5. Day – What language do goats speak?

The morning was lazy – most of us kept sleeping throughout all the morning songs. However, fresh waves of the Mediterranean sea awoken our adventurous spirits for the day’s mission of exploring the whole island from head to toes.

Before leaving, however, we were tested by our sailing assistant #Rasmus who got a little bit mad that we were not sailing today, and thus raised waves of the wind and ocean, stealing pieces of our drying clothes and blowing them to the bottom of the sea. After a few unsuccessful attempts, the rescue #mission went well, and believing that we resolved our issues with the god of wind, still in a lazy manner (going by car) we set for an adventure of the island’s exploration.

The first stop was a #volcano crater – a huge hole in the middle of the island, producing sulfur, emitting heat with smoke from the ground, smelling like rotten eggs. As the legend goes, the volcano formed as a rock was thrown on one of the giant soldiers during the war between gods and giants. The buried giant is still angry, keeping the volcano active and able to errupt any time with all the hidden anger from the depths of the earth.

Wandering around the island, we slowly found out more and more about the island of Nisyros: not only does it have a volcano crater inside of it, but it also looks like one itself – a round shape with mountains rising from all sides of the seashore; remote beaches with huge rocks and wild atmosphere are great for snorkeling; the tiny villages with narrow streets and unique architecture, painted in white-and-blue, look beautiful and cozy even in the abandoned parts; the heat of the volcano creates a tiny hidden cave sauna that puts the air temperature to shame – after opening our pores in the #sauna, we came out of it to cool down under a refreshing 30° heat.

Getting to know the landscape of the island also involved getting to know its inhabitants. For this, we needed to communicate in various languages: a Greek kid in improvised English, a coffee place owner born in Germany and telling us stories in German, mountain goats and street cats teaching us their own languages…

…yet maybe not completely understanding ours.