Everyone Is Called Spiros: Local Secrets, Honest Stories & the Real Corfu
The transfer coach leaves at ten past four in the morning and nobody talks on it.
You know that coach. You have sat on it with a sleeping child on your shoulder and a week's worth of sun still on your arms, doing the sum in your head about how long it is until next year. One week out of fifty two. And every single year you land back at the same apartment, the same bar, the same stretch of sand, because it took you three days last time to work out where anything was and you are not wasting three days again.
I did ten years of that. Same resort. Same fortnight in the same month. Then three years ago I got off the plane and did not get back on, and I found out how much of the island I had been driving past.
This is that, written down. Not a brochure and not a listicle. Three years of notebooks about a place you already love, put in the order you would actually use them in.
The argument you have every year, settled honestly
Every Corfu group on the internet has the same conversation. Sidari or Kassiopi. Is Kavos really that bad. Is Paleokastritsa worth staying in or only worth a day. So the book takes all of them and says the true thing about each, including who each one is wrong for. Said the way I would say it to my sister, not the way a tour operator says it.
What things should actually cost
You have seen the headlines about bars in town charging eight euros for a flat Coke and two euros for bread you did not order. On the Liston you are paying for the view, and that is fair enough, but the moment you are away from the front the numbers change completely, and almost nobody tells you what normal looks like.
So there is a card. Beer, frappe, salad, souvlaki, sunbeds, cover charge, airport taxi, hire car, boat hire. Screenshot it and you can check any bill in the dark without a word to anybody. You stop bracing, which is the actual point.
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What is inside
The resort verdict. The 2026 bill card. Which beach at which hour, and the order to do the west coast in so you are never in the crowd. The September and October week, hour by hour, for the shoulder season when the island gets itself back. The villages up the mountain, Old Perithia and the ones with a single taverna, and how to be a guest in them rather than a coach party. Where the tsitsibira still gets made. An honest chapter for anyone who has ever sat up at two in the morning looking at village houses, covering rent, winter, paperwork, and what February is actually like when everything shuts.
And the bay at the end of a path I thought had given up. Exact directions, in writing, which is the one thing I will not put in a Facebook post.
It does not go out of date
Prices move and tavernas change hands, so every year I go back through the whole thing. The bill card gets re-checked against what I actually pay. Travel rules get corrected the week they change. Places that have closed come out. Everyone who has ever bought it gets the new version by email, free, with a dated list of what changed. Buy it once and it keeps working.
How you get it
Instant download the moment you pay. It is on your phone in about thirty seconds. Reads on anything, phone, tablet, Kindle, laptop, so it is there on the plane and there at the table. Yours forever, re-downloadable whenever, updates included.
My neighbour Spiridoula is eighty, she has lived in the house joined onto mine her whole life, and when I told her what I was writing she said the truest thing in the book. In town you pay for the view. Here you pay for the food.
This is the ten minutes up the hill, in writing.