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 ;-)

Read More

That Greek Cottage!

This is the story of the  cottage  that got away! It was the late summer of 1974, the year ABBA won Eurovision, Nixon resigned as US President, Harold Wilson's Labour Party came back to power and blockbusters from John le Carre ('Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy') and Robert Pirsig ('Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance') hit the bookshops. Bob Dylan was touring for the first time since his motorcycle accident of eight years previous, the Moody Blues had just disbanded, Cat Stevens released 'Buddha and the Chocolate Box' and everyone seemed to be 'Kung Fu Fighting'.

It also happened that in July of that year, the military junta which had been ruling Greece since a coup d'état in 1967 was finally replaced by an interim civilian government. For some of us who had been longing to visit Greece, but felt it unethical to do so while the Generals were in power, the timing was almost perfect - three months of summer vacation from university stretched ahead. The only problems were the cost of getting there and the small matter of a war in the region: Turkish troops had recently invaded Cyprus and Greeks and Turks had resumed their age-old hostilities in the eastern Mediterranean.

The first problem was solved fairly easily. I got a holiday job with some fellow students from Warwick university as part of a contract team going in to steam-clean industrial plant in Birmingham factories during their two-week annual shut-down. It was a filthy job hosing down rolling mills and heavy machinery but it paid fantastically well, enough to cover a couple of months back-packing around Greece. The second problem actually played into our hands, for the Cyprus war put off thousands of would-be holiday-makers to the region, flights emptied and ticket prices fell.

My girlfriend and I decided that Crete would be our destination, well out of trouble's way; and so armed with tent, drachmas, books that we had to read in advance of the next university term, a camera and some light clothing, off we jetted, courtesy of Dan-Air (anyone remember them?). The flight was delayed by several hours but it meant that we flew down across the long string of Greek islands just as the sky was turning from black to rose and we landed in Irakleion at sunrise. Magical.

To say that it was like a coming home would be an exaggeration - but I certainly felt an extraordinary affinity with the place that has abided down the years.  It is why I've been to Greece more times than any other country and why I did once seriously contemplate retiring to live there (before austerity and Brexit reared their complicating heads).

As I've said, there were almost no tourists visiting Greece that year because of the war and we were welcomed with open arms wherever we went as soon as it was established that we were English and not American. (The Greeks blamed most things at the time on the Americans. They thought US foreign policy was behind the rise of the Generals. They didn't like the fact that Turkey was armed with American weapons and warplanes and that American forces were stationed on Turkish soil.)

Greek people are so friendly and generous. We were given - literally gifted - so much food everywhere we went, especially fresh fruit and vegetables grown for the summer tourists who never materialised; figs, oranges, tomatoes and watermelon to die for! I could enthuse at length about that holiday - Knossos, Aghios Nikolaos, Vai (close to heaven on earth) but I must cut to the chase.

We made a leisurely tour along the north coast of dusty Crete and in one place we decided to stay in a pension for a few days as a break from rough camping - a proper bed with clean sheets, hot shower, luxury. It was in the coastal town of Siteia, quite small in 1974 - now a centre of the island's wine industry and a bustling tourist resort with its own international airport. There we met some young Americans. They were quite pleased to find non-Americans who didn't treat them disdainfully. Most of them were just hanging out there for the summer but one of them, a young woman, was - or had been - working in Siteia as a teacher.

Unfortunately for her, she was in the process of being expelled from the country for having told her pupils that the returning prime minister, Konstantinous Karamanlis, was a shit of the first order. Such a fervently expressed opinion was unlikely to go unreported and it found no favour with her employers or the new Greek government with its anti-American bias. It was probably the excuse they had been looking for to move her on.

She was devastated to be leaving and was desperate to recoup the $1,000 dollars (or its drachma equivalent) she had spent on buying her little cottage in Siteia. We were asked if we were interested.


$1,000 or near offer in 1974!

The cottage was small, simple, sturdy and beautiful; cool inside in the summer because the walls were thick, warm in the winter for the same reason. There was a grapevine in the tiny yard.

$1,000 was about £450 at 1974 exchange rates. That was about triple what our holiday to dusty Crete cost (and was comparable to the price of a new Mini Cooper)! I should have gone straight to the main post office in Siteia and wired my parents to lend me the funds. I didn't do so. To a poor student, it seemed like a lot of money at the time. We said our goodbyes and continued on our tour. With the benefit of hindsight, it was an absolute bargain. Of course we laughed ruefully afterwards and I harbour a mild regret about it to this day.

Quite by coincidence, the song 'If I Laugh' by Cat Stevens (born Steven Demetre Georgiou to a Greek Cypriot father and Swedish mother) from his album 'Teaser And The Firecat'  seems remarkably apposite in its sentiments, given the story of the cottage that got away...

If I Laugh
If I laugh just a little bit
maybe I can forget the chance
that I didn't have to know you
and live in peace, in peace

If I laugh just a little bit
maybe I can forget the plans that
I didn't use to get you
at home - with me - alone

If I laugh just a little bit
maybe I can recall the way
that I used to be , before you
and sleep at night - and dream
If I laugh, baby if I laugh
just a little bit...
                                      Cat Stevens (1971)

If you'd like to listen to it, for it is very beautiful, I've included a hyperlink here: Cat Stevens playing If I Laugh live

I'll sign off this week with a new poem of my own. I hope it pleases.

Idyll
Late September Grecian sun,
given latitude, still strikes me
as warming to the bones,
to the sleepy spirits
that invest these olive groves,
to the white-washed
stone-wall cottage clusters
with their fragrant, dark interiors
of homely mystery
and cats the colour of molasses
rolling lazy in the dust,
quite unprovoked
by dancing end-of-season butterflies.

Before me, the epic story
of Odysseus lies open to the page
where Hermes bids divine Calypso
let our captive hero go, but I,
fuelled by a lunch
of cool retsina and dolmades,
cease reading and allow my gaze
to fold to Homeric sightlessness.

Sunlight licks my eyelids
like the charming snake of old,
cicadas drone, a hint of oregano
spices up this timeless afternoon
and I drowse
happy to the very soul, thinking
that unlike our bold adventurer
I might prove fickle and be tempted
not to risk another sinking
in the wine-dark sea.
I might elect to stay a while
on this idyllic isle...
but then I never knew Penelope! 

Thanks for reading. Have a good week, S ;-)

Read More

Curiosities

Your Saturday Blogger is back from dusty Crete sporting a suntan and a broken finger, the hallmarks of a good holiday. It was a much-needed respite from the topsy-turvy house on the strand, work on which is still in progress. (I may treat you to fables of the reconstruction next week.)

There was a time, forty years ago on my first visit to dusty Crete, when everything was in Greek alone - road signs, public notices, menus, advertisements, shop signs. Nowadays, to reflect the pervasion of the international tourist, English is pretty much everywhere as well - which is a shame in many ways, for it detracts from the 'Greekness' of the experience and makes the tourist lazy.

There is a silver lining to this cloud of globalisation. Occasionally, a well-intentioned attempt to sign in English can yield some amusing curiosities. These errors in usage can also be strangely poetic, something gained in translation. Two of my favourites from the recent holiday were a  hand-painted sign on a roadside orchard wall that read "Kindly do not tough the fruits" and a notice inside the entrance to a restaurant in Heraklion that requested patrons to "Please wait to be sated".

Then there was this sign-board on a beach-front shop, pictured below....

It took me a while before I clocked that, in addition to fruit, bread, milk, batteries (all bursting with freshness of course), it was also possible to purchase Sea Gods:

Fantastic! Clearly the owner intended to advertise his stock of sea goods (lilos, inflatable crocodiles, rubber rings, foam tubes, fishing nets etc) but I loved the idea of a trade in mythological Hellenic deities of the sea being fronted through this beach-side store in 21st century Crete.

Greece is a nation of hundreds of islands, of which dusty Crete is the largest, followed by Euboea, Lesbos and Rhodes and then another 200 habitable islands of decreasing size. It's no surprise then that the role of the sea has been central to the development of Greek civilisation and culture and no surprise again that Greek mythology is littered with a pantheon of over 100 sea deities. Google Greek sea gods if you have the curiosity, an evening to spare and a good bottle of retsina to hand.

These sea gods between them embodied, epitomised or represented every aspect of the sea (storms, tides, waves, whirlpools), its contents (dolphins, krakens, whales) and the dangers it posed to mere mortals. The deities were propitiated (kept sweet, basically) through rituals performed at shrines in their honour. At their head was Poseidon, brother of Zeus. Poseidon, with his trident, ruled over seas and oceans.

Verdigris
With our junk culture,
we swarm, we litter
in thoughtless droves,
each act of hubris
a heedless desecration
of the green of Greece.

It seems to me
sea god,
as you rise majestic through emerald swell
dripping brine from verdigris
like the spray-bedecked tamarisk trees
lining this rocky shore,
that it's just as well
your bronze-age eye
has grown for evermore blind.

Otherwise
what horrors
would you find
to inflict on us
with a swift flash of trident
in retribution for our pollution
of your beautiful seaways
and sandy coves?
I imagine waves of anger
coming to engulf us all.

*Verdigris is from the Old French Verd de Grece, green of Greece.

Thanks for reading. Here's hoping for one last late summer sun-drenched week, S ;-)

Read More