Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me Simon Calder. It's Tuesday the 13th of August.

Awful lot of attention, of course, on Athens, where there are wildfires which are spreading in the northeastern area of the capital and serious concerns about possible further loss of life after a woman

tragically died in the fires. There is a massive effort, more than 700 firefighters who are

tackling the blazes and the hope is that there will be,

they will get the fires under control quickly and that hopefully will be by the end of today.

But they are being hampered by extremely high winds and very high temperatures in Greece and that's also affecting other parts of

Greece I was in Xante about six weeks ago and there was a whole patch of

mountainside that was destroyed in a blaze and there's other parts of Greece the General Secretariat for Civil Protection in

Athens says that there is an extreme fire risk for many areas in Greece so what are

your rights well things are continuing strangely very normally for now at Athens Airport, which if you may know it, it's to the east of the city, quite close to where the wildfires are burning.

But all the operations are taking off normally.

They're flying out to the northeast.

If you're on the left, you probably get a view of the

terrible scenes of smoke and fire. No threat directly to the airport because it's

basically either built up or there's very little vegetation and we're seeing many flights from the UK arrive and depart each day

the only advice from the airlines is well here's jet to allow extra time for your journey to

and from the airport as there may be road closures in place a slightly slightly different story on the ferries. We've got

diversions, the port of Rafina, which is quite close to the airport and handles ferries to the

cyclides and also to Crete has been moved or rather closed and ferries moved south to the port of Lavrio.

That's because it's a much easier place to access Athens from when some roads are closed.

There's been no great update from the Foreign Office of the UK and that because that's I guess because the advice

remains the same as it's been all summer if you've got any serious immediate danger dial

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