THE EURO CRISIS has hit us really hard, the receptionist at the hotel said. We have had plenty of time to chat as I try to get better to continue this ride.

The funny thing is that the crisis doesn't show. Not at first glance. I mentioned that to someone, that pavement cafés are full of customers and people look well dressed and happy. And he said: "We are the champions of coffee drinking, but the crisis has hit us. It is harder in big cities like Athens and Thessaloniki but it is affecting us as well and it is only time before we feel it like everyone else."

This hotel has more than halved its prices. Still only a few rooms are occupied. When I said we wanted to stay another night, the man at the counter said openly: "Good... we need more customers."

At the bike shop across the road, the credit card machine has gone. It's cash for everything. We couldn't communicate enough to discuss whether too few people had kept their cards or if bank commission was more than the business could bear. But, either way, it's symbolic.

The Carrefour supermarket up the road, part of the second biggest chain in the world, has a feeling of getting by, but no better than that. This morning, Steph got talking to a Belgian woman who has lived here since she was eight. She said her husband repaired shoes. That was his job. He did nothing else. And now he had no work, which is odd because you'd think that in a crisis like this people would have shoes repaired rather than buy new.

Steph said: "This town has the air of having been quite prosperous. There are a lot of shoe shops and clothes shops. But lots of them say they have cut their prices by up to 60 per cent. That could be the time of the year, but it has still happened. And still there aren't many people going in.

"And there are lots of shops selling computers and computer bits, but there's nobody in them and you wonder how long they're for this world."

A bulky and mumbling 70-year-old in a café told us he had lived most of his life near Toronto, in Canada, where he ran first a taxi business and then a restaurant. He has come back to Greece at the will of his wife. We said they had returned at a difficult time.

He put his hand on my shoulder, sharing a confidence: "I get my pension from Canada. I get it paid into a bank there. Not here. When I want money, I draw it out with a bank card, but the rest of the money stays in Canada. All Greek governments steal."

More striking on a national level is what happened when we got here. Not sure what to do, we called at the train station to consider our options. Nobody was there. A man across the tracks stared at us curiously as we tried to make sense of handwritten timetables in Greek. We unfolded our maps to see if any of the shapes related to towns on our route. None did.

What the man knew but we didn't is that there aren't any trains any more. Great swathes of lines have been closed and international services have been scrapped entirely. To save money to repay Greece's debts.

The hotel receptionist threw up his hands in exasperation.

"A year ago, they built us a brand new line. Completely new. And now they can't afford to run the trains. So they take the money..." - he gestured taking bread from people's mouths - "and now we have nothing. All in a year."