Ithaka Bound

Traveler Bound for Ithaka…

Wherein I show you some glamourous hats and offer advice on the necessities:

There are two body parts that need special protection in Greece:  your head, and your feet. They can ruin a holiday faster than you can say, “I’ll have another tyropita, parakalo.”*  Take it from my twenty year-old self, who spent two days in bed recovering from heat stroke during a trip to Greece.

As far as hats go, you have a lot of options.  At a minimum, bring or buy two of the following.  Menfolk, modify as you see fit:

The bucket hat: it’s enough to shade the eyes and a little bit of the face, without obscuring vision or interfering with a camera when taking photographs. A lot of Greek grannies—very, very smart women—wear it in the water while swimming, for sun protection.  It’s my favorite hat because it’s comfortable, cool, and able to hold all my hair.

The floppy hat: I call this my Brigitte Bardot hat because it makes me feel like I should be on a scooter in the South of France.

I love the colors, the wide brim keeps my whole face and neck shaded, and it doesn’t interfere with photographs.  Let this hat fulfill it’s destiny by pairing it with big Chanel sunglasses and hopping on the back of someone’s scooter — it doesn’t really matter who’s.

The baseball cap: if you’re American you’ll probably want to bring one along, just because. I saw a surprising number of Russians wearing them as well. Is it a fad in Russia?

Baseball caps get in the way of your camera (if you use the viewfinder), but they protect your face — though not your ears — when the sun is at the right angle. [Go, Badgers.]

On to feet. Everyone needs at least these two pairs of shoes:

The rock/hot sand/water shoe: Buy this for €7 as soon as you get to Greece.

Most of the best beaches are at least pebbly, if not full-on rocky. If the beach is sandy, by noon the sand will be too hot to walk barefoot, and sometimes its too hot for flip-flops even: the sand slips in the crevices. They’ll also protect you if you step on a sea urchin — which are common in Greek waters.

The tough/durable shoe: at a minimum you’ll want something with a sole at least this thick for walking anywhere in Greece, even in Athens—the gods help you if you’re wearing flip flops around the Acropolis and it starts to rain.

If you plan on doing any sort of mildly strenuous hiking, you’ll need a tougher shoe/boot. I went on a few hikes — planned and unplanned (some might call this “getting lost”, but I think the phrase carries a distinct hint of judgement) — and really could have used a pair of light boots, but I just couldn’t bear the thought of having my feet so hot. I wore my Keens in the water, but they were way too buoyant and made it impossible to swim because my feet were higher than my head.

Another necessity is sunscreen, and I’ve found this one to be the best:

It takes a good 15 minutes to rub this stuff on to your skin, but it’s well worth the effort if you have super-pale skin of the Eastern European variety, like I do. The good news is, you’ll only have to rub it in once per day, even if you spend the entire day in the water. In fact, you’ll have to use a loofah in the shower to get it all off.

I’ve tried just about every kind of sunscreen out there. Spray-on sunscreens are a joke — even if they claim to be waterproof. Sunscreens without Zinc or Titanium Dioxide are also a joke.  Some sunscreens with Zinc or Titanium Dioxide are a joke. I even tried the “sensitive skin” version of this same sunscreen, SPF 50, and I still burned. After much trial and sunburn, I’ve come to the conclusion that, in order to truly protect oneself from the sun, sunscreen must be difficult to rub into the skin. Don’t believe the marketing hype; get this: Carroten SPF 50 for kids.

One more thing:  bug/mosquito spray. The mosquitos of Greece are surprisingly zealous and persistent little bloodsuckers.  Bring along some bug spray if you don’t want to be chasing them around your room at 2:00 in the morning.

* I’ll have another cheese pie, please.

© 2010, Ithaka Bound. All rights reserved. Photos and text are copyright protected.

Dangerous Beauty

“I cannot leave you alone on the beach, miss. I cannot.”

A stone’s throw from the coast of Asia Minor, I’m on the island of Symi trying to convince a woman with a boat to leave me on the island’s most beautiful beach.

Concerned over what could happen to me, she’ll only drop me off if there are other people on the beach as well.  So far, everyone else is going to the tourist-developed beaches and, with just 15 minutes before the boat leaves, time is running out for me.

Most tourists to Symi are Italian, which I love, however, most italian visitors to Greece don’t venture far from a sunbed or a restaurant with grilled calamari: all the better to see and be seen.

The beach at Agios Georgios is wild, remote, and gorgeous. A vertical cliff dive into the Aegean and a pebble beach at the bottom.

I search my mind for a convincing argument.

The American in me wonders if it’s a question of compensation.  If I offered her more money for the extra fuel that would be expended by dropping me off, would she accept it?

But I risk offending her with this offer.  She’s already stated her concern for my welfare as the reason she can’t leave me.  To backpedal now would compromise her integrity.

Is Agios Georgios really such a dangerous beauty? I’ve never seen a jellyfish in Greek waters, or a shark.  (I always ask about sharks.  Greeks swear they don’t exist in their boundaries.)  I have plenty of water and food with me…

The speed boat ride to the beach would seem to be the most dangerous part of my excursion.

I feel my inner Simone De Beauvoir rise and percolate.  Would we even be having this conversation if I were a man?

I tell Simone to simmer down.  The argument is a weak and unconvincing, and I’m talking to a woman.  It would just make her defensive, and rightly so.

I could tell her that I survived two war zones.  Maybe talk about the hand grenades and landmines in Bosnia, and how I ran to a bunker (in platform heels, no less) every night as mortars and rockets pierced the sky above me during the month of Ramadan in the Middle East.

I could tell her about nights spent in a tent during a freezing winter, or how apocalyptically orange a sand storm appears as it builds momentum and rushes across a lifeless desert.

I could tell her what a safe place this beautiful beach, named after a swashbuckling saint,  would be for me.

According to Greek mythology, the Three Graces were born on Symi.  They ruled over social interactions, manners and culture.

I stand there on the dock, contemplating my next move, when the will to power suddenly leaves me.  I thank the woman with the boat for her kind concern and find a seat for myself in one of the people-watching cafes in Symi’s breath-taking Italianate harbor (Hello! Beautiful!).  I spend the rest of the morning sipping a frappe and watching the boats come in, wondering how I got so lucky.

I’ve reached my limit on laptop time, so this is my last post from Greece.  I’m going to spend the next few weeks lolling about, far from the internets.  I’ll add a couple more island posts when I’m back in DC in September.

Andio everyone.

Enjoy the rest of your summer!

© 2010, Ithaka Bound. All rights reserved. Photos and text are copyright protected.

Two for Tilos

A mere 300 permanent residents.

Beaches so remote, a torturously hot hike or boat ride is required to reach the most pristine.

A studio to call my own,  just five paces from a tranquil bay where dolphins gather at dusk.

Tilos would appear to be my version of the greek ideal.

Except….

with so few greek residents, I meet more tourists than locals.  Unlike Nisyros, which gets excursion boats filled with volcano seekers from 11:00 am to 4:00 pm, leaving the island to natives outside of those hours; Tilos gets tourists who park themselves for weeks at a time.

Also, everyone in Tilos is half of a couple, except for me. I feel my lack of coupledom acutely here, which hardly ever happens.  Tilos is definitely for two’s.

After I leave the island, I find out I missed out on a museum devoted to the mastodon –midget elephants that roamed Tilos and disappeared from the earth around 4600 BC.

Unbelievable.

How many chances will life grant me to see the bones of an extinct midget elephant?

© 2010, Ithaka Bound. All rights reserved. Photos and text are copyright protected.

Love in the Time of Caldera

There is a speck in the center of the photo above — a couple embracing in the caldera of a volcano.

The island of Nisyros was formed when the Olympian Gods went to war against the Titans. Poseidon, god of the sea, set his sights on defeating the Titan Polybotes and pursued him as he fled across the Aegean.

Poseidon caught up with Polybotes near Kos and broke off a piece of the island (near Cape Chelone) with his trident, hurling it at the giant.  This piece of land pinned Polybotes beneath it and sometimes he still hisses and groans and lets off steam, which explains all those sulphurous gasses and the volcano.

There is something about the ancient myths’ explanation of the world which I find very comforting. I could sleep like a baby on the bosom of the Avenger Zeus.

Nisyros’ beaches are black rock and sand, and the water looks like rich chocolate liqueur.

When I drove to the caldera, a native New Yorker named Vasili waved me over with instructions on where to park  (“Park it over here, sweetheart, and show me that smile again.”) and doled out advice on how to avoid falling into the hissing holes.

If you visit, try to catch Vasili when he isn’t busy and share an ice tea with him.  He loves to chat and he’ll tell you all about his trip to Graceland and why the Colonel was responsible for Elvis’ death. (“I loved Elvis like a brother.”)

I was in the entrails of Polybotes right before closing time.  All alone in the middle of the ancient volcano without another tourist in sight,  the notes of a mournful bouzouka began to reverberate around me, echoing for miles.

Torn between remaining there enraptured for hours, or seeking out the source of those magical notes, I made my way slowly back up the white powder slopes to find the most unlikely bouzouka player of all:  a young man dressed in rastafarian colors, blond ringlets falling down his back. He gave me a sheepish grin.  How could someone so young elicit such mournful notes and understand what they mean?

He understands me when I say, “Beautiful”, and thanks me.

I didn’t realize how much I loved taking photos of people in the caldera with my tilt-shift lens until I had already left Nisyros.  I considered going back for more but decided to leave it for next summer.  For the next 11 months at least, I want to hold on to my musical memory of the caldera.

and then they saw my camera…

© 2010, Ithaka Bound. All rights reserved. Photos and text are copyright protected.

Amsterdam of the Aegean

Somewhere in that nebulous world between waking and dreaming, I had a heart-stopping nightmare that I was still in the Greek Islands, but everything had disastrously changed.

The people were big — they were so much bigger — and they spoke a strange language. A language that starts deep in the throat and never really rises. Their language was Dutch. Some of the people spoke English. They were Australian or British. But most of the people were Dutch* and they brought Holland along with them to an island that was once part of Greece.

There were bikes everywhere—just like in Amsterdam—and the people rode them.

The big people rode bikes. That’s how I knew they weren’t Greek!  Greeks only ride motorbikes. Greeks hate to pedal. Its too much like exercise.

The big people had really white bellies –blindingly white, like mine used to be — and they went to beaches that were jam packed with other white bellies. They had Phillippino women massage them on the beach while they laid on their bellies.

These were not the kind of beaches you have to follow a goat path up and down slippery mountains to get to, all while grabbing hold of thorny weeds to keep from going over a cliff.  No, to get to these beaches, you just roll from your package hotel bed onto your belly, make a few turns, and end up on a sunbed by the beach.

The big people were not polite, they were loutish, and sloppy drunk, and disrespectful.

But most of all, they were on a mission to destroy the peace; and they succeeded marvelously.

Then I saw this guy:

What’s he doing here?

He did his best imitation of Pancho Villa/Che Guevara for me:

And I saw a mosque with a crazy name:

Then two Greeks asked me if I wanted to take an excursion boat to a neighboring island, and I realized that this was no nightmare, this was Kos, and I was only passing through. Just one night in Kos, before getting back to Greece.

I saw some things I liked too, like this octopus salad:

and these ruins:

and kindness between children:

* To clarify: I really like the Dutch and have been to their fine country many times. If my own countrymen took over Kos, guzzling beers, gobbling hamburgers and driving their huge SUV’s on the narrow roads, I would be just as, if not more , horrified.

© 2010, Ithaka Bound. All rights reserved. Photos and text are copyright protected.

Patmos of the Apocalypse

There was once a troublesome man named John who was kicked out of the beautiful city of Ephesus.

The Ephesians kicked John out because he was so troublesome and kept bothering them about worshipping Diana/Artemis.

John said he had a better god for them to worship.  He said his god was better.

He made the Ephesians feel bad.

When the Ephesians kicked him out, John went to live in a dark cave on the small island of Patmos in Greece.

John was Jesus’ disciple, and writer of the famous gospel.

Or he was another christian believer named John.

Or he was just another crazy man named John.

John was so p.o’d at the Ephesians for kicking him out of their city, he wrote a doomsday novel condemning them to hell for being so mean to him.

Or the voice of God spoke to John from three fissures in the cave, dictating the Book of Revelations to him.

Or John heard voices because he was a delusional schizophrenic.

No one knows the full story, but the Greeks are fully onboard with the holy version of events and have built a beautiful church on the summit of their hora, or old town — one of the most beautiful horas in Greece — to commemorate the event.

There hasn’t been much scholarship on the Book of the Apocalypse, because, I think, John used so much symbolism, no one can figure out what he was writing about.  No one even knows who this John really was.  What we do know is that here, in Patmos, John breathed life into the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.

Life nearly left me, just trying to get here. It’s all in the journey, right?  My journey to Patmos started at 5:00 am when I boarded a ferry from Fourni to the port city of Karlovassi on the island of Samos.  Once in Karlovassi, it took me two hours to figure out that I needed to take a bus from the port to the city center.  From the city center, I got on another bus to Vathy, the capital of Samos.  Once in Vathy, I boarded another bus to the port town of Pythagoreio. Then a four hour wait in Pythagoreio before boarding an ancient ferry boat to Patmos.  Somebody please shoot me if I ever pack so much again.

I only spent three nights in Patmos, the shortest amount of time I’ve ever spent on any island; mostly because I’m working on a personal photographic project while in Greece, and Patmos didn’t have much of what I most love to photograph:  Greeks on the beach or in the water, caught  in a moment.

I’d show you John’s cave, but they wouldn’t allow pictures.  I’ll never forget the sight of a hundred American passengers from a Princess Cruise ship filing past John’s holy place in under 5 minutes.

© 2010, Ithaka Bound. All rights reserved. Photos and text are copyright protected.

Pirate’s Lair

Still single, I boarded a small passenger boat called the Blue Velvet and set off for an archipelago of islands near Ikaria called Fourni.

Ikaria went through a long and dark history referred to as the “Age of Invisibility”; a time when pirates ransacked the island on such a regular basis, the locals were forced to move inland and build camouflage homes made from slate and rock that disappeared into the mountains when viewed from afar.  As seen from the sea, Ikaria was a deserted island.

Fourni, the island group right next to Ikaria, was where the pirates hung out.

Some observations on Fourni:

70% of the women on Fourni wear black.  Black skirts, black stockings…but there’s nothing provocative about it:

With so many widows, I wonder what’s happening to the men of Fourni.

As you would expect from such an isolated and small group of islands, the people of Fourni did a lot of inter-marrying.  The pickings were slim, so a lot of people look alike.  I was told that the islands were settled by four families, and it’s fairly easy to see the familiy lines:

1.  The “I’m a little teapot” family group — short and stout.

2.  The unfortunate nose family group — hooked noses.

3.   The wooly mammoth family group — thick, curly, wooly hair.

4.  Descendants of a Venetian Casanova — taller, fairer, grey-eyed.

There seem to have been a lot of marriages between family groups 1 & 3, and 2 & 4.  Occasionally, one sees a combination of 2, 3 & 4.

Having just come from the warm and welcoming arms of Ikaria, I initially felt a cold chill in Fourni.  But after spending an evening sharing a lemonade and talking with the local schoolteacher, and then helping a widow cross the street, the people of Fourni warmed to me…or maybe I warmed to them.

If Fourni were any more authentically Greek, tourists wouldn’t be able to stay here.  There is no car rental.  You either use your feet or befriend a local.  There are no stores selling souvenirs or useless knick-knacks.  There’s one bakery and one mini-market.  There are lots of fisherman, and lobster with spaghetti is the local specialty. To get to the best beaches, you’ll need a boat or the mountain climbing skills of a billy goat.

I found a great bargain studio for only € 20 a night. There seems to be some construction going on the island, so I suspect its in the process of renewing itself, but Fourni is still another world.

Old traditions continue here.  Men sit in the cafes and talk politics, women congregate in the whitewashed backstreets, gossiping and playing with children.

The children, by the way, are the happiest, smilingest children I’ve ever encountered.  They loved my camera, and wouldn’t stop smiling for me.  The schoolteacher told me he loves teaching in Fourni because the children are pure (the word he used) and untouched by the outside world.

For an even more remote experience, I went to the island of Thimena, a stone’s throw from Fourni.  The entire island has about 20 homes on it, and I was able to walk the full length of the island in 1.5 hours.  The road I walked was gravel and freshly bulldozed, and it led me to the church and beach of Agios Nikolaus.  When I returned to the port, an elderly man sang out “Brava! Brava!”  when I told him I had walked to the beach and back. Apparently, not many people do this.

The people of Thimena are beyond friendly.  Everyone waves and says hello and asks if you want to stop for a coffee.  The elderly man spent an hour speaking Greek to me while I waited for the boat to take me back to Fourni.  When I waved from the boat, it seemed the entire island waved back to me.

I spent five nights on Fourni and was able to leave only because I told myself I’d be back someday.

© 2010, Ithaka Bound. All rights reserved. Photos and text are copyright protected.