From Cairo to the Connemara: A Sojournal

 Pt2 - 14 INTERLUDE: IN THE SILVER SILENCE Delphi, 1977: At the youth hostel Ilene and I team up with four fellow travellers from England. We spend the night together eating, drinking and swapping travel stories at a small taverna perched on the side of the mountain. A full moon glows silver in the clear vaulted sky. It’s cool out on the deck but we barely notice, warmed as we are by the wine and good company. At some point late in the evening the others retire to the youth hostel while Ilene and I settle on a stroll around the village. I don’t know how we end up at the deserted archaeological site a few ks out of town but here we are at the low fence beside the entrance gate. Then in a crazy wordless minute we’re on the inside threading our way up to the stadium. Sitting in the royal seats we whisper to each other in the silver silence as though speech might rouse the spirits. Here in this place of myth and legend we are creating our own personal mythology, a moment only we two w...

 Pt2 - 13: ON THE MAINLAND Mycenae is famous as the seat of Agamemnon, the aggrieved king who led his troops on a ten year siege of Troy to avenge the kidnapping of his wife Helen by the Trojan warrior Paris, and we all know how that turned out. This morning Mycenae was under its own siege by busloads of chattering schoolchildren. I’ve decided when I get home I’ll invent a spray for this. We hacked our way through the hordes up to the Lion’s Gate which offered a spectacular view across the Peloponnesian Plains. It was a peerless day to be at any sort of altitude but, alas, the infestation of school kids and the growing invasion of German tourists destroyed any enjoyment of the moment. With the drive to Olympia on the western coast ahead of us we cut our losses and returned to the car. There were a hundred tour buses choking the carpark, and I’m not making that up! It took us longer to negotiate our way out to the road than we’d actually spent up at the site. The next few hours we...

 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 de...

 Pt2 - 11: NAXOS The sleek new hydrofoil motored across Santorini’s sheltered harbour on course for Naxos like a yellow torpedo. I sank back into the aircraft seat with a copy of the Times bought yesterday in Thira for what I assumed would be two and a half hours of satin smooth sailing, but the moment we broached open water it was suddenly more like a Cessna in a washing machine. I folded the newspaper up and concentrated on not losing the bacon and two fried eggs I had for breakfast. It took a while, but I eventually attuned to the conditions and recovered some composure. The day was hot and clear, but out here the breeze whipped up enough chop to suck the fun out of the crossing. Even as we forged the last 200 meters to the town pier at Naxos the wind fairly howled across our bow. It wasn’t just the maelstrom that made Naxos seem our most charmless landfall in the islands. Apart from the classical arch on the low bluff to port, the waterfront and the promenade lacked the colo...

Pt2 - 10:   SANTORINI   In my mind we were going to have Santorini all to ourselves, so imagine how pissed off I was to discover other travellers aboard the ferry out of Heraklion, how dare they? I call the Romilda a ferry but, like much of the inter-island traffic, it’s a small cruise ship with a vehicle deck. Sailing conditions were ideal and we spent much of the four hour passage lounging in a booth, conserving our energy for the fabled isle. Fully recovered from Samaria, we were up for it. The approach was spectacular. Sheer cliffs of compressed volcanic ash reared out of the blue Aegean like cross sections of an exotic cake with layers of brown, ochre, red, green and black, all iced with the bright white settlements of Oia, Imerovigli and Thira. We docked about 7:30 as the setting sun cast the sea in bronze. It was like arriving on a movie set. I might have mentioned elsewhere that travelling on the cusp of the season offers considerable benefits, even if sometimes...

Pt2 - 9:   CRETE We’d not been in Chania (Khar-nia) a day when the clouds parted and the warm sun sucked up the shallow puddles along the old Venetian waterfront. It didn’t take a lot of imagination to visualise small sailing ships riding gently on the tide and to hear the sounds of the busy commercial district at the eastern end of the sheltered harbour echoing across the water. At the local maritime museum there’s a richly detailed scale model of the old Venetian port which shows not much has changed here in the last two hundred odd years. A stroll out to the little lighthouse at the end of the breakwater offered a view back across the harbour to the colourful strand and what might literally have been the face of 18 th century Venice. In the middle distance the dramatic Lefka Ori, or White Mountains, lived up to their snow-covered name. Like all the accommodation in Old Chania, The Captain Vassilis was a large Venetian house converted to a hotel. Built in the 1780s, it was r...

 Pt2 - 8: ATHENS   I had my bearings immediately. Within half an hour of arriving in Syntagma Square in the centre of Athens we’d installed ourselves in room 811 of the Hotel Astor on Karageorgi. The balcony boasted a view of the Acropolis and we had CNN for the first time since Tiberias. With less than a week to go to the election the IRA is stepping up its terror campaign at railway stations and airports in Britain; we can only cross all our digits and hope Bill doesn’t get caught up in any carnage and/or his flight isn’t cancelled at the last minute. In the meantime, we have a day to settle in. I led Tess back through Syntagma and up to the Plaka. Normally a hub of lively activity the Plaka was quiet today for Orthodox Easter Sunday. That’s ok, it’s just nice to be wandering around in t-shirts, and it gave Tess a chance to scope the place out without being harangued by restaurant touts. * We’re still tiring easily on the tail end of the Istanbul bug and have two d...

 Pt2 - 7: GREECE 24 th April – 20 th May   SAMOS True to his word, Mehmet from Hermes Car Hire drove us down to the coast to board the Ku şadaşi Prenses at 8:15 this morning and we were underway fifteen minutes later. Although hazy, it was pleasantly warm and calm for the short hop across to Samos. The shallow turquoise waters of the Turkish coast gave way to the inky blue of the deeper Aegean while the grey shapes of Samos and its family of small rocky islets loomed in the distance. Indeed, we never actually lost sight of land for the entire ninety-five minute journey. As we steamed into the port of Samos Town the sun won its battle to burn through the haze and broke over the colourful buildings lining the waterfront, a fitting welcome to continent number three, Europe, and country number five. Customs formalities were unusually casual at both ends of the crossing. Although we could have waltzed through with a kilo of heroin, this is definitely how international tra...