Where is Gerald Durrell's Corfu?

If you haven't read Gerald Durrell's book My Family and Other Animals, then put it on your summer reading list. It is lighthearted, very funny and will make you wish you had a childhood like his on the Greek island of Corfu. I had to read the book for school when I was turning 16, and have wanted to visit Corfu ever since. This quote alone was enough:
“Each day had a tranquility a timelessness about it so that you wished it would never end. But then the dark skin of the night would peel off and there would be a fresh day waiting for us glossy and colorful as a child's transfer and with the same tinge of unreality.”

So this spring break I went in search of Durrell's Corfu. I researched where to find the villas where the family had stayed and came up with some conflicting answers. It is doubtful whether much of the original homes still stand and they are definitely not on the tour guide. There is information about The White House, and so we headed to Kalami Bay. This is the house where Gerald's older brother Larry lived with his wife. It is now a restaurant with rooms to rent. As excited as I was to find the house, I was enthralled at the approach. There was no sign and we had to wind down a one lane track to the waters edge.

While I took in the olive groves behind crumbling stone walls and the banks of wild flowers, Jon did the driving and hoped we wouldn't meet another car. No tour buses would be coming this way. The place looked exactly like a scene from the book and I could just imagine Gerry taking his dogs out in a boat or walking up through the olives to visit a shepherd friend.
But this wasn't where he had lived. I did a bit more research and found that Gerald Durrell had regretted what his book had done to the island, and never got over the tragedy of the developing tourist trade during the 70's and 80's.

The memory of the island of his childhood is there, if you are willing to go looking for it. Much of the island has changed, but Durrell changed it even in his book. He used artistic license to add family members and under emphasized the size of the island. From his account the reader gets the impression that the off shore islands, checker board fields, and goat herders are all part of his back garden. I had to drive for the best part of a day to visit parts of the island that resembled the stories from the book.
In his book, Gerald Durrell did what many of us do, he created an idyllic childhood the way he would always want to remember it. Reality is never the same, and that is in part due to the passage of time, growing older and the world changing. But the main reason that Corfu is not the same is because as adults we cannot look at a place with the same eyes of a child.