Chapter 18

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That night brought about the worst nights sleep I had on the trip. The room at the Hotel Spiros had a slightly smokey smell to it so we left the windows open. It turned out that the windows has some kind of switch built into them to deactivate the air conditioning when they were open. No matter what trickery I employed, I could not get the aircon to run with the windows open. Choosing heat over stench, I woke up several times during the night from the heat. Finally, at about 5am, my priorities shifted and I closed the windows.

My lack of sleep caused even more problems waking up promptly enough to sit down for the hotel provided breakfast, but we did get to our seats on time. After scoffing our respective breakfasts, Mel and I headed out to find a scooter for hire.

I had been umming and ahhing about scooter hire throught the trip. Sure, we hired a quad bike (at Mel's instance), but Mel and I are scooter riders from a long way back and it seemed a shame not to scoot around the islands. Saying that, Mel suggested we leave our safety gear at home and, mindful of the kind of accidents that tourists have on their holidays, I was not so keen to ride. None of that mattered on this day, though. Naxos was probably proving a little sleepy for us. Our logic was that one of the reasons we might not be getting the maximum value out of Naxos was because we could not easily get to the beaches The Guide all to frequently referred to. Thus, we would hire a scooter and scoot to whichever beaches we pleased. Our trusty stead cam in the form of a Kymco 90cc 2 stroke. After riding out to one of the further beaches - the name of which escapes me - we rode back to one of the nearer beaches, Beach Anna, where there was far less wind. It was a nice beach. The sand was clean and the water was clear, with my (by now) familiar hardy little fish. Of course there was the obligatory naked German baby frolicking about.

We had a great day at Beach Anna and probably our only gebuine beach day during the entire trip. We paid a few Euro for a sun lounge in front of a hotel and tarted chatting to Cliff and Karen, a couple from Canada. They were very good value and while Karen was off in the water I chatted about a great range of things with Cliff, Though none of the things we speak about come to mind as I write this, I am quite certain it involved how we had the solutions to all the world's ills. It was that kind of chat. But before long it was time for us to head back to the port town and our hotel. By now the wind had really picked up. So much so that the decidedly average helmet I had been given when I hired the scooter - which was really much more like a baseball helmet, with couple of (now exposed) bolts around the temple region fastening a make shift strap to it - kept coming off the back of my head. Faced with the option of either having the helmet fly off into a car behind me or having an accident trying to keep the damn thing on and having the aforementioned expose bolt drive into my temple, I took off the helmet and rode bak to the scooter shop Easy Rider style. I felt pretty good about that. Clearly, I lived to tell the tale.

Dinner on ths night was at Scirocco, in the Naxos town square. From our first day in Naxos we haded noted this establishment was fairly well full all of the time. Taking this as a good sign, we took a seat. The signs were right.

Continuing The Moussaka Challenge, I found that the Scirocco version of this classic Greek dish was second only to the magnificent Mousakka of Apolloz on Paros on my very first night of this Island adventure. Mel tells me she liked her meal, too, and the service was really quite good - polite, prompt ... and with no requirement to badger passers by to enter. Top all of this off with a €26 bill and I can tell you that I wa quite pleased with my last meal of this holiday.

To commiserate our final night on holiday, we had cocktails at a fairly swank looking cocktail bar right on the water so that we could see our last Greek Island sunset. And what a sunset it was. Certainly one of the better ones we had seen, so we quickly whipped out our cameras and took some snaps for memory sake. The sun then disappeared between what looked like a slot in the clouds and did not return for the remainder of the evening. It seemed quite poetic.

On our final morning in Naxos I awoke to two things. The first was loads of rain. Given that we had clothes drying on some chairs outside our hotel room, it was quite a scuttle to get them inside. The second was thunder. Plenty of thunder. More thunder than I recall ever having seen. Every five second or so there would be a flash of lightening and a few seconds late there would be thunder to accompany it. I was deeply concerned that such a store would prevent the fast boat on which were booked making the journey from Naxos to Pireaus for the onward journey back home. This only added to my pre flight, cat on a hot tin roof thing I have before most flights Have I packed everything? Have I forgotten anything? What time is the flight? What time is the boat? Where is my passport? Do we have time for breakfast? On reflecton, I really do feel for Mel during these times.

By the time we had finished our breakfast the lightening had subsided and the female proprietor of the hotel - who really was a nice woman, though I never did get her name - has quite confident that the inclement weather was not going to cause our boat any problems. Eventually, she would prove to be correct. But in the meantime, Mel and I turned down her offer to have her son drop us off at the dock so that we could take one last look around the shops of Naxos town. What we did not know then that at 9:30am nothing much of interest was open. So we ended up down by the port anyway and chase the last cafe, as you head toward the dock, to kill some time in. It was really quite a nice cafe, too. Two girls sat beside us and, Greece being Greece, lit up a cigarette each. As was our way on this trip, we did not say anything to them because smoking is what the Greeks do. But this was the end of our trip and we really had had enough of cigarette smoke, so we moved down a couple of tables. How bad did we feel when one of the girls waved to get our attention and then told us that if we had said something they would not have lit up. She seemed like a nice, genuine woman. But I think it might have been a case of damned if you do, damned if you don't. I had no intention of trying to force my Anglo-American values onto the locals. Still, I felt terrible. Still do.

The day got better, though. Courtesy of a nice guy at the counter of the ferry ticket sales outlet, we took advantage of a free upgrade to business class on the fast boat to Pireaus, which got us to Pireaus with a couple of hours to kill before we needed to head off to the airport. I have mentioned previously that Pireaus holds no great place in my heart and I can tell you that Mel is of a similar mind. I can, however, qualify this by saying that I developed a new found admiration for the dodgy street sellers of the dodgy merchandise you see all over Pireaus. When we had first arrived in Pireaus two weeks ago it was quite sunny, so the sellers were flogging CDs, binoculars and videos. As soon as the rain turned up, as it had on this day, they were selling umbrellas. You have to give them credit for their versatility and opportunism.

Anyway, rather than hang around a place that neither of us was really into, we decided to take the Metro into Athens for a whistle stop tour. As an English speaker, it is a breeze getting around Athens. There are plenty of signs in English and even the Metro voice overs have an English option. I imagine this is a side effect of the recent Olympics Games. Regardless of the cause, I found getting around a very comfortable exercise. With no real destination in mind we got off at Victoria Station. The surrounding areas looked quite a bit dodgy, to say the least, so we promptly headed south to what looked like more friendly pastures. While I do not want to assert to strong an opinion about Athens - having been there for all of an hour and a half - what Mel and I saw was not much different to Pireaus. That is to say, we did not think much of it. We saw some buildings of significance up in the mountains above the city (yes, I feel like an idiot not knowing what they are) but we felt underwhelmed. We quickly dived down a quaint looking mall and picked what must have been the most crowded place in the mall to eat. As the weather was still not suited for al fresco dining, we moved inside. We almost turned straight back around for all the smoke in there. In fact, we even told the waiter that the smoke was just too much for us, but either he did not quite understand us or he was a very smooth operator because all he did was lead us furthe into the restaurant where, obligingly, Mel and I sat down. In the end, I was quite that he did as the staff were friendly and the service was prompt. Certainly more so than I have come to expect in London.

For reasons unknown to me, Mel and I spent much time pouring over the bill we received at the end of our Mel. Suddenly we realised that we were beginning to understand the Greek Alphabet. That was an exciting moment. Unfortunately, one of the waiters misinterpreted this and ran over to check our bill was ok. It was, other than my observation that the mean we had eaten cost almost double what it would have on any of the islands we had visited. This, I understand, is the nature of big cities everywhere.

Following this insight, we left for the airport. Our holiday was over.