17th July 99,Saturday,0910hrs,Café Stathmos,Patras,GREECE.Going2be HOT!
Urgh. The 3 ½ hour ferry was terrible. That ‘fresh breeze’, once out on the sea, made the catamaran roll and pitch like a mad thing. I was sick, the first time I can remember ever having travel sickness of any kind, but felt instantly better, and to my own surprise, fell asleep almost straight away. Gruelling would be a good word. As soon a we rounded the island of Corfu, the wind dropped and the sea was calmer, thank god.
At Corfu itself, we were met with a barrage of people pushing places to stay –The Pink Palace that we’d heard so much about, (much touted as a haze of beach, pool, sex and alcohol – tempting, but too pricey at about £10 a night...!), camping places and stuff.
There was a chap telling us, in no uncertain terms, to get the hell out of the terminal, really aggressively. Not, we learned, through generally loathing the sight of backpackers, or xenophobia, but for the more socially acceptable reason that there was a bomb warning on the building.
Supposedly Albanian in origin (everyone more or less assumed that it was), a telephone call had alerted the police, and they had evacuated the terminal. So naturally, the logical place to dump a load of backpackers off a ferry, in a giant harbour with moorings every hundred yards, is right smack bang (sorry) outside the only building in the immediate area that’s likely to go skywards any second.
It was a false alarm.
Our overnight ferry fare to get here to Patras cost a ‘NEVER TRUST A GREEK IN A TRAVEL OFFICE’ 5800drachmae = £11.
The ship was the ‘Daedalus’, which I took as a good sign. We’re with a couple of girls – Marianne, who is Portuguese, and Alexandra, who is Columbian. They’re really great fun, and good to talk to – we met them in Brindisi, and they’re coming with us to Olympia today.
Anyway, when we got on board the Daedalus, we were rushed unceremoniously upstairs to the upper decks, which were romantically open to the night sky, and rather less romantically open to the funnel smoke. I would have liked to have slept under the stars, but the smoke was bad, so we went below decks to a room with aircraft-like chairs, where I rolled out my roll mat, got out my pillow and sleeping bag liner and slept quite well for about five hours. I managed to get on deck for the sunrise – it was beautiful. The mountains of the Pelopennese through the haze, Patras coming into view, and everything bathed in pink and orange light.
We’re catching the train to Olympia at 1050hrs.
We’ve just been sat here, outside a cafe on the harbour in Patras, in Greece, none of us speak Greek, and yet we’ve just been offered a copy of Watchtower magazine by some Jehovah’s witnesses. It’s a crazy world.
