Day 3: Rhodes Town

After we'd cooled off last night we went and sat on the hotel roof terrace with an Aperol Spritz.

Later on we headed into town to find some more food. The restaurant we ended up in had loads of Greek food. I went for my favourite pastitsio...

...while Helen was more adventurous and went for a plate that had a mixture of multiple Greek dishes.

By the time we'd finished eating it was fully dark. The mosque in the centre of town looked beautiful illuminated.

Our plan for Monday was to go for a walk around the moat, which lies between the two layers of fortified walls that surround the town.

We entered from one of the city gates and found that the moat was pretty much deserted, although it wasn't particularly early in the morning; probably around 10am.

It was a really nice place to stroll around. There was the odd palm tree...

...a lot of spherical stones which we assume were meant to be reminiscent of cannon balls...

...and an area which looks like it's used for theatre performances.

Every so often we'd come to a bridge across the moat, leading through one of the gates into the town centre.

It wasn't possible to get up to there from here which wasn't a problem for us, but later on we did meet two ladies who seemed to have followed a sign for the old town and ended up walking around the moat!

The walls on the sides of the moat were incredibly high.

They seemed to be home to a large population of lizards.

And these were big lizards!

As we progressed further around the moat we did run into a few other groups of people, but it was mostly pretty quiet.

It was fun to see the different towers of the walls from a different angle.

As we circled round we began to get a view of the larger fortifications within the town.

Soon we had made it round to the Palace of the Grand Master.

We exited the old town through one of the gates...

...and emerged down by the sea.

We could see the fortress we'd walked out to yesterday...

...as well as the windmills...

...and the statues of the two deer.

We walked along by the sea for a while, looking for the town beach. It turned out to be quite underwhelming; different bits of the beach seemed to be belong to different establishments and it was completely covered in different types of sun loungers. We had to walk quite a while before we eventually came to a section of beach that was public.

It was a pebbly beach rather than sandy.

The day was quite windy again and we saw people paragliding.

We also had a really good view across to the Turkish coast.

On the way back into town we walked through a small garden, which was in front of the beach.

Then we found a cafe, where we had what might possibly be the world's largest iced coffees!

Our next plan was to walk around the top of the town walls.

Our landlady had told us that it was possible to do this, but only between the hours of 12 and 3 and not on Sundays, so we hadn't been able to try it yesterday. We bought tickets for the very reasonable price of EUR 3 each from the ticket office of the Palace of the Grand Master, then walked up onto the walls.

There was a fantastic view back towards the castle....

...and also out over the town.

From here we could see how many mosques and minarets there had once been here.

We could also look down on the moat where we'd been walking earlier.

At times we could even see the sea.

It was a really lovely place to stroll around and look down on the old town.

We even tried a selfie, though it wasn't necessarily massively successful as I'd forgotten to pack my selfie stick.

Eventually we began to approach the end of the section you can walk around.

We climbed down by one of the town gates.

We found a shady restaurant where we got a table under a tree and ordered a carafe of wine. It came as a very snazzy jug!

We had a really nice meal there, finishing up with a Greek coffee (which is very similar to a Turkish coffee!!)

Then we just had time for another stroll around the town, passing another mosque...

...some indeterminate ruins...

...and getting another view of the most impressive gate in the walls, before finally heading back to the hotel to cool off.