My translated proposal regarding the future of the paths was put before the local council, at their meeting last week, by Kostas Skouras, the political representative for the KKE party. By the time they got to my item, it was 1.30 in the morning! I sat in the small public gallery section of the Town Hall meeting room, together with a small group of others who had items on the agenda. The mayor responded by agreeing to my proposal and before I knew it, they moved on to the next item. However, I still had no idea of when they were going to give me workers or indeed what had happened to the funds that I had been told by Mrs Mimika Rekka were available for this project. Although Mrs Rekka was present at the meeting, she made no comment whatsoever, even though she had set up the initial meeting at the town hall last March, during which I chose 4 routes to be cleaned. In the meantime, a volunteer and myself have cleaned a long portion of trail in the Potami valley, in our spare time. A regular update and images were sent to Mrs Rekka during that time, again without response.
The walking season is almost over and it is a crying shame that local authority has not taken advantage of my offer to project manage the clearing of the most popular trails. After twenty years of doing it myself, together with the occasional volunteer, the situation has become such that I cannot continue. Meanwhile, my Skopelos Trails book is selling well.

I’m playing truant from the most boring conference in the history of conferences even taking into the account its in Chinese and English. I don’t even get the chance to see Beijing as tomorrow I’m off to Tianjin. We came from Yantai which is by the sea and, according to the Chinese is a very small city of just a million people! However it was much cleaner and tidier than normal. Because we’re doing business people keep feeding us banquets with 20 or so dishes, as well as trying to force large quantities of alcohol down us. All part of a business partnership apparently. I of course have been resisting. In Yantai they were overwhelmingly hospitable because the President wished to repay Ann and me for having him to afternoon tea when he visited Auckland.

I’m going to keep blogging even though I have to do it on a chinese site so I keep guessing which button or icon to press. I just hope that when we move from Beijing, some of the technology starts to work.

Cute pictures!

Rob

In the middle of technology nightmare. No Blackberry, no laptop. A PC in the hotel business centre that is only in mandarin and a hotel telephone line that won’t do international! So this blog is my last chance. Here’s trying!

You can read this blog but not add comments!!! Just email me if you want to get in touch – you all have my email address. Rob