Kefalonia

Nothing on Kefalonia is close to anything else. It is the biggest of the Ionian islands, a mountain in the middle and a limestone coast broken into cliffs and blue sea caves, with only a few long beaches between them. The island assumes you have hired a car, and it is right. Inland the road climbs into Mount Ainos, a national park of black pine and fir with semi-wild ponies, and on a clear day the view runs down to both coasts and over the water to Zakynthos and Ithaca.

We went in May, when the island is quieter and cooler, and better for driving and walking than for lying on a beach. For proper beach weather, go in summer: June to September has the warmest sea, and July and August are the hottest and the busiest. Winter settles the question by closing much of the coast from November to March.

We would stay in the north. Fiskardo is the glamorous end of the island, yachts in the harbour and the seafood tavernas along it; Assos, a short drive away, is a handful of houses under a Venetian castle on a pine headland, and quieter still. Both are about an hour from the airport, and it is an hour worth driving. Argostoli, the capital, is ten minutes from the airport and the practical base rather than the pretty one, though it has the island's shops and, along the harbour wall, its loggerhead turtles.

Myrtos is the beach to drive to: a mile of white limestone pebbles below the cliffs of the north-west coast, 30 to 40 minutes from Fiskardo, the last of it a steep road switchbacking down from the coast road, on which the view is the passengers' business. At Assos, leave the car at the isthmus and walk up through the pines to the castle Venice built between 1593 and 1596 to govern the north, which gave its administrators a headland for an office. Melissani Cave, near Sami, is crossed by boat, an underground lake lit through a gap where the roof fell in, and at its bluest around midday.

Dinner is by the water. We ate fish and Greek food in the harbour tavernas and could not now name one, which leaves the recommending to the harbour. In 1953 an earthquake flattened most of Kefalonia and spared Fiskardo alone, so its pastel houses still face the yachts and the fishing boats: the one waterfront on the island that looks as it did before the earthquake.