I have always wanted to go to Greece ever since I can remember. I'm not sure what attracted me to it in the first place. Maybe it was just a picture I saw of the deep blue sea against the white and blue houses or the fantastic food or simple life style but I've always wanted to spend some time there. Besides the usual tourist aspects like seeing the Acropolis or the many fantastic early Greek landmarks I always thought that going to Greece would be a cultural experience in that the people seem friendly and open to sharing their life style and beautiful islands with you openly.

While I was "researching" information for our trip (reading a climbing magazine) I came across an article on Kalymnos, an island in the Dodecanese region where unlike other Greek islands it was far less touristy due to the large amount of rock that covered the island. The locals had subsisted on a thriving sea sponge industry rather than tourism because of this. That all changed in about 1999 when Kalymnos was put on the international climbing map. Expert climbers from Italy and all over began to flock to Kalymnos to put up new routes in this new untapped resource. Now Kalymnos has some of the best sport climbing in the world and hosts one of the longest continuous crags of climbing on the planet. The town of Massouri sits at the base of 90% of those climbs and is all accessable by foot right from your room! This is a place Aprille and I need to spend a lot of time at so I put it in our itinerary to spend one month at a single apartment in Massouri so we could explore as much of the climbing as possible.