Chapter 17

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I am not a heavy sleeper. A little too much sunlight hits my eyes in the morning and I am up. A little bit of thought enters my mind during the night and I am up. Mel starts snoring and I am up. Not on this trip, though. Man, had I been sleeping. I was going to bed at 12am and waking at 10am. Plus there was the almost daily afternoon kip that Mel and I had become most fond of. That's a lot of sleep. This could only mean one thing: I was relaxed. This is a big thing for me. I have already gone on at length about this so I won't do so here. Suffice to say that it is tough for me to relax. I was experiencing no such problem at the Hotel Spiros on this particular morning - nor had I experienced much of a problem in this area for several days prior to arriving at Naxos - rising only just prior to the cessation of serving of the the obligatorily complimentary breakfast in the dining room. Mel and I raced downstairs and promptly served ourselves a hearty breakfast. Of course, I was careful to avoid the water from the communal tap that was masquerading as bottled water.

Mel and I then promptly headed out to the beach. En route, Mel purchased an inflatable bed for €4 so that she could float about the warm, shallow waters at the beach by our hotel. We walked a fair way along the beach before deciding on a spot. We each took up a place under an umbrella and on a beach lounge. It was not long before we spotted a person patrolling what turned out to be his spot on the beach and requesting €3 for each of the occupied lounge chairs. It might sound like I am having a bitch about having to pay for these facilities, but this is not the case; I am happy to pay. If it means that I am comfortable and relaxed then the facilities are worth more than sticker price. And now that were were settled I could look forward to a long day of sunning, wading, chatting, people watching and reading of Bill.

Except that it didn't happen. Minutes after we had settled in to our prime beach positions we could see lightning on the horizon. A storm was heading our way. Fast. Then the rain came. Being the kind of guy who is aware of the kind of things that can go wrong, I figured that the flat terrain of the beach combined with the metal spike of the umbrella under which we were sitting could not be the safest place to sit during a thunder storm. So it was that after a good, oh, 15 minutes on the beach we headed back to our hotel room. At that point, the €6 we had spent on our sun lounges looked like a less than fruitful investment.

Despite the rain, the walk back to the hotel was not as unkind as rain would otherwise suggest courtesy of the warmth of the day. Besides, once we had dropped off Mel's equally-at-the-time-stupidly-invested in inflatable bed at the hotel we were free to do a spot of shopping. This shopping was not before its time, I can tell you, because to say I was short on clothes would be somewhat of an understatement. A couple of plain, white Gap t-shirts I had brought with me had become decidedly less than white and I had either thrown them out or should have done so. After successfully purchasing two tops the rain had cleared and we headed toward the most recognisable symbol of Naxos, the Monument to Apollo, but we did so via The Labarynth.

The Naxos Labarynth was more what we had come to expect of Greek Island choras. Rather than the disappointingly western main town of the port, The Labarynth was all about white blocks of quaintness. We spotted a few places to eat in The Labarynth and decided we should dine at one of them later.

The Monument to Apollo (or 'Portara') is a mystery to me. It looks like a marvelous door frame that leads to nowhere and sits on the edge of the Naxos coastline. It is visible from pretty much anywhere within the port town. That is it. That is all I know. I should know more. I should want to know more. But I do not. I walked Mel there and we took some photos. We ticked the box.

By this time it had gotten quite hot again, so we made back toward the beach spot we had abandoned earlier. The beach patroller who had previously charged us for a spot on the beach was kind enough not charge us again. Either that or the charge is for a full day's usage. Either way, it was good that he remembered us. Mel lost no time getting use out of her inflatable and I wasted no time getting stuck into Bill and doing some people watching. There was a rudie-nudie German baby with a pink bandanna having a whale of a time with her parents. I hadn't really noticed this till mid afternoon but I am quite certain that she had been doing so, with much gusto, since around lunch time. She would have slept well that night. I reflected that as we get older we seem to lose the capacity for having that kind of fun. How do we get that back?

There was a middle-to-late aged Chinese woman walking around the beach offering her services as a masseuse. At the best of times this kind of service goes against my sensibility. Massage by the beach necessitates the placing of an unknown person's hands on my bare skin. Who knows where those hands have been? It might occur to you that these thoughts and the frequency with which I have them is downright silly. Certainly it has occurred to me. Indeed, it did that very day. At least, for a very short while. Specifically, it was until the woman took a break from trudging up and down the beach, at which point she hocked up loogies non-stop for no other observable reason other than she took pleasure from it. And this woman wanted to charge money for touching my bare skin. Right.

That night we headed back into The Labarynth (which is also called the Old Town) and ate at a place called Lucullus. It was not a good meal. I had a very bland chicken kebab. So bland that if it had come off my own BBQ for a guest to eat I would be forced to make some apologies. It seemed to be served with microwaved rice, but I cannot be certain. The service was below average. Just as we had the night before at Poppi's we were coerced into eating there by some vociferous haggling by the proprietor or staff there. Just as with Poppi's we had been disappointed with the outcome. Thus our Rule of Haggling Restaurants was born: there seems to be an inverse relationship between the level of haggling and the quality of the restaurant and these should be avoided.

And that, for the second day on Naxos, was pretty much that. It wasn't a bad day. It wasn't a great day either. Tomorrow was going to be site-seeing day, since The Guide highlighted Naxos as being a great island to do so.

What we couldn't know then was how deceptively large Naxos is and how big a chunk out of our day just getting to the site seeing would take. On our agenda was a visit to the Apollo Kouros. As a much younger man, I remember by best friend at the time's cologne of choice was Kouros, by YSL. So when The Guide mentioned the Kouros (which means 'handsome young man' according to the only source I checked) I thought I owed it to this long lost friend to take a look. The price of this nostalgia was a 4.5 hour round trip to the town of Apollon. The Guide refers rather glowingly about the lushness of the Naxos countryside and, yes, it is unexpectedly green when contrasted with the other islands we visited on this trip. But it did not make that 4.5 hours of my trip go any faster.

When we arrived at Apollon, I found it a little depressing. One restaurant dominated the shore line and the staff (or proprietors, I never could really tell) were relentless in haranguing passers' by to eat there. According to the Rule of Haggling Restaurants, now well embedded within the psyche of Mel and me, there was no way that we were going to eat there. We went to a convenience store to grab a bite instead.

The Kouros is only a short walk from the town. But there was a problem. We had to walk through Jurassic Park to get there.

It occurs to me that the way you view life is all down to your frame of reference. A young girl sees her 5' 7" father as a giant until she associates with boys who are taller than that. For most automotively challenged people with mechanic friends, their abiity to fix all range of motor related dysfunction is always a revelation. My frame of reference always seems to be slightly askew and in this instance is was couched by my siblings. All sisters. My sisters vehemently dilike creepy crawlys, by which I mean insects, spiders, snakes and all your other regular suspects. But their dislike extends to most living things - I imagine possums and squirrels fall into this category as well. But it would be along list and I imagine there is no way that I could effectively catalogue it here. Being the youngest, perhaps most impressionable, of my family I have picked up this foible. Suffice to say that I am not the blokiest bloke I know. It bugs me a little but not a whole lot. With this in mind, en route to the Kouros from the town of Apollon via the dry paddock behind the houses of the residents of Apollon, we encountered several large and (to my eye) ugly lizards. By large I mean about eight to ten inches long. This kind of freaked me out just a little. What freaked me out a lot more was the weirdest thing; the noise made by the slap of the lizard's feet on the rocks as they scampered about. It freaked me out so much, I might have done a little hop forward, expediting my passage through a particularly treacherous stretch. Mel would suggest I started to run but stopped myself because of her presence. Mel has always been a liar, but I should not digress form my point - life is all about your frame of reference and I am telling you that to get to the Apollo Kouros I had to navigate my way through, of all things, Jurassic Park ... goddamit.

Having survived my ordeal and arrived at the Kouros it reminded Mel and me of the statues of Easter Island, it was laid on its back. We waited for some younger folk to clear off before taking some photos of it. Ticking that box we went back through Jurassic Park (though I had negotiated a brisker step with Mel on this occasion), back passed the badgering restaurateurs to wait for the 1pm bus to take us back to our hotel. We waited at the bus stop for quite a while but we wanted to make certain that we did not miss the bus as it was 2.5 hours till the next one and we'd seen as much of Apollon as we had cared to see.

On the way back to the Chora on the bus Mel and I kept ourselves entertained by counting the number of churches we could spot. That number cam to 52. 52 churches along a stretch of about 40 kilometres of road. This is a seriously religious neck of the woods.

I should also add that for all the skill of the bus drivers we encountered - they really do negotiate an impressive number of obstacles on the journey to Apollon in the form of traffic, buildings and windy roads and narrow streets - they can not prevent you from getting car sick. I do not really suffer from motion sickness but even I felt the effects just a little. If this is a problem for you, try to sticking to the front of the bus.

All of this driving made us tired and we went back to our room for a rather longish snooze. During the day we had spotted a Mexican restaurant called Escoban. At the beginning of our trip I had vowed to eat as authentically Greek as I could for the entire trip. By now, though, I had eaten more Greek food than I had a taste for and the thought of something different was greatly appealing. So after our post-snooze shower Mel and I headed over to Escoban. It was empty when we got there, which always gives me the heebiegeebies because I feel that if a restaurant is any good then it will have at least some people there all of the time. Mel and I were the first diner at Escoban on this evening and it took quite a while for people to start rolling. I need not have been concerned as the service here was about the best we had experienced during our entire trip, courtesy of our waiter whose hair seemed to be a king of funky blonde-orange. The food was pretty good for the price we paid and the servings were generous. The san grias hit the spot and after our first two half-jugs our waiter gave us a third one for free. We stayed there for many hours enjoying the music, which was some kind of latin pop-rock with a tinge of R&B. By now the place was quite busy and why not - certainly we had a great time. Appetites well satiated, we headed home for the night.

Not for the first time on this trip, I reflected that good times can strike you at the most unexpected moments. When they do, we are truly living.