Travel Corfu – still the best place for your family and other animals
Twenty five years ago, during my final year at university, I set off with some friends and an InterRail ticket to see Europe. We headed south following the sun and somehow found our way to Corfu where we whiled away an idyllic fortnight on the beach in Benitses, living in a scruffy overcrowded guesthouse and surviving on Gyros kebabs and Mythos beer. It was undoubtedly one of the best holidays of my life, but for some reason I have never been back until now.
My son, Ben, turned 17 last year so we reasoned that it would probably be his last family holiday before he started taking the kind of drink fuelled trips to Magaluf that you see on Sun, Sex and Suspicious Parents. My daughter, Jenny, was 15 so we needed a holiday that had something for everyone and I decided that Corfu would be perfect. There were going to be no scruffy guesthouses with four backpackers squashed into every room this time round; I’ll let the kids try that out for themselves in a few years’ time. Instead we settled on a hotel called Mitsis Roda Beach Resort. As the name suggests, it is a package holiday destination with many of the guests on an all-inclusive deal, although we opted for half board. My thinking was that the kids would find other teens to do teenage things with while we could slope off to a local taverna each evening. The hotel was very impressive with spacious, nicely furnished rooms (ours had a sea view), no less than 4 restaurants and bars at every turn. The pool was huge as well, practically a saltwater lagoon.
Roda itself is a very relaxing resort with a decent beach which is refreshingly free of both watersports and touts. There are plenty of restaurants and bars but very few nightclubs, a fact I approved of but which didn’t go down so well with Ben. We hired a car for a week which enabled us to run Ben and Jenny to the nearby resort of Acharavi which has all the things teenagers love – jet bikes, a water park and vertical drinking establishments! It also gave us the chance to see the rest of the island. Corfu is only 40 miles long but it is surely the most beautiful of all the Greek islands; in my view it is one of the most beautiful places on earth. The mountains in the north provide some stunning scenery and there are some amazing beaches; one day we dived off the road following a sign to a taverna and had a wonderful lunch overlooking the most ravishing bay I have ever seen.
Corfu was part of the Venetian empire for a long time and this is reflected in the architecture with many of the buildings being hundreds of years old. Nowhere is this more true than in Corfu Town which is well worth a visit. The whole town was once a walled fortress and the Old Town is a rambling maze of cobbled streets and alleyways. On an artificial islet lies the Old Citadel, a partially renovated fortress with contributions from both Venetian and British overlords. It is easy to spend a day wandering around Corfu Town and you can also congratulate yourself on getting your fill of holiday culture. We also visited Benitses to see if I could recapture that golden two weeks from my youth. There has been a lot of development over the years and it is no longer the backpacker heaven I remember – everything changes, I suppose.
There is no doubt that Greece and the Greeks are suffering more than their fair share of hardship at the moment but this doesn’t seem to have affected Corfu too badly. There are a lot less Germans about and many of the bars are quieter than they would like to be, but the people are resolutely cheerful. A holiday in Corfu is all things to all people; I can’t understand why I left it 25 years to come back.
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