St Paul' s Bay (Lindos)

Kalithea

Kalithea spa

Anthony Quinn Bay

Faraklos

Pefkos to Lardos

St Paul's Bay (Lindos)

Rhodes

Rhodes Aquarium. 5€ ea. What can I say!? Interesting 1930's (Italian) grotto-like aquarium in the basement of the marine biology station but fish and invertebrates very off-colour. The most pitiful sight however, was the turtle and its futile and self-harming efforts to escape its tiny tank.

A recently re-furbished marine life display on ground floor inlcuded dried small animals (interesting - but you have to know what you're looking at, and what a living one looks like to appreciate), and some pretty grisly and mishappen shark and rays that look 150 years old but are actually only a few tens.

Pefkos to Lardos

I was starting to wake up (about 6:20am) when suddenly the entire room began to shake (fairly violently). It was an earthquake. The tremors of the main shock seemed to last 5-10 seconds, accompanied by a loud rumbling noise; then there were lighter trembles dying away. Was going to go back to sleep and the fire alarm went off and the building was evacuated onto the beach - where we waited until it was ok for us to go back in (wondered what it would have felt like under water).

In the day we went to Petaloudes ('Butterfly Valley' - they're moth's actually, but Valley of the Moth's would sound a bit creepy I suppose), then to Ancient Kameiros. Later found out the earthquake magnitude was 6.3.

Got ready for a night snorkel around the reefs in front of the hotel. Nice warm night, water fine. Lots of wildlife, but fish less noticable (and no wrasse). Sand eels and small silver fish close in over the sand, and over the reef soon found a frilly orange nudibranch, then an octopus. Wedged in rocks, an orange nudibranch and squat lobster(?) Also found a very big fireworm, far bigger than they're supposed to get, a few scorpion fish, blennys, sand gobies, stripy fish (but not a comber), also a very small cuttlefish.

Pefkos to Lardos

First day on Rhodes I woke up early and nipped out to the beach. It was sunny and the water nice and very warm even first thing. I'd seen from the Google Earth pictures that there was some shallow rocks to explore at the edges of several sandy bays and I looked round these. All the familiar fish were here in abundance: salp, red mullet, cardinal fish, damselfish (I shortly discovered that the tiny blue fish are in fact juvenile damselfish - Chromis chromis), parrot fish, bream, decorated wrasse, painted comber, and sand smelt. Other stuff included some red sponge and a few rounded black ones, lots of burrows in sand, fireworms, and yellow anemones. Didn't take camera, used basic kit and wore a rash vest.