Waking Up In Paradise

Take it from me. Waking up in paradise is not all it's cracked up to be, especially after a night like the one I'd just experienced on Saturday 31st August 1974!

There weren't many people willing to risk a holiday in the eastern Mediterranean that summer, for there was a war being fought between the Greeks and the Turks over on the island of Cyprus. Fighting had commenced in mid-July when the Turks invaded and was waged over several tense weeks, so the official advice was that Cyprus, Greece and Turkey were destinations best avoided. Holiday companies cancelled packages and airlines pulled flights, but some intrepid back-packers were not to be put off.

My girlfriend and I with minimal light clothing, books which required reading before the next university term, and our orange tent, flew off to dusty Crete with a fistful of drachmas and our dreams of a Greek vacation that we'd refused to contemplate during the years that the country's recently ousted military junta had been in power.

It was while we were staying in Aghios Nikolaos that we were told about Vai, a palm beach paradise about 80km (50 miles) away, right at the eastern-most tip of Crete, well worth a visit. One bus a day made the journey and we decided to head off there for the week-end.

After the town of Siteia, we were the only passengers left on the (non-air-conditioned) old bus as it wove its precarious way along the dusty coast road to land's end in the full heat of a blistering Saturday afternoon, but Vai, when we arrived, was breathtakingly beautiful: a curving half-moon bay of golden sand fringed by groves of date palms. The only habitation was an old bar/taverna set back among the trees and we were surprised to find it open, given there was hardly anyone around.

We went for a dip to cool off, then found a place to pitch the tent beneath the palms before heading over to the taverna. Could we eat? Yes, but they only had moussaka on offer. My girlfriend took one look at it and decided to stick to beer (and later some bread, cheese and peaches that we'd brought with us). Me, I went for the moussaka with my beer - a decision I was later to regret.

palm fringed beach at Vai, Crete (1974)

We read for a while in the late afternoon, took another dip in the sea and walked hand in hand on the edge of the sand the entire length of the bay and back without seeing another soul. The bar/taverna was closed and the owner departed (presumably to the nearby village of Palaikastro). It seemed we were alone in paradise.

By the way, for those of you (the majority I guess) who have never been to Vai, you might have witnessed it unknowingly as the back-drop to a TV advertisement from the 1980s featuring the Bounty chocolate bar ("Try a little tenderness - Bounty, the taste of paradise"). Of course the makers of the advertisement had cheated. The palm trees at Vai are date palms, not coconut palms, so the crew had to bring along their own bag of coconuts for the shoot. Still, it was a cheaper location than a proper tropical island.

It was very peaceful as the sun began to set behind the palm grove. The stillness was uncanny, the sea was silent, the air hot with not a breath of wind and as the sky shaded from flaming red to dark blue, I was reminded very strongly of my childhood in West Africa, those familiar date palms, the fact that sunsets don't hang around and darkness falls suddenly. We retired to our tent.

I don't know if it was the lightning flashes, the crashes of thunder, the tattoo of rain on our tent or the fact that my every bone ached that woke me first in the middle of the night. However, I soon realised that I was going to be violently sick, so unzipping the mosquito flap I crawled out into the storm and retched up moussaka and beer until there was nothing left inside me, or so I thought. Food poisoning! Re-heated meat. Nature's way of purging the system. Soaking wet but somewhat relieved, I dived back into the tent and tried to find a comfortable position to lie in. Impossible. In fact I had to crawl into the storm twice more, and felt I must have turned myself inside out, before the nausea abated and the thunderclouds rolled away. I ached all over, couldn't get comfortable and decided this was the most wretched I had ever felt.

I might have slept for an hour or so, I'm not really sure. At just after six the sun rose out of the sea on a beautiful September Sunday morning. The air was clear, the palms dripped and glistened, the water sparkled and I stumbled weakly down to the shore to sit very still feeling sorry for myself, and waited for the sun to warm me. 

curving half-moon bay at Vai, Crete (1974)

Of course I was dehydrated, light-headed and slightly feverish, certainly in no fit state to properly appreciate the beauty of the scene, but then something really strange happened. As I sat there an hour past sunrise on that deserted beach people began walking towards me along the shoreline, people that I knew. They weren't dressed for the beach, that's for sure. One was my best friend from school in sub-fusc jacket, tie and charcoal trousers. Another was the first girl I'd ever had sex with. Another was the mate I regularly went cycling with. He didn't have his bike with him.

Of course I knew this couldn't be real, especially as the girl had died rather tragically on account of drugs a couple of years before. A ghost perhaps? And was my school friend then also dead? And my cycling companion? It turned out later not to be the case, but as they continued to walk towards me these chimeras seemed as real as my girlfriend, standing outside the tent calling to ask if I was feeling any better. Then after a few disconcerting minutes more, my shimmering friends just dematerialised, leaving an empty shoreline. I suppose I had been hallucinating. It was truly the weirdest, most unsettling thing I've ever known. Have any of you perhaps experienced anything similar? I'd be interested to hear the circumstances. The mind is a curious device!

Once the bar/taverna opened I rehydrated cautiously during the morning with bottles of lemonade, though didn't feel up to eating anything. We decided to pack up the tent and ride out of paradise on the daily bus back to Siteia and a few nights in a pension with clean sheets and hot showers, a more practical form of paradise.

I was reminded of that morning in Vai over twenty years later when watching the movie 'Contact' while on a flight to San Francisco. If you know the film (starring Jodie Foster as astronomer Ellie Arroway) there is a famous scene where she travels through time and space and finds herself on a deserted beach and her father walks towards her - all illusion but not hallucination in that instance. The parallel resonated.

Nowadays at Vai there's probably a metalled road, a car-park, several buses a day, a choice of bars/tavernas, a supermarket and rows of sunbeds all along the beach. I'm not interested in going back there. I'll just treasure the memory (food-poisoning, hallucinations and all). 

I did plan a poem to accompany this blog but I'm really not convinced of its merits, so I've removed it.

Thanks for reading, S ;-)