myself.

Needless to say I was not afforded that opportunity.

This little village has lots of grass. I might have over indulged a little, but it's green and fresh, not gold and crispy like grass on our coastline in Piraeus.

We moved on again today.

One of the problems of holidaying off the beaten track is that it is, well, out in the boonies as they say Downunder. And out in the boonies internet connection either doesn't exist, or is intermittent depending on wind direction, power supply, phase of the moon, or some other accident of nature or technology. If you are reading this, the stars aligned (or a satellite flew over).

We might be getting an old fashioned off-grid holiday....but we may not be able to tell the world about it. And isn't that the point after all?

You should have seen the road we traversed to get here! We have been on worse roads in Greece it's  true,  but the worse roads still went through farmland and vineyards and orchards. F said, for any South Island Kiwi reading this “think Hakataramea Valley in the late 1960s, or possibly the passes leading into the McKenzie Country....matagouri and tarameas and rocks”. For everyone else just think dry valley landscape covered in really sharp spiky bushes, and rocks. Lots of rocks.

The top and bottom views were the good part, the middle one is spiky.

Every so often we passed a pair of dog kennels (one each side of the road) with k9s employed doing barking. There might have been some sheep or goats out in that spiky countryside. A very considerate dog owner had buried all the kennels in bivouacs constructed of pine boughs, presumably to keep the sun off their tin roofs.

And at the end of that we turned a corner into a sleepy village on beautifully tarmacadamed roads that connect it to bigger towns both east and west, with a thoroughly modernized village centre that screams EU investment in paving and medical and community centre, and a collection of narrow contorted lanes that scream ‘donkey track’.  It was at the end of one of these donkey tracks (along which we dodged collections of abandoned farm machinery...F pointed out mouldboard ploughs, some towable things she called grubbers, a couple of rotivators, a real tractor, and several part farm vehicles; front part or back part) that we found our Traditional Rooms.

Interestingly Traditional here always includes a thoroughly modernized, beautifully tiled, bathroom with flush toilet , and hot/cold water on tap.

This traditional room does not have a fireplace you could roast an ox in. It has furniture that might have been made on the premises, and needleworked covers with crocheted edges on every horizontal surface and a few vertical ones. Even the top of the rangehood has a cross-stitched cover.

We strongly suspect our route here had been designed by a Gurgle algorithm that can do shortest, or fastest, but has no setting for 'most sensible' route. Still, we got to take F on  nostalgia tour of some countryside like the holidays of her childhood.

Demonstrating Internet speeed....

* F note: 

Taramea for anyone curious. Hakataramea mean 'dance of the tarameas' - probably a remark on their flowerheads moving about in the wind. They are viciously sharp in every direction. (Called 'Spaniards' in English for some reason.)

Matagouri,  in English called 'Wild Irishman'. 

We don't want to perpetuate any colonial prejudices, so just try to find the English colonial names amusing. I have always known them by the Maori names. Tramping holidays in undeveloped hill country inevitably resulted in leg injury by spiky plants, and they both hurt like the blazes.