The northwest of Corfu

The wind blows quite hard this morning as we head for Sidari, a neighboring village just west of Roda. Sidari is a busy tourist village and that is mainly because it is known for the best sandy beach in Corfu, but also for the Canal d'Amour, a collection of inlets that have been sculpted by the sea water from the soft sandstone rocks off the coast. Especially English people like to come here and at the end of June there are already a lot of them.

There are the small and the normal Canal d'Amour and there are several stories about them, all of course equally true: if you, as a couple, swim through the canal, you stay together forever. If you swim through the canal on your own while it is in the shade, you will always be happy in love. And if you go through the canal while still being single, you will soon, perhaps even today, meet the man or woman of your dreams.

We stay on dry land and admire the sandstone formations where you can clamber on. The reputation of the Canal is well exploited because you see the name being used everywhere in the village while it is not really that special. Nice to see, just as it is nice to walk through the tourist center with the many souvenir shops and restaurants. But a bit too busy for us.

The same phenomenon of strangely shaped rocks can also be seen on the north-western spur of Corfu, at Akra Drastis. By car you can not get onto the cape, but a little further south we find a few places from where we have a good view on it. Also walking from the village Peroulades you seem not to be able to reach the head of the cape because the cliffs suddenly go down perpendicular. You can rent a boat, but you have to watch out with the strong wind and sea currents.

The coast remains very nice as we head further south with high steep white rocks and much fewer beaches than on the north coast. West of Peroulades you can descend to a small strip of beach at the bottom of the rocks called Logas and there is a viewpoint above the rocks. It is also called the sunset beach because you can see the most spectacular sunset in Corfu from here. Because of this reputation it is of course always busy with sunset.

The coast with the magnificent cliffs continues as far as Agios Stefanos (not the same place where we were before, there is also an Agios Stefanos on the east coast of Corfu). Here the rocks are flattened and in front of the village there is an elongated and wide sandy beach, but the strong wind pushes the waves hard up the land. The area for the beach seems to consist entirely of houses and complexes intended for tourists, the local residents all have their houses a bit further away.

Today we do not feel like driving around a lot, and from Agios Stefanos we drive to our regular bathing spot on the north coast. There the water is a lot quieter, but that will be mainly because the coastal strip is very shallow. After a few hours we go back to our village for some food and drinks. Elisabeth sees there are milkshakes on the menu, so she orders a banana milkshake. But what she gets is a kind of ice-cold milk with a lot of sugar in it, very dirty. Later we see that the chocolate milkshake looks just as white. Not recommended.