A top tip for travellers to Kefalonia: watch out for traffic jams. We had driven only a few miles north from our villa to the dramatic, far-flung tip of the Ionian island and my wife was enjoying the calm of the open road. Moments later, our car halted for an unexpected welcoming party: a parade of weather-beaten billy goats gruff, all gangly horns, boxer teeth and Ming the Merciless beards. There must have been at least 100 of the road hoggers.
Not for nothing is Kefalonia known as the wildest of the Ionians. It’s the largest and least familiar, compared with Corfu and Zante; the Greece you’ve been planning to visit for ages. It’s an adventurous place, dazzling with empty beaches, electric-blue waters and eccentric tavernas — particularly if you avoid peak summer. Unlike the overcrowded Mykonos and Santorini, it’s all you want it to be: tranquil, refreshing and sublime.
It’s this Greece — the one that doesn’t do towel races to the pool — that we had come to experience. We were staying for a week at To Petrino, a dry-stone villa of the kind that Italian army captain Antonio Corelli and local girl Pelagia would have retired to after the heart-pumping finale of Louis de Bernières’s novel Captain Corelli’s Mandolin. That bestselling phenomenon, published 25 years ago, was set on the island — and there’s still a sense of romance about the place.
Our host was Panagis Gagadis, an octogenarian in the same vein as Dr Iannis from the novel, and he treated us to the spoils of what grows in his garden. On the first day, football-sized lemons arrived, then a decanter of home-pressed olive oil. Sunday breakfast was a silver platter of loukoumades (deep-fried doughnuts soaked in honey and sesame), while Monday provided peppers stuffed with lamb from the farmer across the road. Panagis’s wife’s garden-vegetable pizza and a delightful moussaka rounded off the week of Greek-style Come Dine with Me, all served on our oleander-filled terrace in the company of chickens and a mouthy turkey.
Only when we had stopped eating did we notice something else. Away from our pool, we wondered why it was so quiet. Emplisi beach, a gorgeous hideaway with inconceivably blue water, was deserted; the shingly Kimilia beach nearby was equally forsaken, despite being squeezed between postcard shallows and sands. At Acqua on Alaties beach, we lunched on tirokafteri (spicy feta dip) and seared halloumi while overlooking the shore. That and more was all ours.
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The reason for the quiet is Kefalonia’s jigsaw-puzzle geography. The airport lies at the island’s southern tip, crowded by well-trodden beaches and resorts including Lassi, Skala and the capital Argostoli. To many, the northern peninsula is “here be dragons” territory — 90 minutes beyond the fly-and-flop comfort zone along a bottom-clenching cliff road — and the farthest most people travel is to Myrtos beach. You might be told it’s the most beautiful bay in Greece, but it’s not. Frankly, the island teems with others and you can do without the headache of the tour bus.
More fun is to be had on the lesser-known east coast, in and around Sami. This is where Nicolas Cage and Penélope Cruz canoodled during the making of the 2001 film adaptation of de Bernières’s love story, with the seafront partly reconstructed to whisk cinemagoers back to Second World War-era Greece. Not that you get any whiff of Hollywood today; it’s as if locals eyed the whole thing suspiciously. For a dose of on-screen eye-candy, check out Agios Fanentes, a snaggletooth monastery that appears in the movie and is bulwarked on a promontory above the harbour.
Heading south, Mount Ainos is a Ben Nevis-style hill inhabited by semi-wild ponies that represents the transition from coast to mountains. We preferred to linger elsewhere — in particular at the whisper-quiet cafes of Assos, Magganos and pastel-painted Fiskardo, a beautiful fishing village overlooking the island of Ithaca. One might mistake it for the home of Odysseus — as Homer did in the Odyssey — were it not for the cruise ships that arrive at lunchtime and clog up the harbour. Conveniently, passengers are on a tight schedule and so locals breathe easy again by the middle of the afternoon.
On our final morning, we paused for more goat hi-jinks, this time at the deserted Dafnoudi beach. As we swam together, looking back towards the pines, two wayward billies spilled out of the trees to plonk themselves meditatively on the sand. Quite right, too. They may not have sensed the love in the air, but they had as much right to enjoy it as we did.
Mike MacEacheran was a guest of Fairlight Jones (fairlightjones.com), which has seven nights at To Petrino from £500pp based on four sharing, including car hire and return flights to Kefalonia with Jet2 from Glasgow or Edinburgh
