We excreted today! Twice each! Hahaha.
Once quickly in the apartment….and once – for seven hours! – on a ferry. Very discretely of course…!
No concrete reason to secrete our tickets….but we arrived on board having not had them checked at all!! Only…to then be called over the tannoy to come to reception!! Oh dear…..seven hours to come up with silly crete words….!!
There were a few jokes about Cretins…..(..or Cretans)…but that was just unfair…and not very pc! So I was moved to look up the real derivation of Cretin…nothing to do with Crete at all of course…but rather:
…from French crétin (“cretin, idiot”), from crestin, an Alpine dialectal form of chrétien, from Latin christiānus in the lost sense of “anyone in Christendom”.
Funny that!! Well, not everyone might find it funny! But I do.
So…as we ex-crete…it is an appropriate time to reflect on my ten days there. Went too quickly! And yes…it was better than I had remembered/expected! Glorious cycling, with some great stops en route. Plenty left to explore….and next time, I would certainly focus on the more remote South coast! (…yes, can feel a next time coming already!)
A lovely wee port setting at Kissamos…about 4km West of the town….
….and two stops en route, the first at Antikithera….a tiny place…(but requiring the most extraordinary ferry manoeuvre).
….and the second at….guess what!….Kithera (would not be so appropriate ferrying in the other direction).
I had originally thought of island hopping here…but with the ferry running only twice a week right now…it would have taken too big a chunk of time!!
Kythira is a much bigger island than its Anti-neighbour, and tourism is evidently developing. Looks still delightfully laid back though!
Woops……
And funny..almost exactly a year ago, Nae and I were sitting on the magnificent Simos beach on the tiny island of Elafonisos looking out to a lump of an island opposite. Now we know what it was!! Kythira!
More toilet signs in the boat. And elsewhere…..
So I have been doing a very unscientific study throughout Greece…and talking a sneak peak into all the little bins which always sit beside the toilet. Do folk really dispose of their shitty toilet paper in the bin? And my survey says “NO”! My eternal guilt is assuaged!!!
And on to Gytheio….what a lovely town!!
But so very un-Greek! The sea fringed with neoclassical mansions…so completely different…but very charming. (Apparently, Gyheio was a thriving city in Spartan times..the main port for Sparta which his just 50kms away. But was destroyed by a huge earthquake and existed only as a tiny village until the Greek Revolution..(early nineteenth century)..becoming a popular refuge away from the fighting, and so what we see today was all built in a very short period of time.)
Very pretty…
…and this is the island where Helen (of Helen of Troy fame…but actually a Spartan – confusing, eh!) and Trojan Paris apparently got it together…a dangerous liaison indeed….sparking the Trojan war…horses and all!!
We had both chuckled about this cactus….undergoing a sex change maybe…
…and then this…
“..but he attacked me with a chair, sir…” but more collective amusement was focussed on the tiny dicks! Apparently in Ancient Greece, a small penis was a sign of beauty. All very comforting for the 50% of us men who are smaller than average!!
Tragic Postscript:
As we arrived in Gytheio….We were greeted by a huge all-but brand new ‘Emergency Response’ ship tied up to the ferry dock.
So impressive I thought….with special ‘rescue areas’ on each aide of the ship…presumably to save folk battling to get to Europe in too-small boats.
….but for the new Greek policy of turning those boats back, rather than rescuing.
It was the very next morning we woke to the news of the monster tragedy of a boat going down with the loss of maybe 600 souls…on the same day we were ferrying across.
And this boat – just 80kms away – had not moved.
And there was talk of the “rescue” being hampered by strong winds. Yet our ferry was crossing the very same stretch of water at the same moment in time….and it was flat calm. Tragic inaction. The politics of the asylum seekers has just gone bananas. In the UK. And in Greece too. One wonders what has happened to humanity. Sickening.
Absolutely hideous and heart breaking, an unnecessary loss of life.