Karpathos Stop Over

Tuesday, July 05, 2011—Pigadia, Karpathos, Greece



Landed in the unfortunately named Pigadia today (it sounds like the name one would give a hog breeding festival in the Midwest or something, or maybe where Piglet from Winnie the Poo might go if he decided to head for the big city), which is the main town and main port of the island of Karpathos. It’s a pretty nice place, a typical Greek town built around its harbor and rising up the hills behind it. I can already tell, though, that island is going to be a short stop for me. Today I went for a hike and then spent an hour of so on the town’s very touristy main beach. While doing all this I had a serious been-there-done-that kind of feeling, by which I mean I’ve already figured out, both thru being here and reading more deeply about the island, that this place has nothing to offer me that I haven’t already done better, or at least a well, on Crete.


There’s supposedly some town in the north that’s been cut off from the rest of the world where people still live an “authentic” way of life (whatever the hell that means), but I’ve also read that they live off tourism there now, that busses dump people off so they can see this old way of living. All this sounds fishy to me, like the people there are kind of playing themselves for the tourists. Either way, it doesn’t sound all that interesting. So I plan on taking the next boat to Rhodes, which leaves Thursday and around twelve-thirty in the afternoon. That means I have one more day here. I think I’m going to spend it trying to hunt down some more secluded beaches, places where there aren’t millions of people playing paddle ball (Europeans love that shit), paying to sit on lounges and under umbrellas, and generally being tourist sheep.


I’m realizing now that I’ve finally left Crete that I don’t really know what I want from the Dodecanese, to the point where I almost blew off my ferry this morning and stayed in Sitia. One thing I’m beginning to see is that if I do write a book about this place it needs to be primarily a Crete book: that’s the place that most interests me and I will know by far best when all is said and done. So maybe this Dodecanese trip will be a short run that serves mostly to give me parts of Greece to compare to Crete, to give me some perspective, in other words. What I find frustrating about these Islands (all Greek Islands, actually, except for Crete) is that each one has one or two aspects to it that really intrigues me, but others that turn me off. So I think I might just hop thru these islands sampling the good stuff and heading off to the next point (for example, I’m really interested in the historical aspects of Rhodes Town, but the rest of the island, beautiful as it may be, sounds like an over-priced tourist hell I wouldn’t mind skipping). If that’s how things go down it means I’ll have ten to fifteen days back on Crete to hit some spots there I missed and really dig deeply into the place. It’s all guesswork for the moment, though—I may very well find islands up here that grab me. If that happens everything of course changes.


I’ve also got to admit to some burnout at this point. I’ve got slightly more than a month to go and that been-there-done-that feeling I mentioned before is becoming quite prevalent in general; as I studied up on the Dodecanese these last few days I kept getting the feeling that I know exactly what I'll find when I get to each island. So far with Karpathos this feeling has proved to be accurate. Not sure what all this means. Maybe nine weeks in one go is too long and I’m just done. Or maybe I realize spreading myself too thin for my purposes and just concentrating on the surface, which means I’m not seeing the true character of the where I’m at. Or maybe I’m just right: maybe there’s a similarity to experience here, a limitation I have to deal with. Still playing with all these ideas …






The ferry over here did surprise me a bit. The only boats I’ve taken since coming here are the relatively little ones that ply the southwest coast of Crete. So I guess I was expecting a bigger version of one of those. What I got was a massive ferry, with sleeping rooms, lounges of various types, and a huge cargo hold that was carrying big trucks as well as cars, plus a whole bunch of other crap. It was pretty grungy, though—the ship seemed old--1960s old--and everything about it was worn, faded, unkempt. But it got me here and only cost nineteen Euros for the four-plus hour trip. I wonder how small the islands have to be, how close together, and how small the passenger number is before these beasts drop out in favor of smaller, more interesting craft …