Booked a week at the Messini Beachclub with Neilson holidays. BA charter includes free bike carriage . As the premium road bikes were not available ( Defy’s , all booked ) I reserved a premium mtb and booked abike box on my flight .

I intend to take the Roubaix and do some road rides , either group or solo, and some mtb rides as well.

If the wind fills in hopefully should be able to get a windsurf in as well.

For the mtb rides , are they gravel tracks with some faster decents or more rocky tech single track alpine stuff? Would you armour up or just go with baggies and a LS top?
I have purchaced a 1 : 150 000 map and some of the roads look tasty, lots of switcbacks and a 2400m hill not too far away . Are the roads safe enough or pot -hole littered gravel traps, waiting to catch out the over zealous tourist ( checks EHIC )

thanks in advance

I was there last year. The guided MTB is mainly gravel tracks with some singletrack. It’s certainly not techy stuff although they do run a trip to some man made stuff in the mountains outside the main town if there’s enough people. I was told that’s more techy (it’s a black ride in their classification) but the rest of the guided rides are XC, to the extent that I didn’t drop my saddle more than a couple of times in the week. It was the first year they ran that resort though so they might have found some more singletrack by this time. Neilson aren’t shy in taking you down some quite serious stuff (lots and lots of rocky desents at Vounaki beach for example) but keep to their red rides unless you want a gravel track bimble. The roads round there were generally not too bad (EU money) but anything not used much is likely to be dusty so be careful on the bends. There didn’t seem to be enough people around to make the roads busy. Best advice is talk to the guides, they will know the area really well after 6 months being there and are generally very good riders (our guides this year had just come back from the Mega)

I went last year too. I was there on only the second week the resort had ever opening though so I got a real impression that the area had great potential but the guides hadn’t yet tapped into it yet.

The ‘black’ ride on the Friday was ok. It was graded as a black due to distance rather than terrain though so I think we banged out 60km.
There were some fun little rocky descents but nothing crazy.

The guide last year was called Ali and rode a Yeti ASRC, if he’s still there say hello to him for me 😉