Pt2 - 12:

TWENTY FOUR HOURS ON THE MOVE

 

The Ariadne was little more than a cattle barge. It was already so uncomfortably crowded when we pulled out of Naxos for the seven hour leg to Piraeus we were flat out finding a square meter of deck to camp on. It was impossible to stretch out so we assumed the foetal position to attempt some sleep. At first the vibrations were mildly amusing, like a therapeutic bed, but the novelty soon wore off. Apart from that first strung out night in Cairo we’d managed to avoid resorting to the Normison (Temazepam) in our little first aid kit, but it was obvious after nearly two hours of relentless juddering that if we were going to get any shuteye at all it would have to be assisted. About 1:30am we both swallowed a Normie. The next thing I knew it was 5:30, stirred to comatose consciousness by increasingly loud music playing over the PA to rouse us in preparation for Piraeus still two hours hence. Tess hadn’t slept a wink.

We’d already decided on Operation Time Management – Step 3, renting a car to travel the mainland. For some foolish reason I’d imagined Piraeus, a major landfall for domestic and international travellers, would be awash with car rental joints. Guess what! Battling fuzzy fatigue, I was already on a short fuse after dealing with a couple of exceedingly rude waiters at the passenger terminal Chew and Spew who behaved like the place was Maxim’s in Paris and we were a couple of vagrants when I discovered there wasn’t a car rental office in sight. A forty minute footslog around the filthy port revealed just one travel office who were happy to rent us one of their precious vehicles if we surrendered our first born and signed over the house. That seemed like the good news when we subsequently discovered we had to haul our gear one and a half kilometres through foul port traffic to catch the bus in to Syntagma; echoes of Egypt.

Bowed but unbeaten, we hauled ourselves the distance and boarded the 040 in to central Athens. It went via Rome and Berlin. We were so punch drunk and devoid of judgement when we finally fell down the steps onto the pavement in Syntagma that we staggered to MacDonald’s for breakfast. It was still only 9am when we felt sufficiently restored enough to drag our packs to a luggage storage place on Nikis, across the road from a car rental office. We struck a deal for a 1.2ltr Opel Corsa at A$60/day – expensive by Turkish standards but reasonably competitive for Greece.

With two hours to kill before delivery we retired to the Plaka for coffee and cake, then wandered back through the Botanical Gardens to the National Palace. You gotta love the whacky livery of the ceremonial guards at these institutions. Here they dress up like something out of a Punch and Judy Show, with sparkly pointy hats festooned with pom poms, white tights and shoes straight out of Arabian Nights with little bells on the upturned toes. Their ancient rifles shouldered, they stiffly march a defined route like clockwork toys. The sight leavened our weary souls for the walk back to Nikis and the car place.

At 12:35pm we were on our way out of Athens. At 1:35pm we were still on our way out of Athens along an endless Parramatta Road of used car yards and furniture retailers where the signs didn’t speak English. Eventually we found ourselves on the tollway to Corinth. By the time we stopped for souvlaki at the little village of Kehries on the Gulf of Saronika we’d been travelling for 30 hours – if you counted the full day we put in motoring around Naxos yesterday. A retired NATO pilot from Chania who happened to be lunching at the café told us about the springs where Helen allegedly bathed before Paris whisked her off to Troy. We took our souvlakis and followed the pilot’s directions to a lovely little sheltered cove where we sat right on the water and ate. Rejuvenated, we found the springs in question bubbling out of the rocks into a 3 meter square pool of clear, cool water.

We arrived in Epidavros at 4:30. With plenty of time for a leisurely visit and the convoy of tourist buses mostly come and gone, we enjoyed poking around the ruins in the cool of the afternoon. I entirely failed to mention to Tess that on my visit here in 1977 I’d met a young lady from Tampa, Florida – Ilene – with whom I ended up travelling around the rest of Greece, across to Bari on the ferry from Igoumenitsa and on to Rome and Florence for a couple of passionate weeks. It was an intense fling that didn’t endure much beyond the holiday and so, while the memories were fond and would crop up again over the next little while, especially in Delphi, there didn’t seem to be any percentage in sharing them with Tess. Instead, I went to the centre of the amphitheatre, marked with a marble circle, to demonstrate the famously perfect acoustics. You can hear a frog fart from the back row, but I settled for dropping a coin from hip height. The sound came ringing back to me from all points of the theatre and Tess managed to capture it on the video camera from way up in the dress circle.

At 6:15, with just shy of 200ks on the trip meter, we pulled into Nafplion. We found a small room in a nameless pension in the shadow of the fortress and made for the waterfront, where we saluted the sunset with yeros and a couple of very large Amstels. Too grotty for the sack after so long without a shower I hopped in for a quick rinse; when I got out 5 minutes later Tess was dead to the world. I flopped down beside her and was rowing headlong into Blanket Bay when a drunk started up in the street outside, yelling what I took to be obscenities at a woman who screamed back as good as she got. I weighed up the pros and cons of stabbing the dickhead to death with my Swiss Army knife, but decided life in a Greek prison probably wasn’t worth it. It went on for about half an hour when an older male voice suddenly intervened from somewhere overhead, a balcony I guessed. The tone left me in no doubt the message was, “Pull yer bloody head in and piss off…NOW!” A few minutes later I heard the drunk ride off on his little scooter, leaving the sobbing woman in his wake. It was 11:30. In the nearly 40 hours since we’d woken up yesterday morning on Naxos we’d ridden round the island in a day, ferried seven plus hours across to Piraeus on the Ariadne, negotiated Piraeus and Athens, hired a car and driven from Athens to Epidavros to Nafplion...I slipped seamlessly into exhausted oblivion.

Coming up: Mainly Mainland