Kalamaki; Saturday, 04 October, 2025

I was originally booked to go on a day trip exploring the island today, but due to the poor weather originally predicted for today it had been postponed to Monday a couple of days earlier, so after a quick breakfast I headed out of the hotel and up to the main street to catch the bus into Zakynthos Town to explore the capital of the island.

The bus service is a bit patchy, with a number of buses in the morning then nothing for several hours and then a couple of buses in the evening. Not helped by the timetable posted at the bus stop expiring at the end of the previous week and the copy of the timetable the hotel had not valid until the 7th, plus some confusion at the hotel as to which side of the road the bus would leave from. In the end the 09:45 never appeared and at 10am a bus pulled up on the other side of the road going to Laganas and Zakynthos – which the driver happily informed us was the only service for a while, so we crossed over the road and caught that – not that it made much of a difference as the bus fares are a fixed €2.

The main difference was that it took nearly 40 minutes for the bus to wind its way through the resort town of Laganas and then through the traffic into Zakynthos Town, dropping us off at the bus station right out the back of town, albeit only about a 10 minute walk to the harbour, and that’s where I headed to first to get a view of the whole of the town and for a wander along the harbour front.

At the southern end of the harbour is the city’s main church Saint Dionysios and I had a look around that before heading on into the port to look around the replica ancient Greek ship which has been placed at the end of the breakwater.

From there I wandered back along the harbour front all the way north to the end of the bay and the main square of city Solomos Square where I picked up the Zante Fun Train, a land train tour around the centre of the town which showed that there really wasn’t that much to see in the Zante Town!

Back in Solomos Square I had a look around the square before heading over to the Byzantine Museum of Zakynthos located at the rear of the square to have a look around that.

After taking in the museum, I continued having a wander through town and stopped off at a restaurant close to Solomos Square for a bit to eat as there was no way I would make it back to the hotel in time to make lunch.

I had a leisurely lunch and then went for a bit more of a wander through the town before grabbing an ice cream and, giving up on finding much to do, heading back to the bus station in time to get the 3pm bus back to Kalamaki, which promptly took the direct route straight down to the coast and I was back at the hotel in less than 20 minutes.

I popped back to my room and changed into my swimming trunks to head back to the hotel pool for a quick swim, but it turned out that the pool wasn’t heated – which might explain why so few people were using it, so after a few minutes of swimming I headed out of the hotel and down to the beach where I found that the sea was considerably warmer than the pool and with a very shallow beach I could walk a long way out before the water was even up to my waist.

I had a decent swim in the sea before heading back to the hotel to have a shower and then head over to the restaurant for dinner.