Island of Dreams

Island of Dreams

My plan had been to get up early and enjoy an invigorating morning swim in the azure blue of the ridiculously nearby Aegean Sea before breakfast. The reality of the situation was that a phone call from Marina at the Hotel Maria Beach reception desk woke me with a jolt a few minutes before 11:00 a.m. She said she had some information for me. Disappointed that I had missed not just early morning but virtually the whole morning, and having not yet adjusted to a frame of mind where engaging in a conversation could be considered completely feasible, I made my way down the clacky marble-tiled steps to the welcome lobby.

The welcome lobby had been the Marie Celeste of welcome lobbies when I rolled into town at the back end of the previous evening. Almost lost amongst the piles of glossy leaflets strategically placed to tempt guests to visit the birthplace of Nana Mouskouri, admire a one-thousand-year-old olive tree, or learn how to weave their own yoghurt in a cave, I found a shiny silver bell for summoning an attendant. I hit the nipple in its centre several times with the palm of my hand, gently at first because I didn’t want to appear impatient and finally quite hard because I did want to appear impatient.

A helpful waiter eventually appeared from the adjoining bar in which the soft rock music was so loud that nobody could hear the call bell from there. He knew a fair bit about recognising weary travellers and he had done just that. He had been expecting me and he handed me my room key from his pocket without putting me through any of the usual clerical formalities that can take the edge off even the brightest of holiday moods. After that my only requirements were an ample serving of red wine, a Wi-Fi code and a bed, all of which I found within seconds of dragging myself and my bag in through the door of the much anticipated Room Two. Calmed and relaxed, I drifted off to sleep with Nana Mouskouri at the forefront of my mind, as usual.

The information that next-morning Marina had for me was that I was required to give her a lot of money to pay for my room and that I had missed breakfast (which wasn’t included in the price anyway). A bit of photocopying and me signing forms printed in Greek went on too, which may have been something to do with the Cretan Tourism Authority’s registration requirements or perhaps just straightforward identity fraud. I didn’t really care. The good news was that I was entitled to the loan of a beach towel. Hurroo!

This was day three of a holiday in Crete, the planning of which I had had no involvement in. The intention from the outset had been that I would be included on the guest list but at the last minute, due to circumstances beyond my control, it turned out that I was the only guest on the guest list. Being the sort of person that hates to see a holiday go to waste, I decided to go alone. I have my favourite destinations and travel preferences but really I’ll go anywhere on a trip, which makes it even more surprising that I’ve still never been to Great Yarmouth.  

The hotel booking had been made only a few weeks earlier by means of a purely verbal agreement between my customary travelling companion and the matriarch of the family who owned the business. No money had changed hands but to back out at such a very late stage would surely have been considered dishonourable. Clicking the cancel button on a hotel reservation website is probably a bit dishonourable too, but at least when that happens there’s no requirement for a telephone confrontation with a crestfallen lady who knows only a few words of English, and having to describe a series of made up catastrophic events that had collectively rendered travelling impossible before finishing off with at least forty-seven I’m-ever-so-sorries. For all its faults, the internet at least takes the bulk of the guilt out of letting someone down at short notice. So my decision to travel solo saved one party from embarrassment and the other from disappointment. 

The flight from Sofia (the nearest airport to my Bulgarian home) to Irákleio (the nearest airport to Hotel Maria Beach) took only slightly more than an hour but the hit and miss logistics involved in travelling between peripheral parts of two Balkan countries meant that it had taken me almost two days and an overnight stay in another hotel to reach my final destination. I must admit, however, that my inability to resist doing a self-guided walking tour of the old city of Irákleio accounted for at least six hours of the journey. The Cretan capital’s ancient ramparts were said to be the most impressive in the Mediterranean, and they didn’t disappoint.

I’d been to Crete on two previous occasions, the most recent having been fifteen years earlier. Both visits had caused me to fall in love with the island but this time I would be staying in the town of Kissamos which I knew would be better than Great Yarmouth, but I also knew it wouldn’t be a patch on those Cretan places where I had been when I encountered that falling in love with the island thing. So, tired and alone, and in the wrong place, I was a little lacking in enthusiasm. But at least I had two weeks away from household, garden and pet-owning chores, and the late summer weather of the southern Aegean would be a little cooler than what I had left at home. So I gave myself a slap before telling myself to cheer up and crack on with it. If my mother had been there she would have told me to think of the starving children in Africa who would have loved some sfakianes pites and a half litre bottle of Mythos.

After handing over my fat wadge of euro notes to Marina, she counted the cash twice, forced it into the back pocket of her denim shorts, smiled and asked me if there was anything else she could do for me. Impressed by the efficiency with which she had emptied my wallet, I reminded her about the free beach towel and asked if she could point me in the direction of a bank’s cash machine where I could withdraw some money to partially fill the void she had just created. Then, having satisfied me on both counts, she suggested that I enjoy my holiday.

Kissamos didn’t have a hop-on hop-off tourist bus service which would have been handy, particularly for one-legged visitors. So, to initiate my exploration, I opted to let the car I’d rented at the airport have a day off and I set off on a stroll into the town. En route I greeted on-coming pedestrians and people tending to their gardens each with a well-rehearsed and cheerful kaliméra (Καλημέρα, meaning ‘good day’) whilst singing to myself the Springfields’ old song, Island of Dreams, the lyrics of which seemed very apt at that point.

The town’s nucleus was very old but no one knew exactly how old as it was one of several old settlements in the region to have been documented in chronicles, but no one could remember which of those settlements it had been because their names had all changed on a regular basis over the centuries. Today it was a port, a fishing village and a major fridge magnet outlet. Its lovely old buildings had been supplemented with many great works of steel and concrete as tourism had taken over from other less profitable industries.

Its quiet back lanes, where oleanders of various vibrant colours bloomed from recycled olive oil cans on every corner, were particularly charming. Their light perfume carried on the sea breeze, so indicative of hot days in Greece, made them as attractive to me as it did to the countless bees that laboured under the weight of their pollen. There I found the town’s Venetian fountain dating back to 1520. Beautiful as it was, it was hard to say whether or not it was working. It had fresh clean water running out of it at the very bottom but it certainly wasn’t cascading or doing any of that arty farty squirty stuff that you find with the water features in places like Barcelona and Rome. I also looked in and around two very old and beautiful Orthodox churches, interesting upmarket souvenir shops, old-fashioned kafenia outside of which old moustachioed men sat with worry beads and long wooden shepherd’s crooks to fiddle with or lean on respectively. I’d often fancied being the owner of a string of worry beads but decided against it as I think I’d worry about walking away from the place of worry and leaving them behind. I mused that in our gadget-driven world they would be the perfect distraction for people tempted to waste countless hours of their days scrolling away on portable telephone apparatus.  

In the Theo Kamski Fine Foods & Gifts Shop I bought a book all about Greek mythology entitled All About Greek Mythology. For ten minutes I dithered over the to-buy-or-not-to-buy dilemma and wondered should I come back another day. As I edged towards a not buying decision, I found a copy on which the cover was attached upside down. This made me smile and put my hand in my pocket for some money as I walked towards the counter.

The proprietor had already put down his worry beads when I entered the shop. His main worry, I assumed, must have been his lack of customers but on my arrival his eyes flashed with euro symbols where drachma symbols would have flashed during the days of his youth. He introduced himself as Theódoros and asked me where I was from. He was instantly interested in the Bulgarian episode of my life story as a lot of Greek mythology was set in places that are now part of Bulgaria. I told him that I’d always had a fascination for mythological characters and he chuckled when I told him that I found it strange that the word Cyclops didn’t have an ‘i' in it. 

Maybe I shouldn’t have mentioned that it was my aim to learn the Greek alphabet during my stay. Explaining the similarities and differences, he was adamant that the Greek alphabet was by far superior to the Cyrillic that was used where I lived. After a short discussion about which of the two was the better, we agreed to resolve our disagreement by meeting with pistols on the heath (or beach) the following day at dawn, subject to an early wake-up call from Marina.

It was well past 1:00 p.m. when I had breakfast in the Aeras Café-Snack-Restaurant across the road from the mythological shop. Sitting beneath the shady boughs of a lemon tree, next to a simple but refreshing and mesmerising fountain, and less than thirty metres from the smaller of the two ancient whitewashed churches, I took great delight and much needed nourishment from a Cretan sandwich. The faded photograph in the dog-eared menu didn’t look very appetising but, having trusted the written description, I was rewarded with a pita bread construction containing tomatoes, feta, pesto, herbs, onions and worry beads, all washed down with strong black Greek coffee. The food and the setting combined were fabulous! As I drank the free raki and ate the free cake and grapes that arrive with the bill at the end of every restaurant encounter in Crete, I began to think that my love affair with this, the largest of the Greek islands, might be on the verge of rekindling. 

An interesting feature of that very late breakfast experience had been my chat with Ambrose the waiter. I was bemused by his tee shirt on the front of which were emblazoned the words ‘By Order of the Peaky Blinders’. He admitted that he didn’t understand any of the dialogue in the BBC television series from which the phrase originated, but he liked the scenery (industrial Birmingham between the wars) and the way they did their violence with razor blades sewn into the peaks of their cloth caps. A change is as good as a rest, I thought, even for a young man living in a sun-kissed paradise. The colossus of an LCD screen mounted on his living room wall was merely a window from which he could observe the grimness of working-class life in England’s West Midlands a hundred years earlier.

After a short detour to buy provisions in the Sklavenitis supermarket (one of a chain of shops owned by a man with a swollen sklaven) and deposit them in my room, I had a wander out to look at the beach from which Hotel Maria Beach had taken its name. I suppose I should describe it as very nice. There I found beach bars playing Café del Mar chill-out music, a long line of flip-flops temporarily discarded by bathers, parallel rows of sunbeds, pedalos with Titanic painted on their bow, and people shouting ‘Ere Dave, d’ya wanna navva lahh-gurr?’ The youngest of those on the beach built sand castles while the oldest snored with their faces obscured by two-days-old copies of the Daily Mirror.

People were enjoying themselves in peaceful, family-friendly, resort-style surroundings. I felt happy for them but this wasn’t at all my cup of lager. My preference had always been for places a bit rougher round the edges where drinks weren’t brought on a tray to a spot in the shade of a straw umbrella by a waiter who looked like he would have really benefited from a nice cold beer himself. Call me unsociable, but if I find as much as one human footprint on a beach I get a morbid feeling of overcrowding. On the other hand (or foot), goats’ footprints are more than acceptable.

That evening I sat on the balcony of my room with a bottle of cold retsina and Zorba the Greek (the book, not Zorba himself) and relaxed to the loud humming noise of the ninety-three nearby air conditioning units that makes Maria Beach Hotel so appealing. But in the distance I could see the Gulf of Kissamou and orangey-red light from the sun’s setting rays highlighting the Chersonisos Rodopou (the Rodopou Peninsula) beyond it to the east. A beautiful and alluring place that I knew I would explore in the coming days.

It had been an interesting and eventful day so I felt that Kissamos would do for me for now. With my energy levels restored after the epic journey I had undertaken to get there, I knew that my adventure would begin in earnest the following day and escalate beyond. Though I’d have to return each evening to Hotel Maria Beach to check in my on-loan beach towel and tell Marina how much I’d enjoyed myself.

Image:

Afternoon delight… a 75cl glass of ice-cold Charma (pronounced ‘Harma’) Cretan craft beer, a bowl of on-loan peanuts and my copy of Zorba the Greek, by Nikos Kazantzakis. My own photograph.