Reserve a ten night Pelion peninsula trip from the mountain villages to the sea

Reserve a ten night Pelion peninsula trip on this rung and what stands settled before you leave is four rooms, every road transfer, two trains, one day on the water and the keys to two buildings that are otherwise locked. Nobody travels with you. The Pine Gazette puts the reservation in and reads the answer; the company that actually runs the trip sends you its own invoice, on its own paperwork, in its own name. Not one room, van, boat or aircraft on this page belongs to Pine Gazette Bookings LLC, and not a cent of it passes through this office at any point.

The nights run mountain first and water last: three in Makrinitsa at 600 meters above the gulf, three in Tsagarada on the Aegean side, two in Zagora among the apple terraces, then two in Milina down on the sheltered water, where the last full day is spent on a boat. Four rooms, four moves, and on every move the van takes the bags while you are free to walk out of the village on the old paths instead. The order is not arbitrary. It puts the day on the water at the end and on the inside coast, which stays workable in weeks when the outer shore does not.

Getting yourself to Greece is a ticket you buy, and no flight is arranged here. What the plan asks of that ticket is only that it lands at Athens or Thessaloniki, because the ten nights open in Volos and the rail seats north with the change at Larissa are reserved in your name as part of this. Nothing leaves New Orleans, Louisiana for either city without at least one change, so price the two ends separately. Send the fortnight you could travel and how many of you there are, and a figure on paper comes back inside two to four working days, because in the shoulder months the houses in Tsagarada and Milina answer at their own pace. Call +1 (504) 832-6194 or write to bookings@thepinegazette.com.

Two coasts and the ridge between them

Makrinitsa hangs on the western slope with the whole gulf laid out below it, and from the marble fountain in its square, cut in 1809 with four lion heads, you can watch weather cross the water two hours before it arrives. The lanes above that square are steps, so vehicles stop where the road ends and everything after that is carried. Portaria is twenty minutes further up and the road keeps climbing to the ridge at Hania, near 1,200 meters, where the beech starts and the temperature drops eight or ten degrees from what you left at the shore.

Over the top the ground falls to the Aegean and does it fast. Tsagarada sits at about 500 meters with the water a thousand feet below it and three kilometers of road holding its four hamlets together. Damouchari, straight down from there, is the one natural harbor on this whole eastern shore, a pocket of grey pebble with a ruined tower over it and eleven houses. Twenty minutes south, Mylopotamos is two coves joined by a hole worn through the rock, and you can swim from one to the other on a still morning in June. North of Damouchari the path to Fakistra drops through holm oak for twenty five minutes to a beach you have to want, with a cave in the cliff above it that villagers used to teach children in when teaching was not permitted.

The stone paths and what they were laid for

The kalderimia are not walking trails that somebody invented for visitors. They are the road system this mountain used before the road system, paved in slabs set on edge, wide enough for two loaded mules to pass, and they carried apples, olives, chestnut and raw silk down to the water for four hundred years. The mapped network still runs to a couple of hundred kilometers, some of it swallowed by asphalt, some of it rebuilt in the last fifteen years by people who remember what the stones were for.

Two are worth the ten nights on their own. Milies to Vyzitsa is a gentle two kilometers under plane trees, thirty five minutes, with a fountain at the halfway point that has run since anybody can say. Tsagarada to Damouchari is the serious one: three kilometers, about 450 meters of descent, an hour and a quarter if you do not stop, and the last third is bare stone in full sun. In Kissos, on the way north, the church of Agia Marina was finished in 1750 and its carved screen took a workshop from Epirus the better part of four years.

Fifteen kilometers on six hundred millimeter gauge

The line up the mountain was laid out by an Italian engineer named Evaristo De Chirico, whose son grew up to paint empty squares, and it opened in sections between 1895 and 1903. The gauge is six hundred millimeters, which is narrow enough that the carriages feel like a room rather than a corridor. The surviving run goes from Ano Lechonia to Milies, fifteen kilometers, ninety minutes, climbing to about 250 meters through olive terraces and then chestnut, over six masonry viaducts and one curved iron bridge above the Taxiarches gorge that De Chirico built bent in plan because the ground gave him no straight line. Your seats are on a fixed departure, and the timetable thins to weekends outside high summer, which is one of the two things that fixes the shape of your ten nights.

Milies at the top is worth the arrival. The church of the Taxiarches, finished in 1741, has clay amphorae built into its walls with their mouths open to the nave, and a word spoken at the front of it carries to the back without effort. Across the square, the village library was founded in 1814 and holds about three thousand volumes, a good number of them printed in Venice; it is kept locked and the operating company arranges the hour it opens for you.

Zagora apples and the day on the gulf

Zagora spreads over four quarters at around 500 meters and grows the small firiki apple, long rather than round, picked from the middle of September into October off terraces held up by dry stone. The growers here have worked as a single cooperative from 1916 onward, and in harvest weeks the road down to the water carries loaded trucks from first light. The village library, founded in 1762 on money sent home by a merchant working in Amsterdam, keeps roughly ten thousand volumes in a stone room with shutters, and the oldest of them predate the building.

Then the mountain lets you go. Milina sits on the inside coast where the gulf narrows, with fishing boats pulled up on gravel and water that goes from ankle deep to swimming in fifteen paces. The last full day is on a vessel taking twelve, out past two low islets to the small island off the cape, where there are no vehicles at all, one monastery built in 1825, and a jetty. Between 1949 and 1953 that island held political prisoners, most of them women, near four thousand seven hundred of them at the worst of it, in tents on the slope behind the monastery. The passage is carried on the operating company's own passenger licence and appears on the invoice that company sends you.

Pine Gazette Bookings LLC keeps an office at 2450 Severn Avenue, Suite 312 in Metairie, LA 70001. It asks the operator, it checks what comes back against every figure printed on this page, and it hands you both. If a distance, a temperature or a date here is wrong, write to corrections@thepinegazette.com and it will be corrected. To begin, send your two possible weeks and the number of travellers, and expect a written figure within two to four working days.