Petrified Forest

My final adventure before departing Lesvos required more planning than the rest: I wanted to see the petrified forest on the west side of the island. 

The yellow dot on the extreme left is the petrified forest at Sigri. The olive farm is one of the 3 dots in the triangular formation in the bottom right. Full size picture here.

The forest was 2 hours away and buses run sporadically in the winter, so 2 of us rented a car. Before we saw it, I joked that I would only drive it if it were orange. Wouldn't you know, it almost worked! This is Λεμόνι (Greek for lemon.)

Car rental is an interesting process in Greece. It involved Dimitris's calling up a rental company the day before, a man's driving Λεμόνι half an hour from Plomari to Perama, Dimitris's driving the man home that night and us into town the next day, and everyone's reversing the process that evening. The actual paperwork, though, was just my showing the man my JOL and signing a piece of paper. When we got back, I handed him €30. 

Before we drove off, I spent a solid hour figuring out how the car worked. I was extremely glad I'd had an introduction to standards before leaving the states (thanks Nate! Great birthday present), or I'd never have had the guts to get behind the wheel. Lesvos was not the most gentle introduction, covered as it is with narrow, winding city streets, hairpin turns up steep hills, and little old ladies who seem unaware of the advent of the automobile. But I managed well enough for several towns, until Ronan decided we were unlikely to meet any Greek police (we'd seen no evidence such a creature exists) and took over the rest of the driving.

The view back toward Perama, looking quite threatening as the sun rose.

Random windmill!

There was a monastery called Λιμονα on the way, so we had to check it out (because, you know, it sounded kind of like the car.)

We saw a couple of these old sled things on display. They have shards of stone and petrified wood embedded in the bottom for harvesting.

Truck full of fish.

A military base on the hill beneath an old monastery. (They were failing hard at camouflage.)

We made it to the Petrified Forest Museum, which was small but really cool. There were chunks of log displayed outside and inside, along with leaf impressions and a helpful historical video translated into English with all the pauses in the wrong place.

Pine cone impression

Behind the museum there were a few petrified stumps still in the ground, with  cool, spreading roots.

Interesting fort on the coast--we assume it must have been partially restored, but it's not entirely obvious how  the bottom blocks were replaced without disturbing the top ones...

Olive Processing

In late November/early December, most farmers on Lesvos are harvesting their olives. The fruit on the Tragakis farm ripens later than the fruit on flat land at lower altitude (and Dimitris is more worried about his photovoltaic project than the harvest), so I didn't see too much collection, but we did enough to get an idea of what goes on. 

Most of the work is done by an electric rake that shakes the olives down from the trees into the waiting nets. We try to speed up the process picking by hand, but it's not very effective.

After a couple trees, we use the nets to gather all the olives together, then pick out the worst of the leaves and branches before shoveling the fruit into sacks--heavy sacks.

The sacks go to an olive press in town, maybe 10km away. Dimitris has plans for building his own small press, but in the meantime he relies on his friend's plant.

The inside of a modern olive press. Olive oil is the only oil (I think) that is extracted through purely mechanical processes.

A conveyor belt lifts the olives from the initial hopper.

The olives are being--washed? I think?

Now this is washing--definitely washing. And somewhere in between, all the leaves and junk were blown out. There's a crazy vent in the side of the building, covered by a cage with olive leaves plastered all over it.

This is the modern method of stirring the olive pulp to allow the oil droplets to  join together. The paste is actually much more green, but I couldn't get any sort of focus when I tried the photo without flash.

The old-fashioned method, three huge millstones.

 The old method of pressing the olives was in burlap envelopes. The new method involves big, shiny metal devices that didn't make for good pictures.

Filtration.

Pure olive oil.

 Then and now: how the massive quantities of Greek olive oil are stored.

This is the oil for our personal use. It's crazy how much it's used here--anything cooked automatically has olive oil added to it: vegetables, pasta, salad, rice, eggs. Even the dog food is cooked with olive oil.

A Day of Work

So, here's how a day of work goes on the farm. We wake up at 6:30 and have some breakfast/coffee. But I've only got one picture of the table, strangely enough, so we'll have to reuse it from the last post. Work begins at 7.

Riding the pickup truck down from the hill for work.

This has only actually happened once or twice, but I took a bunch of pictures because it was fun.

 Usually we just walk to work--it's not far away.

Most of the time, the work is clearing the brush around the olive trees.

This is necessary because, in addition to diverting nutrients from the trees, the bushes get in the way of harvesting the olives. 

Not our farm--yet.

To harvest the olives, you spread nets on the ground all around and then hit the tree with a stick. Or if you're technological and posh (like I think we are), you hit it with a machine. Either way, all the olives fall out.

To facilitate this process, we wield snazzy choppers like the ones pictured here.

There's a lot of brush to go through.

But we take breaks every hour or so, more often if the supervisor (Mikalis) is there.  He has a strange objection to hard work...

Every now and then, we burn some brush.

It's important to be careful with the fire, though, and keep it low. It never rains around here, so all the grass is tinder-dry. Add to that all the fuel we have to pile at the perimeter in the burning queue, and you've got a recipe for disaster. Someone on Chios recently left a fire before it was fully extinguished, and it flared up again, catching the dry, oily olive trees that cover the hills. Chios was burning for five days.

SO, Mikalis watches the fire, all the time.

When we end work at 11, olive trees make great racks for holding our tools overnight.