Purple Travel
[August 26 2016]
A trip to Antiparos, Greece
What’s the perfect size for an island? Say if you take Ibiza, you’ll most likely find yourself driving 20 minutes or more to get anywhere. Too small, say an atoll in the Maldives, you’ll spend an hour circling the sandy shoreline and that’s your scenery for the week. Antiparos, at 15km long and just a few wide, falls in that sweet spot. It’s small enough to get around foot, but big enough for you to spend each day on a different beach, and for Tom Hanks to holiday at the house he owns on the island, and for nobody to notice.
In early June, we stayed at Glaros, a scattering of studios facing the channel to the Antiparos’ big sister island Paros (you gotta love the Greek logic when it comes to their islands’ names). The long midsummer days were spent doing what you do on an island in the Cyclades – wake up and check which direction the winds are coming from each day and figure out which beach will be the most sheltered, then eat, read, swim, and snooze. And as this was early in the season, more often that not you’d have the beaches to yourselves, and nor would you have to wait hours for your food to arrive at the taverna – probably a whole different scenario than now, in the height of summer.
Text and photo Xerxes Cook
