Hydra has changed somewhat since I last visited seven or eight years ago. The menu boards in front of the tavernas, upon which meals are illustrated and assigned numbers (a sure sign of tourism's encroachment), are more numerous. But with the exception of a municipal garbage truck or two, motorized vehicles are still not allowed (donkeys do most of the heavy carrying), and a good story is just as easy to find.

Where Greeks Like to Play

Hydra is hardly a typical Greek island, though, because there are too many foreigners. I am ready for an island visited mostly by Greeks.

The islands popular with Greeks on holiday tend to be those within easy range of Athens for the weekend. Big, fertile Andros, on the ferry run from the Athens port of Rafina, is perhaps the most visited of these. Many wealthy families have built second homes here, and local support of the arts has been so strong that exhibitions at the privately funded Museum of Contemporary Art have included works by such masters as Picasso, Miró, and Toulouse-Lautrec.

I get a hint of the tone of Andros when, as we approach by high-speed ferry, I ask a young Greek what he most likes to do on the island. "Chase goats with my uncle's helicopter."

Of more interest to me, though, is the island of Kea, which anyone in my line of work ought to pay homage to, as it is the birthplace of the sixth century B.C. lyric poet Simonides, who is credited with being the first poet in history to write for money. Lying thirteen miles off the southern edge of mainland Greece, Kea is closer to Athens than any other inhabited island in the Cyclades group, and has some good beaches, such as sandy Pisses. It also has archaeological sites (the Lion of Kea, a massive stone statue carved out of a hillside, is smiling, perhaps because no one will ever carry him off to a museum) and a sweep of hills heavily terraced with ancient stone walls and crisscrossed with a network of trails that make it a hiker's paradise. But because the ferries from Athens's two main ports, Pireaus and Rafina, seldom stop here, almost no foreigners come.

Cookbook author Aglaia Kremezi and her husband, Costas Moraitis, both former Athenians, live on Kea and run a program called Kea Artisanal, which involves cooking classes, wine tastings, and explorations of the island. No program is scheduled for when I arrive. But because it is a weekday, there is plenty of room at the Porto Kea Suites, the island's first superchic hotel, and since Costas is no longer a hard-charging Athenian, he has time to show me around.

We drive by the red-roofed, hilltop village of Ioulida—which is quiet but has enough tavernas and restaurants to suggest that it could be otherwise when the Athenians are here on weekends—and then pass a scattering of stone farmhouses. We stop at one to buy goat cheese from a weathered woman who gets a wheel of it down from where it is curing on an overhead rack in a shed.