Ideal for a cheap late-season Corfu holiday
Review
by: Shirley Valentine
Weather
28 to 30 degrees in mid-September, one day we had a tropical thunder storm with sheet lightning, but the weather clears up very quickly and rain water quickly evaporates in the heat of the sun.
Holiday
Kavos is a bit of a Jekyll and Hyde resort, in the sense that after the schools go back in the first week of September it completely changes. Far more older tourists (i.e. over 30) turn up, prices noticeably drop and there are plenty of special offers to be found as stores try to clear out their remaining stock, as the end of the season looms. The downside of that is they will run out of some items, or might not have your size. It won't be as scorchingly hot and when it rains here you definitely know that it's raining.
We averaged 28 to 30 degrees when we were here in mid-September, with two out of the seven days being cloudy/rainy.
If you are turned on by Manc, Scouse or Geordie/Mackem accents then you are going to love this place, and the vast majority of people here were Brits. For some reason the Greeks seem to really like Brits and they are great hosts, we generally found them to be very generous and honest and if you take an interest in their language/traditions/food they really appreciate it.
All the food we had was good, freshly cooked, portions are very generous and they serve the food within minutes. Whereas a meal in the UK tends to be a small amount of meat/fish and large quantities of vegetables, on Corfu island we found it to be the other way round. There was usually an enormous slab of fish/meat which took up virtually the whole plate, then small amounts of chips/rice/salad balanced along the side of it.
Even the local dishes such as stifado, pastitsada or sofrito tend to be made with enormous chunks of meat, roughly the size of a woman's fist, cooked for many hours until beautifully tender.
As Kavos is at the southern end of Corfu island it doesn't have the benefit of a central location, but it's quite a small island and Kavos does have the benefit of being cheap. The transfer from the airport took a little over an hour.
A %u201Csmall%u201D cooked breakfast can be found at half a dozen places for one Euro fifty, a pint of beer or a cup of tea for two Euros seems to be universal in Kavos, 24 cans of lager cost twelve Euros and 6 x 1 litre bottles of mineral water was one and a half Euros.
Initially it seemed a bit strange for the cup of tea to cost more than the cooked breakfast, but that's the way it seems to work around here.
In late season you could find a two-course evening meal for six or seven Euros in Kavos, so we generally ended up having a cooked breakfast around midday and then another cooked meal around 8pm.
The Greek kebabs (gyros) were a little different to what we have in the UK. Even if you think that you are getting a doner kebab, it is extremely unlikely to be lamb and will almost certainly be pork or chicken. They roll the pitta around the contents, and Greeks like to have chips in their kebabs. As well as the standard UK kebab fillings you will also be offered a choice of tzatziki or mayonnaise. The best kebab house in Kavos is Nikos, and this is where a lot of the PRs buy themselves kebabs.
We only had two negative experiences in the whole week. Roussos overcharged us for three different items on our bill, and short-changed somebody at another table with change for 40 Euros after they had paid with a 50 Euro note. Why they would risk such a long-established reputation I have no idea, but please don't try to tell me that overcharging of three separate items on the bill is accidental. I would still go back there, however, as the food is absolutely gorgeous, but I will be checking the bill carefully and also checking my change.
One place that I will NOT be going back to is Big Max Diner. There were half a dozen places in Kavos offering a %u201Csmall%u201D breakfast (which was big enough for us, and wasn't particularly small) for one Euro fifty, but Big Max Diner was offering a breakfast with jumbo sausage for two Euros fifty. For some reason I fancied a jumbo sausage that morning, so decided that I was prepared to pay nearly twice as much for my breakfast.
Anyway, when the breakfast turned up it had a normal sized sausage, I wasn't rude but I pointed out that it wasn't a jumbo sausage. After trying to tell me that it was a jumbo sausage he then told me %u201CIf you don't like it you can go! What do you expect for two Euros fifty, anyway?%u201D. There are three answers to that. Firstly, I expect to be served what the board outside says I will be served. Secondly, I don't want to pay two Euros fifty and only receive what other places are selling for one Euro fifty. Thirdly, if I am polite and respectful to you, I expect you to be polite to me.
I realise that these guys might have had three months of working 16-hour-days at this point, but things like that can spoil your whole holiday. To balance out these two negative experiences we had dozens of great experiences, and we really love the Greek people and their outlook on life. We enjoyed our holiday in Marmaris in Turkey but this holiday in Greece was definitely better, and we will certainly be coming back again. PRs are a great source of useful information, so don't be afraid to ask them plenty of random questions when they are trying to entice you into the bar or restaurant that they represent; both Yiannis of The Real Greek Souvlaki Bar and Amanda of Restaurant Olympia, for example, provided an enormous amount of useful advice.
You will be bitten by insects, so take plenty of insect repellent and something to soothe bites (aftershave worked surprisingly well to stop the itching). They only provided one toilet roll for a week, but we took some out with us anyway, we also took some towels and a pillow with us.
Staying in an apartment suited us much better than having a hotel room, we felt far more in control and although we didn't cook anything ourselves, we still saved a lot of money by sitting out on our veranda, drinking cheap cans of lager from the %u201Csupermarket%u201D, nibbling on paprika-flavoured TUC biscuits and watching the world go by.
We stayed at Olive Grove Trees Apartments, which is far enough away from the noise of the strip for a decent night's sleep, but close enough to easily walk it.
We paid £222 (£111 each) for a week including flights/transfers/accommodation, if we didn't do any excursions we could have easily survived on about 400 Euros for the week, but with excursions we spent about 590 Euros for two people. In total the holiday cost us about £800 if you include UK airport parking. Bargain!
Recommend Kavos to others?
Yes