Having called our hostel at 4 to let them know we would be arriving at 7 we hopped off the ferry and found the location we were meant to meet their courtesy bus but, at 7:30 without any sign of the bus we called again and were told it had left the hostel 15 minutes ago and would be 10 minutes. At 8:30 when I called again we were met by a "oh, you aren't here yet? what happened?" and an assurance that this time the bus would really be 10 minutes, which thankfully it was.
Got to the hostel, which Kenny from Thessaloniki, at about 9. The "Pink Palace" is a huge complex of bright pink painted buildings stretching from the main road halfway up a hill all the way down to the beach via several long, pink staircases and a couple of rather steep hills, all surrounded by yet more pink monstrosities. However it did only cost us $30 a night which for the Greek isles is super cheap and includes breakfast and a 3 course dinner every night, plus access to its range of "safaris" (tours) and nightly drinking activities. On arrival we dropped off our luggage, got rushed to dinner to just make the cut off then finalised our check in, got given our welcome shots of Ouzo and then went to bed.
Woke up, walked out our room to be almost blinding by the vast amount of pink surrounded us and made our way over to the beachside kitchen for complementary breakfast of bread, eggs, cheese, ham, jam and complementary wasps (om nom nom) then headed back up the giant hill to reception to book ourselves onto the kayak safari.
Kayaking was awesome, a much needed work out after 2 months of drinking and general fitness destroying laziness and super smooth, crystal clear blue-green water. Went to a monastery on a little island, a 2 storey cliff jump and then spent the last hour of the tour chilling on an empty beach.a
Safari's run by the hostel include free lunch and "Pink Palace themed introductions" which gave us our first insight into the debauchery we had stumbled upon. Pink Palace introductions were the following questions: Name, where you come from, availability, most interesting flag of someone you have had sex with, most interesting place you have had sex and who you would turn gay for.
Got back just in time for dinner and were seated with 2 English girls, Jo and Steph, 2 American guys, Ian and Zach, and an American girl, Rebecca, who told us about how she had been in the jacuzzi with 4 guys "the other night" and had been "splashed in the eye" and now had a serious eye infection. Previously, on the kayak safari, we were told that we should avoid the "jizzcuzzi" and told a story about how "the other night" a girl had had sex with 4 guys in it. We have our suspicions.
Steph and Jo had just arrived and were tired to they left after dinner and the rest of us went downstairs to the "Palladium" for drinks and to compete in the flip cup competition. Flip cup is surprisingly fun, and our team, the "multipl e scoregasms" only lost 2 rounds but didn't win so we each (there was 6 on a team) bought the team a round of shots and spent the rest of the night drinking and dancing.
Woke up just in time for Macky and I to make breakfast (Lewis not being the best at waking up, let alone after a big night) then went up to reception to utilise the crappy wifi and see what our daily safari options were, which was limited to quad biking due to the sea being "too rough" (it was pretty standard Aussie ocean to be honest, useless Greeks!). Lewis and Macky weren't up for it so I joined Zach, Ian and Rebecca, along with new friends Haviland, Paige and her sister, and went quad biking.
The quad safari was amazing. Lots of really fun driving, visited a couple of cool little monasterys and look outs that showed all of Corfu and, from one, mainland Greece and Albania, a beach for a refreshing and much needed swim and ended up at a bar, of course, for a round of "happy, horny juice" which was tasty but unidentifiable. It also included a 40 minute off road section that was a huge amount of fun, an Italian going off a small cliff (he was fine, just a mild concussion but, given what I now know about Italian drivers it serves him right), Mark, an American who epitomises the stereotype of the American frat boy, going to fast and trying to drift around a corner and breaking his knee by going straight into a wall and another round of "Pink Palace style" introductions but with different, equally obscene, questions.
Got back and had dinner with Lewis, Macky and my quad biking friends before going down to the Palladium for "Cross Dress Wednesday" where guys and girls are meant to just swap clothes with each other, and happened surprisingly often and in somewhat shocking detail. The three of us ended up playing pool with the English girls from the previous nights dinner, Jo and Steph, and Lewis and I ended up swapping clothes with them (almost exactly 10 minutes after Macky challenged me to finish his drink then told me it was a cocktail with 5 shots of rum in and my response was "well then, in 10 minutes I will probably be in a dress") which made pool somewhat more uncomfortable for everyone else as we had to bend over in our short shorts or short dress to take our shots. We also found Zach looking lovely in a long blue dress and eyeliner and Ian in short shorts so tight he had to keep the fly down which did not leave much left for the imagination.
At about midnight we collectively moved down to the beach for a late night swim, which ended up going somewhat awry as Steph's bag was stolen and Jo ended up skinning her palms and knees going down the hill after going back to check the Palladium in case the bag had been left there. It turned out that a security guard had moved the bag to mess with us and somewhat killed the evening as we retreated to our room where Steph, training as a medic, disinfected Jo's war wounds while she sobbed into my shoulder while my shorts got damp to mid thigh.
Thinking our night essentially over, fools that we are, we then walked back up to the reception to help the girls with their walking with sore knees and avoiding creepy Italian problems and then Lewis and I were almost immediately after confronted by a guy in a bikini lying, crying, on the ground as Zach came over the top of the hill with a friend of his and the guys girlfriend who was crying inconsolably and had been raped on the beach by an Italian. Italians; every time we hear anything about you lot it just makes you worse and worse, please collectively kill yourselves, I am not in any way kidding. We did what we could for the poor couple, found a couple of female staff members and then, definitely less upbeat than when we left the Palladium, headed back to bed.
Woke up just in time for breakfast, somewhat the worse for wear, and stumbled our way across to breakfast where we ran into Steph and Jo, who, poor thing, was still very sore, and after helping them with beach chairs we headed up to reception to try and find a couple of items that had gone missing at the same time as Steph's bag was relocated, my dinner card and Lewis' locker key and thongs. Luckily reception had the locker key, which had Lewis' laptop and passport in, but the thongs and dinner card were gone.
At about 1 we headed to the beach to walk down, again joined by the girls, to go into town to get what Macky and Lewis promised us were the best gyros ever. They did not disappoint, and for $3 it was even more fantastic. We then walked back up the hill towards the hostel but stopped just before to go into another hotel's public pool and escape the Pink Palace for a few hours where we swam, drank and relaxed for a couple of hours.
At 5 we headed back to the hostel to go and watch the "Ouzo Cup" which, at the time of registration, and very fortuitously, we were not up for competing in. The Ouzo Cup was a 10Euro entry fee volleyball contest where in between each couple of points teams competed to do outdo one another in various drinking or debauchery based challenges for bonus points, such as sculling beers, swapping clothes between team mates of different sexes in front of everyone (and all competitors were in boardies or bikinis so that got a big... confronting), body shots and ended up being won when 4 girls on one team, 2 of whom were sisters, nuded up and 69ed whipped cream off each others... secret places...
After seeing this we retreated up to dinner then went downstairs for some quiet games of pool before grabbing the laptop and watching KickAss before bed.
Woke up at 8:30, rush packed and checked out at 9 (what sort of party hostel makes its checkout time 9am, thats just rude!) then grabbed breakfast, again with Jo and Steph, then played a bunch of cards with our newly acquired, free on check out, Ancient Greek Sex Position cards, which made it a continual process of dealing, giggling at the cards then continuing.
Had another round of lunch gyros followed by pool relaxation before at 4 heading back to the hostel reception to organise busses back to the other side of the island, where us 3 would be ferrying back to Igoumenitsa and the girls were moving to a more sedate hostel. Said our farewells at the port bus stop then jumped on the ferry back to Igoumenitsa.
Found Cumu still intact, if somewhat coated in a layer of salt and dust, packed her back up and then checked in to the overnight car ferry to Bari on the Italian east coast. Had cheap, crappy dinner at the duty free place in the international port then drove onto the ferry.
Slept pretty awfully on the ferry as we did not really think about the whole temperature thing and could not re-access Cumu so had to sleep in a cold recliner seat in boardies, a t shirt and thongs, which was something of a rookie mistake. However on getting back to Cumu we discovered that her nav(wo)man part was back in business, which is something of a two-edged sword.
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