The Gay Crete Blog Visits.........Mykonos! (And Inevitably Makes Some Comparisons WIth Crete)

"You are so lucky you live in Greece, you must go to Mykonos all the time"

Well, of course, I don't. 

Like most Greek islands, including Crete, Mykonos is basically 'closed' during the winter which is the only time that I have when I can go anywhere. which rather shoots down one gay travel web site that announces it as 'an all year round' destination. Yes there are people living on Mykonos, about 10,000 of them. Although on Crete we have a permanent population of well over 500,000 so it is a bit more lively.

Anyway when the chance arose to spend four days on Mykonos in July, and all I had to do was pay for a ferry ticket, then of course I took it. Who wouldn't? 

And after all it is well over 30 years since I was last there, although I have to admit that I don't remember a lot of about the trip and any photographs I had long since disappeared, and my travelling companion at the time has since passed away.

Arriving by ferry (cruising is such a civilised way of getting around the Greek islands), I was struck by how brown and barren the island seems to be, Crete is lush tropical paradise by comparison. And although the whole island is not 'built up' there certainly are a lot more buildings than there were way back in the 70's. The windmills are still there as you come into the port. Well nearly all of them are as one of them is in the process of being rebuilt. I seem to remember that there were more windmills, but maybe not. Even from the quayside you can see that Mykonos Town has grown but they have managed to preserve the character to some extent by using the traditional architectural style. Square and blocky with rounded corners, presumably this is to offer less resistance to the incessant wind that blew the whole time I was there. A common feature of the climate in July and August I was told.

Mykonos is a small island, about 30 square miles (imagine a rectangle 5 miles by 6 miles, and a walking pace of 4 miles per hour....), and with a landscape dotted with buildings this doesn't leave a lot of space for visitors who really want to 'get away from it all'. So you can compare this to Crete which has an area of around 3000 square miles......

So Mykonos is a gay island....

Hmmmmm, well you can ignore the couple of gay travel web sites that tell you that Mykonos welcomes millions of gay tourists each year. Actual tourist figures for Mykonos seem a bit sketchy, but the generally accepted figure is around a million in total. I did wonder about the logistics of this, as getting about 40,000 people on and off the island every week does seem a bit of a challenge, although there are figures on Wikipedia that say there are 40,000 available beds on the island. I didn't check the airport schedules at the time (will do that next year!), but I am inclined to think that included in that figure are all the passengers on cruise ships that stopover, many of these do not actually get off the ship of course, and from watching the tenders on the Sunday morning before my departure most of the people that did get off, got straight on to the ferries going to Delos.

I think you can ignore the web sites that tell you that it is normal to see gay men walking hand in hand too. Being something of a people watcher, I can spend two hours with one cup of coffee, (it's normal in Greece), and I didn't see any. 

So how many gay visitors are going to Mykonos?

Well as we don't have bar codes or chips implanted behind our ears that get scanned as we enter or leave a place, that is an impossible question to answer.

But we can use a little modern technology to roughly gauge the percentage out of the total gay visitors to Greece and to Mykonos. Two of the most popular 'social networking' sites, Gaydar, and Gayromeo, have sections where you can post your travel plans. Yes I know not everyone uses these so we can only use them as a guide.

For the week that I was on Mykonos, (the last week in July 2012), on Gaydar there were more guys visiting Crete than Mykonos, and on Gayromeo there were only two more visiting Mykonos than Crete. Overall more guys were visiting the rest of Greece (on both web sites) than there were visiting Mykonos.

What was also very clear that while many were staying on Crete (or indeed other islands), most travellers to Mykonos were only staying 2 or 3 days, a fact that borne out by our island hopping guests at Villa Ralfa, many of whom were spending 7 or 10 days on Crete, followed by a couple of days on Santorini, and then 2 or 3 nights on Mykonos.

Several times I logged on to Grindr while I was on Mykonos too, that gave the interesting result that there were fewer guys on the 'front page' on Mykonos than there normally are on Crete. The only difference there is that on Crete they are in a 20km radius and on Mykonos they were in a 5km radius.

So there are a load of gay bars on Mykonos...

Actually apparently not. During my three night stay, at the risk of developing chronic alcoholic poisoning, I tried to visit as many as possible at different times, and all of them were mixed, but don't let that put you off. The guys were mainly in the majority!

(Checking web sites, if you can find them, I don't think that any of them actually say they are 'gay bars'. Obviously in Mykonos they are even more conservative than we are on Crete, at least our two gay bars say they are exactly that)

And here I can best quote a straight American couple who I met at Babylon, who told me that they frequent gay bars because they are usually the liveliest and best places to go and they were surprised by "how restrained the gay scene is on Mykonos". And they had been there a week.

And the bars themselves?

Top bar has to be The Piano Bar, cosy, friendly, and with excellent music. So nice to get a decent cabaret with a REAL singer and pianist these days instead of blaring pop music. Both of the guys behind the bar were from Crete, which must tell you something!

Next has to be Babylon, which is actually the first bar I went to on arrival night. Jackie O's is right next door so when you are outside in the throng, you are really in both of them at the same time! The great thing about both of these is the big outside space on the quayside.

Preference is for Babylon because the guys made me really welcome and found the time to talk to me which is always nice when you are a lone traveller. They seated me next to the door on the fence with Jackie O's which is a great place to sit as you can look down on everyone else. The next night I went there they came and got me from the crowd and planted me in the same place, even though the beer I had came from Jackie O's. The music is loud in both places but as they seem to share the same play list you never get the cacophony that is common if you have two lots of music at once.

Porta Bar is fascinating when you eventually find it. Not many people there when I tried it, but with two levels and two entrances it could make life interesting if not a little confusing, while I was there a man came in from the town hall collecting money, first in the bottom entrance and then at the top. I think he was just a bit disturbed that he wasn't going to collect two lots of money! Excellent barman too, insisted that for a slightly upset stomach the cure was obviously 7 * Metaxa, taken neat and sipped slowly.

Kastro Bar was one of my early evening visits so there were only a couple of people in there, but nice surroundings and, of course, the nice little alleyway at the side leading down to the sea........

Some of the bars have drag shows. If you are really unfortunate you will get to see one. I say unfortunate because if they are all like the one I saw then you are in for the worst drag show ever.

Sunset seems to be a popular time for bars too. I couldn't really see why because to be honest the sunset was the same three nights in a row, and not very interesting at that. I suspect that this is just a ruse to part you from your hard earned cash early in the evening. Or maybe I have just seen too many sunsets?

A word of warning/advice here too. Taxis are about as common as hens' teeth on Mykonos. If you are out for a good night in the bars of Mykonos Town and you are staying further than walking distance be prepared for a loooong wait for a cab. Up to two hours is nothing. Part of this is due to the taxi drivers 'selecting' people from the queue, that are all going in the same direction and that he can conveniently drop off in turn. Having said that they don't cheat you and fares are reasonable, but looking at it another way he has just put four people that don't know each other in a cab and charged them €10 each, which would get you from Heraklion Airport to Hersonissos which is about 25km, and you cannot actually go that far on Mykonos!

Of course you can always use the solution tried and tested by two guys from Manchester......Catch the last bus into the Town, go for something to eat, spend all night drinking and dancing and catch the first bus back to your hotel in the morning!

Mykonos is expensive....

Yes. But not always.

You will read on some web sites that it is expensive because it has to import everything from the mainland.

This is nonsense.

You can expect to pay €6 or more for a small bottle of beer in a bar, €8 or more for a long drink (spirit and mixer), and cocktails START at €10....My personal favourite at a sunset bar was €12 for a Campari and soda.

Crete is further from the mainland than Mykonos and yet a small beer is €2.50, maybe €3, a long drink is usually €6 and cocktails about the same.

Something similar applies to food. A gyros, our indigenous fast food, is about the same price on Mykonos as on Crete, but then you can find places on Mykonos where a Greek salad will cost you €10.50, whereas on Crete a Greek salad will set you back €4.50/5.00. 

But you can find places on Mykonos where a Greek salad and a beer can be had for the same price as Crete, and right on the waterfront in Mykonos Town too!

Hotels too can be expensive, although they are rarely full it seems. I tried making last minute bookings while I was there at several and all had rooms available, provided you could spare €150 per night or more. On the other hand there is 'hostel' accommodation at €18 a night (share a room with five other people you have never met, sounds like fun), and this was all fully booked. Crete on the other hand has a wide selection of accommodation from around €25 a night.

Some of this price difference can be put down to the cost of real estate of course. Mykonos is, after all, only a small island so rents and real estate generally will tend to be of higher value, but when you can find such price differences within 100 metres of each other you do tend to wonder!

And so to the beach!

Or not in this case.......Saturday was to have been my 'beach day'...Just to have a look as it were because I don't really do the beach. I have enough lines and wrinkles already, but when in Rome etc.

Unfortunately something I had eaten, and I know what it was, had made going too far from a lavatory a bit of a no-no. I did get as far as Paradise beach, (which is not known as a gay beach), because I could do it easily on the bus, and was quite frankly not impressed. Row upon row of sunbeds (with a large sign saying 'Don't blame us for the price of the sunbed, the money is for the Government'), and umbrellas. And at the back of the beach a row of bars with nearly identical menus and all charging the same prices. At 10.30am on a Saturday, there were not a lot of people there. I would hate to think what it was like if it was crowded.

But this gave me time to have a good wander around the maze that is Mykonos Town, there are loads of cafes where I can make a dash to if I needed the lavatory!

Photogenic is the best word here, indeed I have seen photgraphs of Mykonos posted on web sites belonging to other islands, and if you want to shop then you have plenty of opportunity.

Having worked in a gift shop on Crete I have a bit of experience of some of the things you are likely to come across so I was not particularly impressed when one shop owner told me that a piece of ceramic work was 'local' when it fact it is made by an artist on Crete, or the shop that was selling work by an artist from Naxos who actually works in Athens but saying that was local too.

There are the usual number of shops selling jewellery too, and while you are not getting ripped off as far as the standard of the metal goes, it does get a bit wearing being told that it is made in Greece when you can buy exactly the same designs in Peru and Chile. The prices are fair enough and you can usually get some discount!

So what else is there to do on Mykonos?

Apart from the three B's, not a lot else. There are a couple of museums and some interesting churches and one of the sole saving graces of Mykonos for those who are interested is the birthpace of Apollo on a completely different island, Delos.

This archaeological site is huge, it rivals the Acropolis in interest, and the Palace of Knossos on Crete for size. The true archaeological buff would need to catch the first ferry in the morning and the last one back to even begin to get a good look at it, and although parts of it are slightly 'unkempt' it has not suffered from too much reconstruction, the museum is nicely laid out and the cafe next door, even though it has a captive audience, does not overcharge.

Sadly I suspect that many would rather spend their money on three rather overpriced beers than pay the ferry fare and entrance fee to go to Delos.

So the magic question...Should you go to Mykonos?

It's a small island with a big personality, (a bit like Santorini), and its reputation as a gay destination has been around for 40 years or so. 

A lot of things have changed in that time.

Other destinations are available especially as most gay travellers are a bit more discerning these days and are not always just going for a week long orgy (if that is what you want then go to Santiago de Chile, and the drag shows are better than Mykonos. Well slightly). 

In general it does not appear to me to be quite as gay as the publicity, much of it derived from outside Greece and some of it hopelessly out of date by the way, would have us believe. But big business is in play here and many of those web sites you see promoting it are getting a commission on the hotel rooms they sell.

If you are gay and are cruising the Greek islands, and it is on your 'Bucket List', then splurge for a few nights and do it!

Would I go again?

Are you paying?

Not unless I had a good reason, such as an old and dear friend holding his 60th birthday party there, or maybe a wedding, or christening, or funeral.

Living on Crete I have got used to the wide open spaces, and let's face it, on Crete I can go away for a weekend without leaving the island........

Going Greek - A Look At LGBT Life In Greece

As St. Petersburg effectively puts a ban on LGBT tourists, I decided to take a closer look at the scene in Greece to see how it compares with other countries in Europe particularly now that Spartacus has published its gay travel index for countries around the world! So just for this once the Gay Crete Blog becomes the Gay Greece Blog!

I don't know about you, but I always love the charts and statistics that get produced showing how gay friendly or un-friendly places are and the current Spartacus chart shows some quite amusing results this year, you can find it here at Spartacus World.

Now I was quite pleased to see that Greece scores a resounding zero on the chart although I was a bit mystified by the fact that Greece got a minus 1 for 'locals hostile' when in fact Greeks are some of the friendliest people you can come across and will welcome virtually everyone, the fact that they are not really interested in your sexuality shouldn't really come into the statistics at all! Strangely the UK also got a minus 1 for the same reason, and Peru got a minus 2 for the same reason, and yet I found during a recent trip to Peru that they were some of the friendliest people in South America, particularly when you compare them to the reception you get from people in Rio de Janeiro.

As you would expect Turkey gets a minus 4 overall (the same as Peru but for different reasons), which makes a bit of a nonsense with Out Traveler listing Turkey as an 'Up and Coming Destination', while at the same time getting humpy about the situation in St. Petersburg!

But I digress as we are supposed to be talking about Greece.......

To say that Greek people are conservative, religiously and socially, would be an understatement, and to many of them the concept of 'gay' is almost impossible to grasp, for this reason many Greeks are not, and never will be, 'out', having said that there are many younger people who are, and will even admit to it on their Facebook profile, presumably they work on the basis that none of their family or friends are on Facebook. Of course many visitors to Greece 'worry' about this and the fact that there do not appear to be any anti-discrimination laws when in fact existing Greeks laws already outlaw discrimination.

Naturally enough a result of this conservatism means that Greeks rarely upset other countries so acts of terrorism against Greece are very rare making it one of the safest countries in the world to visit!

Of course there is the occasional skirmish with Turkey, but then the Greeks have long memories and I always put this down to the debacle over Helen of Troy.

So while the Greeks are mainly totally disinterested in your sexuality, this does not extend into other areas of your personal life, and you can impress a Greek by being au fait with your family history for the last 300 years (at least), and they will have no qualms about asking what you do for a living, whether you own your own home, how much you paid for it, or how much rent you pay etc. etc. etc.

As with any other country you are expected to obey the accepted moral and social behaviour and while, undoubtedly, the sight of two men walking down the street hand in hand would raise eyebrows (but possibly be excused on the grounds that you are 'foreign'), it is perfectly acceptable for a man to greet a close friend or relative of the same sex, that he has not seen for a while, or on a special occasion, with a warm embrace and kiss on each cheek. It is amazing at the way some tourists seem to think that they can do anything they like as a tourist, and seem to regard visiting a foreign country as a right when of course it is actually a privilege to be allowed to do so!

Enough of my moralising and tut-tutting.......As you would expect the most amount of LGBT nightlife exists in the largest cities in Greece, i.e. Athens the capital, and Thessaloniki, and since the Greeks discovered the Internet a couple of years ago there has been a burgeoning of web sites, some of them very nice and some of them exceedingly awful. As with most things Greek they are all in competition with each other and I suspect that most of their owners expect to make a fortune by putting up a web site which they will sell at a vast profit at a later date without ever promoting it or updating it. Nonetheless for the LGBT traveller they can be useful, of course many LGBT travellers head straight for Mykonos or Lesvos and would never dream of going to Athens which is a shame, as there is a lot of incorrect information about Mykonos for instance, when statistically there are likely to be more LGBT tourists visiting, say, Crete, than there are to Mykonos. (Ignore one web site that says Mykonos welcomes millions of gay travellers each year as Mykonos only gets about a million visitors a year in total!)

So let's look at some of these web sites.....One of the oldest is Gay Greece and one of the few that has a reasonable translated English version, it even has a section on Crete although I am not in it because I decline to pay for an entry, apparently it is OK for me to promote the Gay Greece web site for free, but not the other way round.....

Then there is Gay Radio and its sister dating site Gay Book Star and then there is the gay chat and guide site Gay Hellas and these are just a few of the general sites. Many of the various bars in Athens and Thessaloniki also have their own site.

For such a conservative country we also have a number of magazines and blogs such as Fagazine, City Uncovered which has a good English version too, and my favourite just for the name and slogan alone Screw - Because Fags Can Read not to mention AntiVirus and 10Percent and our local blog for Crete Lesbian and Gay in Crete

How are we doing so far for a country that is so 'in the closet'??

Naturally most of these sites are in Greek so you will need to have an auto translate installed on your browser, most of these do a reasonable job but sometimes translate peoples' names with hilarious results.

You can also find many of these sites have 'Pages' on Facebook which has the Bing translate on it automatically although it falls flat on its face when it comes across Greek that has been transliterated into Roman characters.

There is a plethora of web sites about Greece generally too, many of these repeat the same things over and over, but one called Travelscope, has taken a slightly different approach, you can read here what they have to say about Crete and prospective visitors to Mykonos might like to take a note of what they have to say about Mykonos here.

Meanwhile here on Crete which statistically almost certainly welcomes more LGBT visitors than Mykonos in an area 100 times greater and therefore, with a lot more to see and do, (unless you really want to spend 10 days in an expensive alcoholic haze fighting for a space on the beach) we will battle on regardless and drop a gentle reminder that we now have two gay bars!

The Gay Baby Boomers – Are We The Forgotten Generation?

I make no apologies for this post as it goes worldwidebut sometimes things just have to be said. I was reading through postings in a group on GTN and it got me thinking about times past...Never a good thing to do when you get older, but at the time I was having a trawl through gay web sites generally and noticed that wherever you go, most of the bars, clubs, and other venues for gay men, seem to revolve around younger people.

I should point out at this stage that I am actually a bit too young to be a ‘baby boomer’, well almost anyway.

Now this could just be me of course, but although us older lot still like to go out and have a good time, do we, when we are on holiday, want to spend our nights clubbing and our days sitting on the beach or by a pool with a hangover, getting fried to a crisp, and then repeating the whole process over again the next night?

Yes, we do like the occasional visit to a nightclub to watch the crass, callow eye candy dance the night away aided by two bottles of beer and a pocketful of illegal substances, but in spite of what they think, we are not dead from neck up, or from the waist down, (as more than one young gentleman discovered when I was visiting Peru and Chile last month).

And while they drink their two beers, us mature ones sit there and consume an entire bottle of gin with not too much tonic as we don’t have malaria as the barman seems to think.

OK, we are on holiday so we can sleep the following day but for most of us sleeping in the sun for hours on end is out of the question. We are more likely to want to spend the day submerged in a tank of moisturiser to try and reverse the ravages that time, (and too much alcohol), has wrought upon us.

And yet many gay ‘destinations’ offer little else to do.

Let’s take the Greek island of Mykonos, probably one of the most famous gay destinations in the world. And don’t get me wrong here, Mykonos is a pretty island, but it is not the almost exclusively gay Greek island that it was back in the 1970’s when I first went there. There is gay nightlife and some gay beaches, and in August it is inundated with Greeks and Italians of both sexes out for a good time. But the admirable burghers of Mykonos, and indeed the businesses themselves, more than certainly discovered that you cannot run an entire Greek island just on gay clientele.

So what do you do on an island the size of Mykonos, once you have visited the museums, a couple of churches, and been to the island of Delos?

Apart from spending evenings drinking, and days sunbathing, the answer is not a lot, and for many of us older gay men this is sometimes not quite enough. We are not so far past it that we just want to sit about and play bingo. We still want to go and see things.

New things.

Different things.

So what do we do?

We invent our own destination. A new destination more suited to our needs. And some of us have already done this in a small way. And because we are not dead from the neck up many of us know how to use the internet so we can travel independently not just follow the crowd and go where a travel agent sends us on a package tour.

The Greek island of Crete, for instance, welcomes many gay visitors each year, although we do not shout about it too much because that is the Cretan (or Greek), way. But for the older gay man, and woman, Crete offers much more than just beaches and clubs.

For a start Crete is a large island with some spectacular mountain scenery dotted with small hill villages just asking to be explored, and although I don’t suggest you take up mountain climbing, there is some great walking, (mainly downhill), that can be done such as the Samaria Gorge, the longest in Europe (yes, Crete is part of Europe), and a wealth of historical sites such as Knossos.

And if it is mythology you are after than what better than Psychro’s Cave where Zeus was born, (and no, I never met him personally, although on a bad day you can be forgiven for asking), followed by a drive around the Lassithi Plateau with chance to see the lammergeyer s that live there (and they are not so difficult to find as some people make out!), so there is something for the keen birder to look out for as well! Around the Plateau are a number of small villages and a couple of larger towns including Tzermiado, where, according to visitors from France, ‘you can get the best goat in Europe’.

Sadly most of the windmills that you see in photographs of Lassithi, are now gone, the water being pumped by electricity generated by wind turbines (!), but around the island you can see the remains of the many stone built windmills from a bygone age, along with some fine examples of Byzantine and Venetian architecture.

But after all this history and physical activity, you need to relax sometimes and Crete has a wide range of beaches including nudist beaches.

And bars.

In fact Crete has two ‘dedicated’ gay bars, Eros Bar in Malia, which has been running for some years, and the newer Roze Maandag (Pink Monday) Bar in Port Hersonissos which opened in summer 2011.

Different in style, they both play similar music but at different volumes! Eros is more of a night/dance club often frequented by Greeks and tends to start late and finish very early the following day so be prepared for a long night out. Roze Maandag bills itself as European, and has a much ‘loungier’ feel to it. You are likely to hear the same ‘gay anthems’ from the same ‘gay icons’ in both bars, but in Roze Maandag you can hear yourself think.

And for a place to stay (and here comes a bit of absolutely shameless self-promotion), there is Villa Ralfa, conveniently located just outside Port Hersonissos, and thirty minutes walk from the village of Pano Hersonissos. Villa Ralfa was Crete’s first LGBT guesthouse and gay homestay, which opened in 200,4 and since then has welcomed independent LGBT travellers from around the world. Of course you may find other hotels on Crete listed as being ‘gay friendly’ but in general these are large ‘all inclusive resorts’ which are really just ‘gay anonymous’ as you are just one or two guests in amongst several hundred. These sort of hotels are naturally the ones favoured by the so called gay travel agencies who really are not interested in true gay owned and run hotels for the simple reason that they cannot make any money by sending you to these, instead they seem to think that everyone will be happy to pay several hundred euros a night for a room without breakfast just because they have booked through a ‘gay travel agency’.

Which lead us on to a final point. The price.

Looking again at various articles it seems that some of the ageing LGBT population are having problems with ‘affordable housing’. Which seems to blow the argument that gay and lesbian people have more money, right out of the water. Sure we may own our own homes but we have been working for 35 years to pay for them. And as we grow older our incomes become fixed either because we are on a pension, or the companies we used to work for have ‘disposed’ of us, or as naturally happens our opportunities for advancement and salary rises no longer exist.

So what is the cost of a holiday on Crete?

The answer is surprisingly little.

Crete (and indeed Greece), has some of the cheapest accommodation in the world and you can get very good accommodation in a family run apartment block from as little as 20 euros per night even in high season. But bear in mind you will often have to book direct with the apartments as the travel agents will mark that up to 40 or so euros per night. Villa Ralfa charges a little more but you do get the pleasure of knowing that almost certainly your fellow guests will be LGBT, (you don’t get money back if they aren’t because they are probably friends of mine and I have them well trained), and we do look after you well, and we know our way around the gay scene, and which are the best places to go for that essential mojito before dinner.

And for food and drink, pricewise probably the best comparison that there is, is South America. A good main course and a glass of wine or bottle of beer will cost you about the same as in Lima or Cusco, or indeed in Santiago de Chile. If you want to ‘splurge’ then there are expensive places, the same as there are everywhere.

So if thinking about a Mediterranean holiday and travelling independently, and want a place to go where there are things to do then Crete, Greece is a very good option for the mature LGBT traveller.