Chapter 3
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Arriving at the new Athens airport – its newness owing to the recent hosting of the Olympic Games, I imagine – was a non-event. It is clean, efficient and not much else. Far from an insult, I mean this as a compliment. An airport, much like an Australian Rules Football umpire, is doing its job best when you don’t really notice it is there. From here, we would need to hop the X96 bus to hell on earth – Pireaus. More on that in a moment.
I knew that the X96 bus was to be our chariot into hell’s own fire after asking the lovely girl at the information counter at the airport. This conversation started in the same fashion so many of my conversations would go in Greece. I would use what little Greek I had picked up living in the outer western suburbs of Melbourne to get the ball rolling and then I would have to throw up my hands after I had exhausted my extensive vocabulary of … oh … ten words.
‘Tikanis’, I would start.
‘Galla’ would come the reply. I knew this meant ‘Good’.
A further reply would then come, ‘Qhdjkdl dhjdl dhdjd hjdl dlaqywtdeuidos lxz …’ or, at least, that is what I made of it. I would then throw up my hands implore the locals for the kind of understanding travellers can never take for granted but always do. I must add that the Greeks I came across, almost to person, were more than happy to oblige with whatever English they had at their disposal. The lady at the airport, I must also add, had more than enough English up her sleeve to address my trivial concerns.
As an aside, I cannot blame the Greeks for thinking that I was Greek after uttering my the very few Greek words I had at my disposal. For one thing, my very few words are pronounced impeccably. There is a sound that the Greeks make in their words that is somewhere between a G and C (or K) that I think I have nailed. Secondly, I imagine my physical features are not unlike that of a Greek man, though I am not Greek. My sister commented as such upon our return during the compulsory viewing of the 300-odd happy snaps that Mel and I had taken on the trip.
The X96 bus takes about an hour to get into Pireaus and was really quite full. A couple of fellow travelers to the rear and locals pretty much elsewhere. Soon after leaving the airport we passed a great big blue building. ‘Ah … already I feel like I am really in Greece’, I thought. ‘They really do love their blue buildings. How nice and how authentic and, moreover, how surprising to see such a magnificent blue building so close to the airport’. It was just about then that I realised that this grand, blue store was, in fact, an Ikea store.
Driving around the outskirts of Athens I could not help but feel slight pangs of guilt. On my previous trip to the Greek Islands I helped a couple of Greek guys, who were brothers, have a great night out at bar called Murphy’s on Paros – continuing the world-wide trend of totally inappropriately located Irish bars - by spontaneously befriending some English girls, some Irish girls and a gaggle of American girls. We all hung out together, dancing with inordinate vigor to Bon Jovi’s ‘It’s My Life’ despite the fact that it had already been played five times that night. We had a whale of a time. Meanwhile the swarm of Italian men who had descended upon the Greek Islands during the peak season and found themselves at this particular bar had to be content dancing with other men. Their friends, I imagine. But men nonetheless. On my last day in Paros I saw my new Greek buddies at the ferry dock and one wrote down their address in Athens. He told me that if I was ever in Athens and did not look them up that it would be an offence to both them and their entire family. The truth of the matter is that I lost their contact details almost immediately and really had no way of getting in contact with them. Still, I could not shake the feeling that my time in Athens represented nothing more that flipping the bird to the parents of two really good guys.
Anyway, with overwhelming feelings of guilt and a new found appreciation for the kind post modern minimalist neo-Greek cubist architecture that is an Ikea building, it felt like no time till we were in Pireaus. The last time I was in Pireaus I felt like it was quite the cesspool. Since then I can say that nothing seems to have improved. It is a dirty, smelly, surly semi-industrial city-come-suburb and we had to kill a couple of hours there before our boat was due to arrive. Countless people of dubious character approached us with equally dubious merchandise to sell. Watches, sunglasses, pirate CDs, binoculars, mobile phone cases and last, but certainly not least, a 10 pack of tissues were mercilessly flogged to us. It did not matter that we were sitting in a restaurant. These people would just waltz on in, insistently showing their wares to Mel and I as we sat at a table eating.
And, oh, in what fine establishments did we eat! One particular place springs to mind. It had a four page menu full of wonderful selections to choose from, but only four of these dishes were on offer. And there was a wide selection beers listed on this menu, but when it came down to it I could choose any beer I wanted as long as it was an Amstel. Eventually, we found a place to eat that was inviting enough. There is a café located at the docks, right up towards where the ships leave from. Sure, we were still pedalled goods of questionable quality and origin, but it was a relaxing way to spend an hour-and-a-half waiting for the fast boat to Paros.
Taking the fast boat is not a cheap option at €40 a piece. Working in the UK, I could take some solace from the fact that there are €1.6 to each GBP. Nevertheless, it didn't take much imagine to see that this rather necessary element of island hopping was going to prove quite expensive. But if you have ever island hopped before and taken the slow boat you know that half way through the trip you will, invariably, lament that you did not dig that bit deeper into your wallet to find the money for the fast boat. If I remember correctly from my previous time at the Greek Islands, the slow boat from Pireaus to Paros , takes about five hours and the fast boat about half of that.
Not that this seemed to be the case on this particular journey from Pireaus to Paros. The speed of the fast boats depends, in part, on reasonably calm waters and I think it is fair to say that the waters on this particular day were not reasonably calm. I do not usually get ill on boats, but on this occasion I did get a little bit of a headache and my appetite was not at its usually voracious level – though this might have been due to the dodgy ricotta pie I purchased on board. Mel tells me that she saw one guy vomiting with much gusto into the tried and true receptical that is the sick-bag. If this were the only upshot of all of this vertical boat activity then that would be that. Unfortunately, though, it also meant that our supposed fast boat took four hours to get to Paros – not much of a time saving given the premium price of the ticket. Worse still, we arrived at Paros at 9 p.m.. Surely all the decent accommodation would be gone by then.
The truth of the matter is that we did not really look so hard for decent accommodation and were happy to settle just for accommodation. Period. And on this rather woolly night in Parikia, the port town of Paros, accommodation was found in the form of the Hotel Stella. The people who ran it seemed nice enough. The room they showed us was clean and, importantly, I was starving so I was eager to put my bags down and clock into a nice restaurant. Besides, at E25 a night – or about £8 each – it was an opportunity to recover some of the expense of the fast boat.
With bags safely allayed, we set off to find a bite. Unusually, Mel was even hungrier that I was. Perhaps that dodgy ricotta pie I bought on the ferry was still having an affect on me. She kept suggesting places to eat and I kept knocking them back, hopeful of finding a place a little more memorable in which to dine. My vision was rewarded when we came upon the Levantis restaurant. It was a semi-open-roofed affair with a friendly waitress. The terracotta coloured walls and loose-pebble flooring lending a romantic atmosphere to the evening. My grilled cous cous was more than passable and Mel's beetroot salad seemed to hit the spot. Dessert was a white chocolate and sour cherry sensation for Mel and a so-so cheese platter for me. The only downside of this evening was that Levantsis would set our expectations for restaurant quality artificially high. It turned out that Paros provided by far the largest number of better quality places to eat than any of the islands we were to visit. In fact, what we could not have known at that point was that the Greek Islands, in the main, are not home to many quality places to eat at all. My advice is this: satiate any foodie desires you might have in Paros before you head off to any of the other islands and then forget your foodie desires completely. This will help to avoid disappointment.
Parikia is roundly indicted – unfairly in my view – by most travel guides. I agree that the views over the water are not the best compared to many other islands, but I feel it has a great mix of things to do and – as I have already mentioned - one of the nicest choras of the islands. The streets are narrow, the buildings are impossibly white, there is a reasonable opportunity to shop and everything was neat and tidy. Certainly, during our search for a place to eat, Mel was impressed.
Fully fed and roughly acclimated with our environs, it was time to retire. It was about midnight and our journey had started at 3:00 A.M. Whoever said that getting there was half the fun must never have, I imagine, gone anywhere notably fun.
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