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A mellow day at the lake
I spent the morning at Athens' Jewish Museum, partly out of a sense of loyalty, partly because the Lonely Planet called it one of the most important Jewish museums in Europe and partly because out of the hundreds of thousands of Jews who were living in Greece at the start of the second world war - and who had thrived in the country since 300BC - more than 97% were transported to death camps in 1944 and murdered by the Germans and their Bulgarian allies.
Unfortunately, after the joys of the Benaki Museum, the Jewish museum was (a) dusty, (b) badly lit and (c) often quite uninspired. There were some beautiful items from happier times and poignant ones from the Holocaust - I especially liked the collection of tickets and passes that traced a camp survivor's journey back from eastern Europe to her home town in Greece - but, for me, the museum didn'y really do them justice, which was a shame.
I spent the rest of the day at a very nice place, though. South of Athens, after you have passed all the little beaches (and a fair few swanky marinas), you get to the end of a bus line and big natural lake that sits, surrounded by rocky cliffs, just back from the coast. The water is a mixture of salty and fresh, is at a constant 28C and is perfect for lazy swimming.
The place has a bit of a sanitorium feel about it as apparently the mineral mix is good for you and the clientele are mostly older people and families out with gran. You pay your entrance (6 euros) and then you can loll around on chairs and sun loungers and take a dip whenever you fancy. Waiters come round and bring drinks and snacks and the whole thing is very mellow and civilised.
There's an easy slope into the water, plus some steps and a lift for wheelchair users, and once you are in you paddle out into the middle and sort of pootle around for a while. The water is silky and smooth and you don't really want to make an effort. Fast swimming doesn't really happen here and is proabably non-de rigueur. The most rebellious anyone gets is nipping across the line of buoys that separate the swimmers from the 'dangerous' waters near the cliff edge.
There is, however, an unexpected treat when you first get in. A school of little black cleaner fish, no more than 4cm or 5cm long, lurk around the steps and if you stay still they will descend on your feet and give you a pedicure, nibbling away at all the dead skin and leaving you, like the water, smooth and silky. The feeling is about a micron away from unbearable, like being continually tickled by someone who refuses to stop. But, if you can get over that, it is actually quite pleasant and there's no doubt that, after eight weeks' wearing flip flops, my feet could do with some attention.
I really enjoyed this lake and I wish I could remember what it is called. (I'll update this post tomorrow or the next day when I have found its name again.) It was an unexpected way to say goodbye to a city I feel I have only just begun to get to know. I'm sure I'll be back. Greece has always been something of a mystery to me bit now, just as when you meet a new person and have the feeling good things will come of it, I think there will be some interesting times here up ahead.
In the meantime, tomorrow I get the train to Patras (which, half of the time, appears to be called Patra - another Greek mystery I haven't been able to unravel) and from there an overnight boat to Bari, which is home, apparently, of one of my favourite pasta dishes: orecchiette with anchovies and broccoli. After that Bologna, Paris and the Eurostar to St Pancras. But all of that is to come. In the meantime, I am going to brave the hostel rooftop and have one last beer looking out over the Acropolis.
A day among the ruins
Once I had sorted my stuff and done some washing I thought the Acropolis could wait, so I went to the beach. Actually, it's not quite that simple. Here you don't really go to the beach. You go to one of dozens of little private beachlets that stretch about 20km down the coast and where, for a fee, you get deckchairs, umbrellas, showers, music, a bar etc etc. A city tram runs the length of the coast and you hop off when you get to the one you want. I chose pretty badly (on the basis of the logo, now you ask) and ended up in a sort of slightly seedy sub-Wallpaper kind of joint with too loud techno music, some odd people and extortionate prices. I hung on in there as long as I could, dividing the amount I had paid by the minutes I was getting out of it, and then double-quicked it back to the hostel. Not the mellowest afternoon I have spent by the Med.
In fact back at the hostel, things had revved up a notch too. The overwhelming demographic at Athens Backpackers is twentysomething New Zealander and they do like their fun. The hostel has a rooftop bar that looks out over the Acropolis and (dumbly) I thought I might go up there a for a quiet beer and watch the sun set over the ruins. By now, though, the time was Happy Hour + 2 and you could hear the party five floors down. As I got to the top of the little metal stairs that led on to the roof, the first thing I saw was a solid mass of bodies, the first thing I smelt was beer and the first thing I heard was someone complaining in a plaintive Kiwi wail that she had just turned 24: 'I'm so OWWWWWWWWLLLLD and I hate it!' I decided to give them a miss.
Today, though, was wonderful. Unlike almost everyone else in the hostel (there are some people over 25; I saw them at breakfast) I didn't sleep in till 12 with a hangover but got up early and headed out for the culture. The aim was to beat the crowds to the Acropolis and it kind of worked.
I am not a big fan of archaeological sights but Athens is changing my point of view. It was great to see the Parthenon at last in the flesh, so to speak, though I'm still not exactly sure what went on there and obviously the best bits are in the British Museum. But I also was really taken by the Temple of Athena Nike, which sits just away from it and is somehow more elegant and compact, the Mozart to the Parthenon's Beethoven if you like. (You can pretend I didn't say that.)
What I hadn't really thought about was that the whole of the Acropolis would be a big building site. Restoaration work has been going on continually, I think, since the 1970s and there is scaffolding all over the place and cranes and hammering and a little railway that carries marble between the sites. Plus there's a constant background noise of sawing, drilling and chiseling which tend to drown out the tour guides shepherding streams of people up the hill and from site to site (I only just managed to stay ahead of the crowds). Billions have gone into this project (and when the new museum is opened they will soon be ready to have the Elgin marbles back - haha) but it turns out not everyone is impressed by the work in progress. I found myself standing next to a guy from Liverpool who said to his friend:
'I don't know why they're doing that, putting the new marble in the gaps, those white bits... I mean, I know they'll treat them with something to make them look old, like, but it's not right. You don't want to look at new stuff. What I like is what you see is what you get. That's why I like the Colosseum. I like Pompeii. There, what you see is what you get.'
After the noise of the Parthenon, the wander down through the trees to the ancient marketplace at the bottom of the hill is so quiet you wonder if your ears have popped. But while the Acropolis gives you the razzmatazz, here you get a little taste of real (ancient) Athens.
At risk of coming over all Michael Wood, I really found this place exciting. You can see where Socrates stood and spoke to the crowd. Here was were those great debates took place about what it meant to be free and what it meant to be a slave, nearly 1,800 years before the Magna Carta (and more than two millennia before the Bill of Rights). And here you can literally stand on the ground where they invented the idea of democracy. It was powerful to think that so much of what we take for granted (or at least fight to preserve) about modern liberal living came from this small patch of land by the Med. Roman ruins are interesting, especially if you have seen 'I, Claudius', but the stuff that happened at Greek ruins still influence us today.
Once you have done all the swooning over rocks and pillars and stuff, there's also a nicely presented little museum. Here, among the various pots and shards of terracotta, is a real bronze Spartan shield - captured by the Athenians in the Battle of Something-or-other. It measures almost a metre across, looks like it weighs a ton and is fantastically dented and battered by what were real Athenian swords aimed at the real man behind. There is also a clever little machine, involving black and white balls, that picked people for jury service - uncannily like the one that picks the lottery numbers now, though this was in 500BC. And, my favourite for some reason, a terracotta bucket (that's a reproduction in the pic above) with a little hole in the bottom that you filled with water and used to time people's speeches. When the water had run out they had to stop talking (this one lasted six minutes). Apparently real experts could time their conclusion perfectly to the last drop. The museum is also a good answer to the Liverpool guy's complaints. Its restored colonnade (pic below) gives you a very good idea of what Athens 550BC must have looked like.
After that I went walking out into the real world again and into the Monastiraki Flea Market. It was early but I was hungry so I sat at a little corner cafe and, with 100% authenticity and 0% originality, had lamb kebab and Greek salad. (I could probably have had Demis Roussos and some tsatsiki too, but I didn't want to be clichéd.) The flea market was like a small version of Camden and no better and no worse, though I did find a cool stall of Greek posters from the 1940s and 1950s (they would, unfortunately, crumple up in my rucksack) and, for me at least, an even cooler one of instruments and bits of electronics from old military aircraft (though even I wouldn't be sure what to do with them when I got home). I did manage to stock up on some good second-hand books in English - though I had to pass on Homer when the stallkeeper, having heavily discounted Alistair MacLean and an old Simenon novel, refused to knock a cent of his original price for 'The Iliad'. Maybe that's what patriotism is.
I had almost had enough history by then but here the past seems to pull you back to it and I was wandering back to the hostel when I caught a glimpse of some towering columns on the other side of a busy six-lane highway. It turned out to be the Temple of Olympian Zeus and you can't really get much more towering than that. Rather spectacularly set apart from the rest of the ruins in a space all of its own, this temple beat all the records. It took 700 years to build. There were 104 columns, each 17 metres high and 2m in diameter (I'm reading this from the guidebook by the way; I don't actually know these details). It held a giant gold and ivory statue of Zeus and a similarly huge one of Hadrian (currently everybody's favourite Roman emperor), who finished it in AD132.
Even now, with only 14 columns remaining - and a 15th that fell over in a storm in 1852 and now lies on its side - it has a kind of mammoth presence. I loved it. It must have been a stunning building when it was finished and I thought that if I had lived in Athens in those days I might have signed up to be one of the Zeus priests. It would certainly beat cowering behind your metre-wide dented bronze shield while half the cast of '300' thundered down on top of you - though maybe you had to do that bit too. That's the trouble with democracy.
(This shouldn't be funny...)
The collection, which I think was once the private collection of a 1920s Alexandrian merchant, traces the cultural development of Greece from almost the origins of time to the present day. And if I were Greek I would be incredibly proud - a British collection would begin around 900AD.
For me, the best stuff is near the beginning. In one of the first cabinets there is a little clay figurine of a woman from about 6,000BC and whose face is so detailed and realistic that she wouldn't look out of place on a street in Athens or London today (except that she is 6in high and made of clay, of course). A little more recent are some intricate and delicate solid gold wreaths to wear in your hair from about 600BC, when we Brits probably hadn't even discovered coracles, and - maybe to go with them? - tiny ornate earrings of winged gods holding bows and arrows and of little animals and human figures. And of course there were loads of painted vases, though, unlike most collections of Greek painted vases, these weren't (a) dusty, (b) badly lit or (c) boring.
The exhibition runs chronologically and rather abruptly (in about gallery 4) you hit 300ishAD and Christian Byzantium. I like Byzantine art but it's strange to see it next to all those pieces from earlier Greek history and you are left with the odd impression that suddenly everyone was wearing more clothes - as if the coming of Christ had caused a serious drop in temperature. Plus comedy seems to have been banned. While in the earlier Greek stuff there are plenty of satyrs and funny masks and frolicking maidens on vases to create the impression of a pretty carefree life. (And if they were wearing clothes at all, it would be those Greek-y drape-y things that look as though they have wrapped themselves in a giant Kleenex.) But come the Byzantines and it's all saints spearing serpents, dour-faced virgins contemplating the crucifixion and everyone wearing at least three more layers.
The rest of the museum I scooted round a bit more quickly, though there were some treats here too. I almost entirely skipped a gallery showing the development of Greek ethnic costume over the ages - all sashes, buckles and ethnic prints as far as I could see. But there are two genuine living rooms from 18th-century Macedonian homes that blow you away. One especially has walls and ceiling entirely made entirely of a light intricately carved wood, like a particularly beautiful church, and it reminded me why I have always wanted to live in a wooden house. If you dropped in on the owner of this room, you would simply refuse to leave.
There is also a beautiful embroidered bridal bed valance - not a phrase you find yourself typing every day - with little pictures of people and animals and rural life. It reminded me of a very similar (woven) bridal gift I saw in Peru, with the same people and scenes from life but, of course, llamas instead of goats. Greece to Peru: we are more of a family than we often imagine. Later, in the galleries dedicated to the War of Independence, there was a haunting portrait of someone called Dimitrios Botsaris as a child. He was orphaned during the war, semi adopted by the new Greek royal family (his father was a big independence fighter) and went on to become minister of war.
I've pasted him below. The reproduction is not that great but there's something in it that made me go back and look at this portrait again and again, perhaps because, even this young, he seems to know the danger and the glory that is up ahead.
I also need to find out more about the satirical Athenian shadow puppeteer Sotiris Spatharis but as that's the second phrase today that you don't find yourself typing that often, and this post has gone on long enough, I am going to go now and say hi to the New Zealanders, efharisto to you for reading this far and good night from what has turned out to be, historically at least, a pretty magical place to be.
From Haifa to Piraeus
When I was trying to set up this part of my trip, I had a brief email exchange with the shipping agent in Haifa. I wanted to know what I could expect on board - I'd heard that some of these cargo ships even had swimming pools and stuff like that. So I dropped a line to my new friend Alicia at Rosenfeld Shipping to ask about the facilities. Her reply was succinct:
David
It's a cargo ship.
Yours
Alicia
So it was with pretty low expectations that I showed up at Haifa docks at 9 on Friday morning to find a little bunch of fellow travelers, a woman with a clipboard and the inevitable Israeli security guy waiting to be taken to our boat. There were a couple of German motorcyclists taking their bikes back from a holiday in Israel, a Dutch man who was driving a Transit van but who otherwise was pretty schtum about what he was up to and an older Israeli couple who were friends of the ship's owner and were going to see him in Cyprus.
After a couple of hours' meandering from immigration office to customs check and back again (the port was all but closed as there were no big ships in that day) we came round the corner to find the M/V Notos waiting for us: 8,111 tonnes, registered in Limmasol and a veteran of the Athens - Cyprus - Haifa run.
I say waiting for us, but only in the way that someone is waiting for you who invites you to dinner and when you show up the kitchen is still cold and they are reading the paper. It stood there at the quayside, big, white-(ish) and proud and spectacularly empty, its rear doors wide open to receive a worryingly large number of containers before we sailed.
Needless to say we have spent most of the day in the port, but that has given us time to explore the ship and watch the lorries bringing the cargo aboard. Mostly we are shipping those big metal containers that could have anything inside but there are also crates of Israeli plums and pomegranates and various little packages for people in Cyprus. There seems to be an enormous collection of bathroom fittings and Mr Popodopoulos of Nicosia will be pleased to hear his lighting units are on the way.
Apart from the Israeli couple, who are in the Owner's Cabin (upstairs, next to the captain and almost certainly with its own en suite jacuzzi), we are staying in crew quarters, which means a deck or two below, simple, a bit scruffy and clean. I'm in a cabin for two with upper and lower berths and a little washbasin, plus a porthole which looks out on to the Med - though admittedly on to the Med across the top of an exhaust vent from the lorry deck below. The showers and toilets wouldn't go down well on a Cunard cruise (well, to be honest they would cause a few grumbles on a prison ship) but they are OK and give you a kind of 'one of the boys' feel when you use them. Thank goodness, though, the sea so far has been calm. And there's a little place - the 'Salon' - where we can sit around and watch TV.
The crew is a mix of two or three Greeks (the guys in charge) and about 20 Egyptians, Russians, Indians and a couple of guys from Japan. Everyone eats together in little shifts and the food is great and comes in huge portions - they are, after all, feeding people who haul big containers on and off ships all day. We are, though, on a kind of NHS hospital food timetable, which is posted on the 'Salon' wall:
Breakfast 0830-0900
Lunch 1230-1300
Dinner 1700-1730
And if you miss those times that's it - there's no shop or 24-hour buffet on board (thanks, Alicia).
We have finally set sail (it's 5pm) and it was sad to see Israel disappearing behind us. But the ship itself is like a little country of its own. We can go just about anywhere as long as we don't get in the way. I am guessing the engine room is pretty much out of bounds and no one has invited us on to the bridge yet, but we are working on that. And you can even get right to the front (yeah, yeah, I know, the bow) for that 'Titanic' moment. But it does look a bit risky and it would be embarrassing to fall in.
Tomorrow we dock at Limassol in Cyprus to take on more stuff. I'm hoping to go ashore and buy a mains adapter. My Israeli one, which was pretty hopeless in Israel, is useless with the sockets here and my iPod needs recharging. No one is clear if we will be allowed off or not. It seems to be up to the Captain so we are going to ask in the morning.
The Day of Pigs
We woke up to find ourselves in port. The day was a bit hazier than before and by the thermometer it was cooler than in Haifa. But the humidity was intense and as soon as you stepped outside you found yourself covered in that film of sweat that's neither tropical nor sporty but simply not nice.
We were to be here, loading up with more containers, for most of the day so the captain gave the OK for three of us to go ashore and see the town. He kept out passports but we were given little laminated badges that said we were passengers on the Notos and told to be back on board by 3pm. Two huge cruise liners (or huge compared to out little cargo ship) had just docked and the immigration staff were getting ready for an influx of day trippers. So we nipped ahead and got to the front of the queue. In fact we needn't have worried. They just glanced at our badges, asked if we were from the EU and waved us through. So much for Fortress Europe, we thought, though the southern half of Cyprus is probably not the best place to land if you are an illegal immigrant and plan on opening a corner shop in Hamburg. The only way is out again or up into the Turkish half, which probably wouldn't help.
I'm afraid I have almost nothing to say about Limmasol, except that it was hot and they do nice ice coffees. We sat by the beach for a while and then I bought an adaptor for my MacBook and was back on the ship in time for lunch.
By the afternoon, the whole of the upper deck, which yesterday was empty, was covered with new containers. Among the new arrivals was a lorry load of pigs, who even now are grunting and snorting around in their pens and drinking from little pipes that squirt water when they get their snouts round them - rather like the ones you get in airports. I reckon there must be 200 of them on the three decks of their container, which is open at the sides. I'm no expert but they seem happy enough, though the appearance of a plate of ham at dinner was a little too much of a coincidence for our comfort.
Now we are on our way again and at least the movement of the ship provides a breeze. I've just got into trouble-ish with the Captain for going for a run on a bit of the deck where some crew members were asleep below. He was fine about it really but I think he thought I was crazy. And to be honest he really doesn't look the running type - imagine a 63-year-old Greek ship captain with a grubby t-shirt and you probably have the right idea. Actually I'm not sure I am the running type either. But after the enormous quantities of food you get at lunchtime, followed, only four and a half hours later, by a similar amount at dinner, you feel you have to do something.
Sunday on the briny blue
By now we have got into the rhythm of life on board. Sleep is idyllic, with the soft hum of the engines and the swushhhh of the sea coming in through your porthole. And the day is punctuated by the crazily close-together meal times. We are served by a shy 20-year-old from Gujarat called Max. He told me his full name but then watched patiently as the 20 or so syllables failed to get into the right order in my head and said, 'but everyone calls me Max.'
This is Max's first job aboard - though whether it's his first on this ship or any ship I couldn't work out - and he doesn't look too happy about it. His immediate superior, Ahmed, all smiles and jokes with us, seems to be breaking him in almost literally and there are frequent orders for Max to tidy this, polish that or Hoover the other. When he serves us our food he does so with a kind of melancholy that suggests life should offer more than a Greek cargo ship on the Med. And he probably has a point. Here he is pretty much the bottom of the pile. On the internal phone directory, which is posted on the wall in the 'Salon', the final entry is for 'Servant', though I doubt even that rings in Max's room.
The rest of the time we divide between sleeping, walking around the decks, reading books and watching the fuzzy television set that gets various random channels depending which land mass we are near. Today, a few of us managed to get up to the bridge and the navigator (or whatever that guy is called on boats) showed us that we were soon to be passing Rhodes. And indeed the whole day we spent sailing through beautiful deep blue seas past the various Dodecanese and Cyclades islands on our way to Athens. Obviously - this would have been the case in any country - the TV was showing the Olympics but, when the Greek flag was raised alongside the Chinese one in the closing ceremony, there were extra enthusiastic grunts of patriotic approval from the Captain and his cronies.
We have discovered that you occupy a funny space as passengers on a cargo ship. One the one hand - and the Captain in one of his rare sociable moments confirmed this - we are totally in the way. A cargo ship probably runs a lot better if there aren't excited landlubbers clogging up your gangways and taking pictures of the pigs. One the other, at least no one has to worry about us and there are no Quiz Nights, daily bulletins, trips ashore and fancy dress parties to organise. In fact they don't even have to be polite, though so far we are all getting on fine.
Like all travellers thrown together randomly for a few days we are happily swapping stories about where we have been, when we were last in each other's cities etc and discussing at length a topic that right now seems to get every traveller from Aachen to Zanzibar foaming at the mouth: the cost of living in London. I've only been away a couple of months but I have lost count of the number of times I have had to commiserate someone on how much it costs to to get the Tube from Covent Garden to Golders Green or advise them on where to stay in London for less that 50 euros per night (er, like, nowhere?). Really, we need to do something about our city. We won't be able to afford to live there soon.
Tomorrow morning we arrive in Piraeus and we and the pigs will be disembarking. My fellow passengers, with their motorbikes and van, will be heading north and west through Greece. I'll be stopping in Athens for a few days, which I am excited about. I've never been there and I have found a hostel right next to the Acropolis. The pigs, I guess, will soon discover where they are headed and will be looking back on their last few days on the Notos with some nostalgia.
Update: Monday morning
It's 11am and we are stuck just outside the port in Piraeus. There's a go-slow on the docks and a queue of ships waiting to berth. It turns out that there is a hierarchy of vessels in this situation. Cruise liners get in first, car ferries next, etc etc. Little ships with containers and pigs aboard are pretty much near the bottom. We may be here some time.
1pm: No sign yet of any movement on shore, so of course we have another hearty lunch. We sit around in the 'Salon' and get slightly nervous about missed connections etc. But really the biggest danger is running out of reading matter. Unexpectedly together for a fourth day, we're finding the conversation moving in dangerous directions. The Captain turns out to be a passionate supporter of Putin and what he is doing in Georgia. The Dutch guy has started to hint at what he was doing in Israel: it has something to do with Old Testament prophecies starting to come true. We are wondering how much food is left in the kitchen.
3pm: The captain comes in and says, 'Ninety-five per cent tomorrow.' We hold on to the possibility of the other five per cent but really it looks like we are here for another night. Piraeus and Athens tantalisingly in view but out of reach. Thoughts turn to hijacking a boat.
5pm: Another meal (of course) and confirmation that we are staying the night. The ship is supposed to dock at 6 in the morning and we'll allegedly be off it by 7. Talking to one of the crew, Sind from Punjab, it turns out this happens quite often in Athens - there just aren't enough parking spaces or whatever they are called for ships - and passengers sometimes go a little beserk. We, so far, are calm, though the two German guys finished off all their beer yesterday in a final-night-on-the-boat drink-in and so now are a little ansty.
Tuesday, 6.15am: Awoken by the very welcome clunk-clunk of the anchor being pulled in (is that 'weighed' or is that when you let it down?). I get up and have one last prison ship shower and go up to what quite possibly might be the poop deck to watch us come into the port. The sun is just coming up over the hills behind Athens (insert suitable Homeric epithet here) and the pigs are starting to squeal in excitement. The last few metres are a wonderful choreography of tug, ship and anchors. Two of the crew position themselves behind two huge winches which each control an anchor on a chain about 100m long and with links twice the size of your hand. When the two anchors have found the sea bed, a third man, leaning over the side, waves his hands in a delicate little ballet (which is impressive, as he is about 20 stone, wears an oily boiler suit and has a roll-up hanging from his mouth) and the others ease out the anchors first on one side and then the other until the back of the boat just touches the dock and we have arrived. It's just like parking, though with a vehicle that weighs 8,000 tonnes and has no brakes.
Now I am in Athens at a hostel that has probably won Hostel of the Year many times over. It's friendly, clean, full of nice people and has a free breakfast. I'll just finish my toast and jam and then it's off to see what all this Acropolis business is about. In the meantime, thanks for reading and have a great day.
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