A Fiery Sunset at the Honey Pot
It doesn’t usually go as well as this. You know those moments when you arrive at a honeypot location and immediately feel the layers of anticipation being stripped away to leave you clinging to shreds of angst as the sensory overload takes you by the ankles and casts your intentions to the wind. The Dakota wreck in Iceland is a case in particular that springs to mind. I was extremely grumpy there, and had hoped that the strange hour we’d chosen, when the bus rides to the site had finished for the day, would mean we’d have the place to ourselves. We didn’t - not by a long chalk. Instaselfie seekers standing all over the fuselage gurning into their phones. Back then it hadn't occurred to me that one could simply take three or four exposures and blend out the interlopers.
So nowadays I approach a place like this with a great deal of trepidation to say the least. It’s so popular here that those of us who have Android phones are probably quite used to seeing a perfect blue of Navagio Beach among the stock images that magically appear each time we reach for them. Type “Zakynthos,” or “Zante” into your search bar and the chances are that a picture of this famous scene will appear before anything else. I just tried it, and guess what? A couple of weeks before we went, Ali found an elderly guidebook to the island in one of the local charity shops that she regularly scours from top to bottom and brought it home. A bargain at 20p. No prizes for guessing the image on the front cover. The 43 year old shipwreck grabs all the headlines around here. Having never been before, we watched a number of YouTube videos to see what to expect, and in each one this scene was the leading attraction on the island.
Not that there aren’t other worthy sights of course, but somehow we ended up here on the evening of the very first full day, no doubt inexorably pulled up along the mountain roads towards the island’s number one tourist bauble. When I realised that our meandering drive had brought us to the hill town of Volimes, only a few miles away, the rest of the journey became inevitable. But I was still carrying enough salt for several large pinches of resignation. I wasn’t expecting it to be a happy experience. There would be tourists for sure, and lots of them too.
I’d already done the painstaking research of course. I knew there was a small viewing platform by the car park, and I also knew that it would be an entirely unsatisfactory vantage point as far as producing an acceptable shot goes. From the platform you can’t even see the ship in its entirety. I also knew that there was an unofficial path across the rocky clifftops towards a far better spot; a path through a large hole in a wire fence with a large warning sign about the penalties for taking it. But everyone, and I mean absolutely everyone was ignoring it in their enthusiasm to get the classic view of the rusting remains of the MV Panagiotis, which has lain here since a stormy October evening in 1980. Rumours abound as to where it was going and what the cargo was, but the beach is sometimes known as Smuggler’s Cove. I’ll leave you to join the dots.
There was even a wedding photoshoot taking place on the edge of the cliffs, the bride standing perilously close to the precipice, her back just a few paces from an enormous vertical drop to the rocks below. I really couldn’t watch - one false step and it might not have been the honeymoon the groom was expecting. And apart from the happy couple and their entourage, there was the usual gathering of selfie seekers and Instagrammers gadding merrily about, some of them seemingly oblivious to just how potentially dangerous a place they were in.
But happily, some things were working in our favour. The beach is no longer accessible since an earthquake last year that caused a landslide from a collapsing cliff. And I wouldn’t need to clone away any of the huge numbers of glass bottomed tourist boats that come here every day throughout the season, because by now they’d all returned to port and dumped their passengers onto quaysides across the island. Ok so there’s one (functioning) boat in the image, but that was an intentional inclusion. And of course if you turn up here and look earnest as you set up your tripod, people immediately mark you as an oddball and give you a wide berth.
Best of all, the sky decided to burn with fire. By now there weren’t many of us left as I tried a handheld pano. The thing about those online search results is that just about every shot you’ll see will be under a blue sky - pretty and postcardy and undeniably eye-catching. But blue skies aren’t really why I’m here. I could have bought a postcard down at the beach in Alykanas. If I was coming here, I wanted my usual sunset drama fix, and quite frankly I couldn’t have asked for better. Well I might have come in the few days around the June solstice and captured the evening light filtering through onto the beach and the orange hulk - which Photopills tells me is the only time of year that it happens, but then again, I might not have witnessed that fire sky. Whatever my experience at the plane wreck in Iceland had been, here at its naval counterpart, it seemed the opposite had taken place. I arrived expecting disappointment, but went away feeling very content.
Later, as I stepped out of the car back at the resort, I realised I was hobbling, but with no discomfort or pain. On closer inspection I discovered I’d left half of the sole of my right shoe somewhere on those sharp white rocks above Navagio Beach. There’s always something isn’t there?
A Fiery Sunset at the Honey Pot
It doesn’t usually go as well as this. You know those moments when you arrive at a honeypot location and immediately feel the layers of anticipation being stripped away to leave you clinging to shreds of angst as the sensory overload takes you by the ankles and casts your intentions to the wind. The Dakota wreck in Iceland is a case in particular that springs to mind. I was extremely grumpy there, and had hoped that the strange hour we’d chosen, when the bus rides to the site had finished for the day, would mean we’d have the place to ourselves. We didn’t - not by a long chalk. Instaselfie seekers standing all over the fuselage gurning into their phones. Back then it hadn't occurred to me that one could simply take three or four exposures and blend out the interlopers.
So nowadays I approach a place like this with a great deal of trepidation to say the least. It’s so popular here that those of us who have Android phones are probably quite used to seeing a perfect blue of Navagio Beach among the stock images that magically appear each time we reach for them. Type “Zakynthos,” or “Zante” into your search bar and the chances are that a picture of this famous scene will appear before anything else. I just tried it, and guess what? A couple of weeks before we went, Ali found an elderly guidebook to the island in one of the local charity shops that she regularly scours from top to bottom and brought it home. A bargain at 20p. No prizes for guessing the image on the front cover. The 43 year old shipwreck grabs all the headlines around here. Having never been before, we watched a number of YouTube videos to see what to expect, and in each one this scene was the leading attraction on the island.
Not that there aren’t other worthy sights of course, but somehow we ended up here on the evening of the very first full day, no doubt inexorably pulled up along the mountain roads towards the island’s number one tourist bauble. When I realised that our meandering drive had brought us to the hill town of Volimes, only a few miles away, the rest of the journey became inevitable. But I was still carrying enough salt for several large pinches of resignation. I wasn’t expecting it to be a happy experience. There would be tourists for sure, and lots of them too.
I’d already done the painstaking research of course. I knew there was a small viewing platform by the car park, and I also knew that it would be an entirely unsatisfactory vantage point as far as producing an acceptable shot goes. From the platform you can’t even see the ship in its entirety. I also knew that there was an unofficial path across the rocky clifftops towards a far better spot; a path through a large hole in a wire fence with a large warning sign about the penalties for taking it. But everyone, and I mean absolutely everyone was ignoring it in their enthusiasm to get the classic view of the rusting remains of the MV Panagiotis, which has lain here since a stormy October evening in 1980. Rumours abound as to where it was going and what the cargo was, but the beach is sometimes known as Smuggler’s Cove. I’ll leave you to join the dots.
There was even a wedding photoshoot taking place on the edge of the cliffs, the bride standing perilously close to the precipice, her back just a few paces from an enormous vertical drop to the rocks below. I really couldn’t watch - one false step and it might not have been the honeymoon the groom was expecting. And apart from the happy couple and their entourage, there was the usual gathering of selfie seekers and Instagrammers gadding merrily about, some of them seemingly oblivious to just how potentially dangerous a place they were in.
But happily, some things were working in our favour. The beach is no longer accessible since an earthquake last year that caused a landslide from a collapsing cliff. And I wouldn’t need to clone away any of the huge numbers of glass bottomed tourist boats that come here every day throughout the season, because by now they’d all returned to port and dumped their passengers onto quaysides across the island. Ok so there’s one (functioning) boat in the image, but that was an intentional inclusion. And of course if you turn up here and look earnest as you set up your tripod, people immediately mark you as an oddball and give you a wide berth.
Best of all, the sky decided to burn with fire. By now there weren’t many of us left as I tried a handheld pano. The thing about those online search results is that just about every shot you’ll see will be under a blue sky - pretty and postcardy and undeniably eye-catching. But blue skies aren’t really why I’m here. I could have bought a postcard down at the beach in Alykanas. If I was coming here, I wanted my usual sunset drama fix, and quite frankly I couldn’t have asked for better. Well I might have come in the few days around the June solstice and captured the evening light filtering through onto the beach and the orange hulk - which Photopills tells me is the only time of year that it happens, but then again, I might not have witnessed that fire sky. Whatever my experience at the plane wreck in Iceland had been, here at its naval counterpart, it seemed the opposite had taken place. I arrived expecting disappointment, but went away feeling very content.
Later, as I stepped out of the car back at the resort, I realised I was hobbling, but with no discomfort or pain. On closer inspection I discovered I’d left half of the sole of my right shoe somewhere on those sharp white rocks above Navagio Beach. There’s always something isn’t there?