ACROPOLIS, NOW!

 

Some 45 years ago, having been not long resident in Paris, I joined some friends for a road trip through Italy and Greece, the final destination being the Acropolis in Athens.  This is the tale of getting there, and getting back, and in between -- Acropolis, now!

 

 

ITALY

It had been raining at the Gare de Lyon at 10 p.m. the previous night. It was already hot and sunny at 10 a.m. at Rome Termini. As I stepped onto the platform, having spent the night in a T3 with two noisy French ladies, the handle of my travel-bag snapped. I should have heeded the omen and got back on the train. 

 

I ran (as best I could, with both arms wrapped round a broken travel-bag) the length of the platform, ready to hurl myself and my bag into the arms of Rupert, who would be waiting at the gate looking tanned and gorgeous after a week in the South of France. He was doing neither. Alf was hunched at the end of the platform, the eternal roll-up in the corner of his mouth. “Rupe and Shazza are ‘aving breakfast across the road. Givus yer bag.” 

So the Great Scene ended up as a “hello-dear-had-a-nice-night-on-the-train” peck, his mouth full of croissant and nothing to show for his week on the Cote d’Azur except for a peeling nose and a lot of mosquito bites. After an insubstantial breakfast and a good deal of puzzling over the bill, literally thousands of lire, we boarded the “camper” which turned out to be not the luxurious Winnebago that Rupert had described, but a rather mucky dormobile with just enough room for Sharon and I to sit side-by-side in the back, although miraculously it still had four wheels, despite having been parked for at least an hour in the centre of Rome. 

Sharon was disgustingly brown already and was sporting white shorts and no make-up. I was looking resplendent in full travelling gear and radiating the pallor of a 50-hour office week. I was impressed, however, with Rupert’s handling of the vehicle in Rome;  his road manners, which even by Parisian standards bestowed upon him the tact and charm of the Orange Order marching through Drumcree, really proved indispensable. “Priorité à droite!” he bellowed, waving his free middle finger at the Coliseum in a magnanimous American gesture. Somehow we managed to get out of Rome and onto the Bari/Brindisi autostrada without upsetting the Vatican, the Mafia or the Red Brigades. 

We drove non-stop for Brindisi, arriving around 10 p.m. and relying heavily on Alf’s assurances that there would be plenty of ticket offices open and that we could take the last boat out for Greece. Amazingly, his assurances proved right (if you think I was over-sceptical, remember Alf worked for the Foreign Office), and we did catch the last boat for Corfu. 

 

The S.S. Giorgios was a cranky Greek ferry-boat carrying an overload of long-haired British, German and Dutch backpackers, and was crewed by a shifty-looking band of Greeks and Italians who snarled at embarking passengers and smoked with a breathtaking disregard for safety on the petrol-sodden car deck. Once on board, however, and chugging out of Brindisi into the warm Adriatic night, the tension that had built up over ten hours of Autostrada and frequently intermittent “pioggie”, or tolls, seemed to melt away into the sea.  I watched the lights of the harbour slowly fade away and looked forward to the morning, bringing Corfu, an exotic and unknown island (unknown except to Alf, that is). 

CORFU

 

One night on the Giorgios was quite enough, and that’s the best that could be said about it. The four of us slept on and off in the airline-type seats; our fatigue had just about overcome the discomfort and induced sleep, when we were roused by general movement and scuffling. Everyone was moving out onto the deck, and the light through the cabin windows was pinky-grey. Dawn over the Greek islands must be something else, I thought, and I dragged myself outside to see for myself. 

It was indeed something else. The whole scene resembled one of David Hamilton’s photographs of smokey unidentified landscapes. We were creeping quietly down the coast of Albania, near enough to see through the dawn haze the misty outlines of the mainland hills. The sea was like a millpond around us, and even the ungainly Giorgios failed to make more than a gentle ripple on the glassy water, which appeared heavy and syrupy, so gentle and slow was its movement. Everything was greyish-pink, turning to gold. 

Attention rapidly turned to the horizon behind us, which was becoming more and more luminous with the approach of sunrise. Suddenly the sun just rose out of the sea at a speed that made everyone gasp in three different languages (“Ja!”, “Ach!” and “Fucking hell!”) and literally flew into the sky in a matter of minutes. Heads turned again towards the prow as we all realised that we were coming into the harbour at Kerkyra, and the sleepiest heads among us were now wide-awake with the exhilaration of this whole experience. The island looked magical, deserted and silent.

We hurried to the car deck, since the crew appeared to be directing the vehicles off the boat before we had even touched the quayside. In a general scramble which dragged us mercilessly from the reverie of the sunrise, we found ourselves on the island and blinking in the sun, which was hot and strong at seven a.m. Breakfast was the first priority - the Giorgios’s provisions ran to coffee and Greek chocolate biscuits - and we drove along the harbour road to a café Alf had once frequented which he described in terms to rival the Hard Rock, but which turned out in fact to be a seedy quayside bar declaring itself to be “THE SPOTY DOG” (sic.). Once inside, we were squinting to see anything at all after the strong sunlight. We were served a fair attempt at an American breakfast by a rather large hairy Greek sporting an American T-shirt and lots of hand-made jewellery. 

After a good deal of debating about whether the bar owner was in fact Demis Roussos and which part of the island to head for, we boarded the van and started to head north-west towards a camp-site marked on our map. The inland part of the island was heavily wooded, and it was difficult to judge which way we were going once we lost sight of the sea. We came across a few lone donkeys bearing black-weeded crones and paniers of olives. The road signs, although written in Roman characters as well as in Greek, were extremely few and far between, and at one point we followed a road into a village where the street was barely wide enough to allow the camper to pass between the houses, and then lost it completely, careering downhill on a dirt track through the forest, with Sharon and I alternately gasping or groaning, and Alf and Rupert grinning and whooping as if they were driving a Land Rover instead of a clapped out rustbucket. Rupert was in fact seeing himself, à la Walter Mitty, as a weatherbeaten designer-stubbled Scandinavian cross-country driver winning the last leg of the Paris-Dakar. Sharon and I, by the same token, were looking at Christopher Lee in “The Devil Rides Out”. 

We eventually rediscovered the road and made it to the camp site at Paleocastrizza, where we made our first real stop since Rome. Alf and Rupert unpacked the tent, which turned out to be army-surplus from some pre-Napoleonic conflict and appeared to have survived a battering by mortar shells. After a good hour’s work, we eventually got the thing to stand up, if somewhat precariously, and stood back to admire our little house. Several blond teutonic heads popped out of spanking new nylon self-inflating one piece living modules, all bearing identical expressions of disbelief. Of course, the teutonic faces were all well-scrubbed and golden brown. By this time my colour matched the tent - a dirty grey -, Rupert appeared not to have washed himself or his clothes since he’d left Paris, and was sporting five days growth in the days before the term “designer stubble” existed; by comparison with the jolly Germanic campers we looked like we’d just done a year in an Athens nick. 

We spent two days in Paleocastrizza, during which time it emerged that everyone’s idea of the perfect holiday was different. Rupert and Sharon would lay for hours frying themselves on the beach, while Alf would sink his nose into a book for hours on end and I’d slope off to the shade of the nearest bar and sampled the Retsina. It was a pleasantly relaxing period, however, after the frantic pace of the journey. I made a point of reading “Prospero’s Cell”, most of it in the bar. 

However, we had a goal to head for - Athens - and time was in short supply, so we reluctantly packed up the bivouac and prepared to break camp. The boat to Patras left every morning at 8 a.m., so in order not to miss it we drove back to Kerkyra the night before and slept in the van on the quayside. We were woken the next morning by engines revving, and found a dozen cars, campers and motorcycles manoeuvring round us and on to the boat. It’s extremely difficult to drive a van with the lower half of your body zipped into a sleeping bag, but Alf managed it (an old Foreign Office trick). Before we’d even woken up, we were chugging on down the coast, making one early stop at Igoumenitsa before the thrilling prospect of a full day on a Greek ferry-boat. 

We arrived in Patras at about 5 p.m. and immediately set off for Athens, after one short stop at the ship’s booking office to reserve our return journey. The only thing worth mentioning between Patras and Athens is Corinth, and as we neared it I began to pay more attention to the scenery through the deepening darkness, determined not to miss the Corinth Canal which, I had been assured, was a dizzying experience. After fifteen minutes of rapt attention I was informed that we’d just gone over it and I’d have to wait until the return journey for a second look. 

ATHENS

We chugged into the outskirts of Athens an hour or so after Corinth, and set up camp on a site about five or six miles outside the city on the Piraeus side. This was our base for two or three days, but the long road into the city lined with half-finished construction projects and permanently swirling with dust became an unpleasant daily exercise and after a few days we moved camp to the other side of Athens, where the sea was not polluted by the waste materials of cargo ships. The wealth of Onassis and Niarchos rests on a piece of Greece which is a disgrace to an otherwise beautiful country. 

On first arriving by road in Athens proper, any and every foreigner must think there’s just been an accident up ahead. The traffic is bumper-to-bumper even before you reach the city, and moves at a snail’s pace, along with a deafening level of noise. The Athens traffic is like this at any time of day and never appears to ease off. Once again, Rupert’s road manners proved a major asset to our party, and he began to enjoy himself, often starting the pandemonium, if by chance nobody else had, with a vigorous hoot and a gusty rendition of “Gerra-moovon, yer greasy bass-teds!”, to which other drivers within earshot would heartily and deafeningly agree, roaring similar sentiments in demotic Greek. 

We found the best place to park in Athens was just off Syndagma, on the Plaka side - though we were alarmed by whole lines of vehicles with no registration plates. At worst, they had been confiscated by the police for illegal parking. At best, the drivers had unscrewed their own plates and locked them in the cars to keep the police from confiscating them. At any event we said a prayer every time we left the van with its plates firmly screwed on, and breathed a sigh of relief each time we returned to find van and plates still attached to each other. 

After days of nothing but the peace of Corfu, the calm of the sea, the monotony of the motorway, the stillness of the campsite, I was revived by the bustle and life of downtown Athens. Waiting for the banks to open, we would plop into slatted chairs at one of the pavement cafes of Syndagma, shielded from the midday sun by canopies, and watch the Athenians and foreigners mingling around this impressive plaza. As Rupert and Sharon wrote postcards by the dozen and Alf nodded in the sun, I’d watch the colourful crowds and drift into a daydream choreographed by Lawrence Durrell … that elegant beauty in dark glasses is the young wife of some ageing shipping millionaire, hoping to pass unnoticed as she goes to meet her lover … that macho character with the scar is a Piraeus pimp, his face slashed in a fight with an Egyptian sailor … that middle-aged businessman is an arms dealer, running guns to Lebanon via Cyprus, and forever on the lookout for the furtive young Mossad agents who hunt him down all over Europe… I would be brought back to earth with a jolt at the sight of a band of British or American tourists buying plastic models of the Parthenon or disgusting little satyr key-rings, and realize that Durrell’s Europe is long gone. 

When all was said and done, however, the whole purpose of this excursion was to set triumphant foot on the edifice which had posed so graciously for those plastic models (my motion to track down the model for the key-rings was vetoed by Mark and Alf). So off we set one day, waiting like all good English tourists until the sun was directly overhead before commencing our great climb to the Parthenon. Starting from the Plaka it’s not so bad, as there are several routes of access to the Acropolis, but about halfway up they all converge on a single path, and we found ourselves sweating and out of breath, shuffling along with a multitude of tourists like a shipment of refugees. By the time we reached the Parthenon it was a veritable asthmatics’ rally with puffing Japanese, Germans, Americans, Brits, Italians and others barely able to lift their Nikons, Asahis or Instamatics to capture the object of this tortuous climb. 

We clambered around on the chunks of stone for about an hour, more awed by the fact that Turkish cannon had near-destroyed what centuries had failed to mark than by the view of Athens sprawling out below us in all directions, before deciding that the triumphant moment was well imprinted on our memories, and that it was all downhill from now on. 

The image of Athens which I retained, however, was neither of the Parthenon nor of the cute soldiers dancing up and down in their pom-pom slippers and frilly skirts, but of the Plaka district, which is a time-warp. Those remaining members of the flower generation who never got their hair cut and became Wall Street traders or got killed in Vietnam or went punk or overdosed, somehow found their way to Athens, and now live in the Plaka in flared jeans and tie-died T-shirts. We were regarded with quiet amusement by such a group at an adjoining table in a cheap restaurant, as though we were the anachronism. 

The old market in the Plaka was an oriental delight, and we spent hours handling and looking at rugs, blankets, pieces of pottery, leather bags and handmade jewellery. However, we were intrigued by the number of fur shops in downtown Athens, where the temperature can never drop below a pleasant 22 degrees even in winter. 

We spent about three days sightseeing in Athens, by which time the sun-worshippers were clamouring for more sea and sand, so we drove out to the other side of Athens and chanced upon a campsite at Varkiza situated on a cliff with a secluded cove just beneath for the almost exclusive use of the campers. The campsite staff were a bunch of easy-going young Greeks with an enviable existence - the warden was a hirsute and paunchy bon-vivant who spent the day drinking ouzo at the open-air bar and trying to convince campers in broken American that he was in fact Demis Roussos’s brother. 

The campsite shop was a Harrods compared to those at Paleocastrizza and Piraeus, and the book rack was a lifesaver to Alf and me. Alf found “The World According to Garp” and was incommunicado for the next week. 

On Corfu the boys had bought a snorkel and mask, and at Varkiza I finally plucked up the courage to brave the elements, once persuaded that I could put my face in the water without getting my mascara wet. Once hooked, I was reluctant to let the equipment go. I was enchanted by the colours and the clarity, and although too nervous to float out more than ten yards or so with my face in the water (I never got over seeing “Jaws”), I became obsessed with this activity, constantly badgering Alf or Mark to let me have the mask so that I could gaze down into the luminous turquoise depths at the gently waving seaweed and myriads of brightly-coloured and exotic fish which were close enough to brush with my fingers before they darted away out of reach. 

Our timetable soon decreed that it was prudent to head back for Patras and the ferry, and we set off for Athens one morning, planning to visit medieval Corinth en route and catch the boat we were booked on the same night. This time we stopped at the Canal so that I could stare down at the thin blue strip miles below which went in and out of focus with increasing frequency the longer I looked at it. We assaulted Corinth by means of a hair-raising drive up to the foot of the ruins - I missed the spectacle of the Gulf of Corinth receding below us into the distance, since I spent the duration of the drive on the floor of the van, exhorting Rupert to watch the road. We parked the van at the highest limit for vehicles and attacked the rest on foot, and eventually on hands and feet, as we ran out of path and scrambled up to the top over steep rocks and brush. The view from the top, however, surpassed that of the Parthenon by miles, and we experienced a sense of great achievement and relief, not to mention aching muscles and grazed knees and elbows.

We clambered around on the chunks of stone for about an hour, more awed by the fact that Turkish cannon had near-destroyed what centuries had failed to mark than by the view of Athens sprawling out below us in all directions, before deciding that the triumphant moment was well imprinted on our memories, and that it was all downhill from now on. 

The image of Athens which I retained, however, was neither of the Parthenon nor of the cute soldiers dancing up and down in their pom-pom slippers and frilly skirts, but of the Plaka district, which is a time-warp. Those remaining members of the flower generation who never got their hair cut and became Wall Street traders or got killed in Vietnam or went punk or overdosed, somehow found their way to Athens, and now live in the Plaka in flared jeans and tie-died T-shirts. We were regarded with quiet amusement by such a group at an adjoining table in a cheap restaurant, as though we were the anachronism. 

The old market in the Plaka was an oriental delight, and we spent hours handling and looking at rugs, blankets, pieces of pottery, leather bags and handmade jewellery. However, we were intrigued by the number of fur shops in downtown Athens, where the temperature can never drop below a pleasant 22 degrees even in winter. 

We spent about three days sightseeing in Athens, by which time the sun-worshippers were clamouring for more sea and sand, so we drove out to the other side of Athens and chanced upon a campsite at Varkiza situated on a cliff with a secluded cove just beneath for the almost exclusive use of the campers. The campsite staff were a bunch of easy-going young Greeks with an enviable existence - the warden was a hirsute and paunchy bon-vivant who spent the day drinking ouzo at the open-air bar and trying to convince campers in broken American that he was in fact Demis Roussos’s brother. 

The campsite shop was a Harrods compared to those at Paleocastrizza and Piraeus, and the book rack was a lifesaver to Alf and me. Alf found “The World According to Garp” and was incommunicado for the next week. 

On Corfu the boys had bought a snorkel and mask, and at Varkiza I finally plucked up the courage to brave the elements, once persuaded that I could put my face in the water without getting my mascara wet. Once hooked, I was reluctant to let the equipment go. I was enchanted by the colours and the clarity, and although too nervous to float out more than ten yards or so with my face in the water (I never got over seeing “Jaws”), I became obsessed with this activity, constantly badgering Alf or Mark to let me have the mask so that I could gaze down into the luminous turquoise depths at the gently waving seaweed and myriads of brightly-coloured and exotic fish which were close enough to brush with my fingers before they darted away out of reach. 

Our timetable soon decreed that it was prudent to head back for Patras and the ferry, and we set off for Athens one morning, planning to visit medieval Corinth en route and catch the boat we were booked on the same night. This time we stopped at the Canal so that I could stare down at the thin blue strip miles below which went in and out of focus with increasing frequency the longer I looked at it. We assaulted Corinth by means of a hair-raising drive up to the foot of the ruins - I missed the spectacle of the Gulf of Corinth receding below us into the distance, since I spent the duration of the drive on the floor of the van, exhorting Rupert to watch the road. We parked the van at the highest limit for vehicles and attacked the rest on foot, and eventually on hands and feet, as we ran out of path and scrambled up to the top over steep rocks and brush. The view from the top, however, surpassed that of the Parthenon by miles, and we experienced a sense of great achievement and relief, not to mention aching muscles and grazed knees and elbows.

PATRAS

We were on the road again, heading for Patras, when an argument arose about the ferry booking. Alf repeatedly assured us that we had plenty of time to make the boat, and we would even have time for dinner in Patras. Exactly how much time we would have only became evident when he finally pulled out the tickets to prove himself right, and we discovered our boat had sailed the night before. Consequently, we not only had dinner in Patras, but also breakfast and lunch, since the next boat didn’t leave until the following evening. 

However, the extra day allowed us a little time to explore Patras, which, if it has nothing else to recommend it, boasts a beautiful cathedral housing the remains of St Andrew. We said goodbye to Greece on the quayside at Patras, where we were drained of every last drachma, lira and metro ticket by the port authorities who wouldn’t let us on the boat until we’d paid “port taxes”. 

Fortunately, we’d managed to get a cabin for the return journey, which was a 20-hour haul from Patras to Brindisi, so we were at least rested when we docked and ready to face the all-night drive to Rome, not having any time or cash to spare. We arrived in Rome in the early hours of the morning, and descended upon a gel from the British Embassy for what was left of the night. This was the end of the line for me, having to be back at work in Paris in a few days’ time, so I arranged to stay with some friends just outside Rome for a couple of days while the others moved on to Zurich. 

With a lamentable lack of team spirit in Vatican City, I jumped on a bus sporting the destination “Termini” and gaily waved “A rivederci”.