Advice for Travellers: A Tale of Two Excursions

We’ve only done two excursions on this holiday and we get the feeling that quite a lot of people here don’t do any.

In recent years we’ve been used to doing excursions from cruise ships – you get off the ship, get on a coach and they take you round.  Here we’ve been back to old style excursions, whereby such as Thomson’s use a local coach operator who’s running excursions for any and everyone who’s prepared to pay.

Our first excursion, “A Tale of Two and a Half Cities” was an adults-only affair and worked well for us.  The system they used that day was on the FOFO principle – first on, first off.  The coach had picked up a couple of guests at a hotel before it came to collect us.  We went on the tour and the couple got off first and the rest of us then came back to the hotel.

Yesterday’s excursion – to Butterfly Valley and Halki wasn’t quite the same.  We were first told to be ready for 8.30am. Late the evening before the trip we got a letter under our door to say we had to be ready for 8am.  We were first on. There followed pick-ups at 8 different hotels.  At some of these stops there were discussions between the driver and boarders (or non-boarders!) and some stops were then followed by U-turns as the driver dotted about collecting passengers.

After an hour and a half we arrived at Butterfly Valley (which is a 25-minute drive from our hotel)!  We were there till 10.40am and then drove on to the coast to catch the boat to Halki at 11.30am.  We got there with a few minutes to spare and we were then ferried across to Halki, the crossing lasting just over an hour.  The sea was pretty much flat, but those small boats can manage to rock on a flat calm and it was quite rocky.  We had around 3 hours and 20 minutes in Halki before the boat left at 4pm.  Halki is a very pretty place, but it is small.  There are endless bars and eateries on the very attractive water front, but we saw just two small supermarkets, one touristy shop and a pharmacy plus the odd fruit stall here and there at the front of someone’s house!

The reality is, if you don't have something to eat and drink and/or go to the beach, there's little else to fill your three and a half hours there.

The beach was some way away and up a steep incline in what was, once again, searing heat and most we saw who wanted the beach were shocked as to how far they would have to go to get there.  Unless you were in a bar, there was very little shade to be had on Halki.  There was a tree on the front with seating underneath where some people gathered at times.

We enjoyed having a drink or two, something to eat (much to our surprise, prices were no different to those on Rhodes itself) and a browse round the place which is very pretty and then we were back on the boat.  Once back on the coach, we pretty soon we realised that this was not going to be a FOFO excursion but a FOLO excursion as we retraced our steps round most of the island to drop people off in reverse order and we were indeed dropped off last.  The boat is about 35 minutes by road from our hotel, but we got back there an hour and 40 minutes after getting off the boat, so our day had lasted from 8am till 6.40pm and we were pretty weary by the end of it.

This second excursion had only just passed my ‘Balance Test’ - how long did we spend travelling compared to how long at places of interest?  For me, if the travelling is more than 50% of the time overall, then it’s not worth it.  We spent just about 50% of the time travelling, so this one just about scraped through the test.  That said, knowing what I do now, I wouldn’t do it again. The coach was cool each time we got on but got progressively hotter, such that it was unpleasantly hot when travelling and the ‘butterflies’, whilst very pretty in flight, were actually moths, so for the owners to call their place ‘Butterfly Valley’ has a Trades Descriptions Act problem about it!

I’d do the first excursion again like a shot and I’d go with them rather than hire a car as Lindos and Rhodes are both a bit of a pain as far as parking is concerned. I’d do the ‘Butterfly Valley’ and Halki tour again, but in a hire car.  Hire cars are cheap to rent (€25 a day) and parking seems to be straightforward at both ‘Butterfly Valley’ and at the small village where the ferries run from – Akra Kopria.  I'd also call by Epta Piges (the Valley of the Seven Springs) on the way out or back.  I was hoping that this would be part of our tour, but it wasn't.