THE Best Beach

Our top ranked spot where the water meets the land

We are pretty lucky to been to a lot of beaches. Too numerous to count! If we include camping lake beaches when we were kids (for me Lake Kalamalka, for Colleen Lac La Biche) we are in the thousands. There are so many ways to rank them – best view, best water color, finest sand, least bugs, warmest, best wildlife underwater, least populated – no ranking system can take it all in.

Today we got to visit one of the most beautiful beaches we have ever seen. It ticks a lot of boxes!

We rented a little Peugeot car today and drove, on a road a little bigger than the Calgary bike paths, up, up up and over the mountain on Lefkada on a scenic road of switchbacks and cliffs to the other end of the island.

The drive was so much fun, but was a bit tainted by the rain. It wasn’t really slippery but I drove slowly so as not to test the tire grip on the edge of the cliffs.

There is a perfect time when the combination of temperature, humidity and altitude hits and the windows fog up instantly — yup that happened, When it happens on the edge of a cliff on a bike path for a road, you just have to stop and wait for the window defrost heater to kick in. Good thing there wasn’t much traffic and that there were a few little spots to pull over.

It is really hard to follow signs when you can’t even sound out the letters and we all know Google map’s sometimes doesn’t get it right, so we may have had to 3 point turn around in someeone’s driveway a few times. This all adds to the adventure. The car was a great decision today – we could have been on a scooter.

The parking lot for this beach is at the top of the cliff. We wondered if someone just shows up in the morning and tells the tourists that it is €5 to park there. You can kind of see the beach from the top but the little peak is just a glimpse of the magic once you get on the stairs. There are about 80 narrow rocky steps down the cliff to get there. It is steep and uneven – can’t really pause and take photos. Once you get to the bottom though…

Porto Katsiki Beach

This place is breathtaking! Definitely among the top beaches we have visited. The rain stopped as we got there and we were treated to an amazing few hours in one of the most beautiful spots on the planet.

The white cliffs are the frame for the white sand and pebble beach and the water color….Chat GPT says,

The blue of the sea in your photo is a stunning turquoise-cyan, with a strong aqua or electric blue tone. It’s vibrant and luminous, likely due to shallow waters and white sandy or limestone seafloor reflecting sunlight.

This shade is often called:

• Tropical Blue

• Aegean Blue (especially fitting, since this looks like a Greek coastal scene)

• Turquoise

• Electric Cyan

In hex color terms, it most closely resembles something like #00e6e6 to #33ccff depending on lighting and depth.

We have said so many times that the pictures don’t do it justice but …

After a few zzz, the clouds came back and the rain threatened again so we climbed back up the stone steps to our little car. Definitely a highlights reel beach for us.

We took the long way back – around the southern tip of Lefkada to where we will be meeting up with our home and transportation for the next week. We managed to stop and chat with the crew who were just getting ready to send their guests off for dinner so they can start the cleanup up job getting the boat ready for us for tomorrow.