Self Catering holiday to mainland Greece. The good and the bad.

Bare in mind my starting point for all holidays is Dubai and we live 3km from the Marina and beach. The ideal/perfect holiday destination for a lot of people. Holidaying though in Dubai is very different from living there. A week or two in a foreign country on vacation does not give you a feel for what life is like living there, even if you go to the same place every year. I've applied that logic to our vacation in Greece, but having lived abroad for the past 8 years I do tend to visit new places with the view of 'what would it be like to live there?' We moved to South Africa without visiting first and to Dubai after a weeks holiday.

I had expectations of Greece through other people's instagram and face book updates. When I googled 'Holidays in Greece' up came hundreds of blue and white domed houses as well as images of long white sandy beaches. Maybe it's because we stayed on the mainland and not on one of the islands that it was all very different.

I purposely deselected 'family fun' and 'evening entertainment' yet we still ended up on packed beaches, 10 sun beds deep with music pumping and disturbances well past midnight.

The accommodation was disappointing also. Although it's been a long time since we had a self catering holiday, I had hoped things had improved, but the apartment did not match the online description and whilst it was clean and tidy, it did lack some decoration and equipment to qualify as self catering. There was a two ring hob, kettle and fridge, there was also very basic cutlery and crockery, no peeler, cork screw/bottle opener or sharp knife to prepare even a simple salad. The apartment slept 4 and if I had been travelling with children I would've needed more in the kitchen. The shower, whilst technically fitting the description was actually just a hose and a shower curtain. I ended up sitting in the tray to actually wash as I couldn't hold the shower head, not stick to the curtain and wash my hair at the same time. There were plenty of towels and hand soap in the bathroom but we had to buy toilet paper on day 2.

I had expected more and for what we had paid we could've stayed in a hotel further out and driven to the beach each day. As it was, whilst the beach was only a 9 min walk away and 'mostly flat' it was at the bottom of a very steep slope and as we'd hired a car for the holiday, we drove to another beach in a little village each day.

Whilst the people were very friendly, the area we stayed in was very expensive and rather run down. It took a long time to recover from seeing children as young as 10 being sold alcohol and tobacco, the open trash cans in the streets, which smell, the amount of real fur being sold and the number of stray and injured dogs, as well as being pestered at every restaurant by stray cats.

All in all I won't be visiting Greece again, it didn't live up to my expectations, although we did have a relaxing holiday just chilling out, reading, snorkelling and some of the most fantastic fish we've ever had. Here are some of the more 'instagrammable' photos.