Two Gavdos Entries

Tuesday, July 26, 2011—Gavdos, Crete, Greece

Back in Gavdos. This time I’m camping under a juniper tree at the base of the hill that marks off the eastern boundary of the little settlement of Sarafiniko. It’s a lot hotter here than when I first came thru in early June. It’s also more crowded—there is at least twice the number of people here as there was during my last go round. Still it’s a pretty sleepy place by high-season Greek island standards. Unfortunately Agios Ioannis, my favorite beach here, and maybe my favorite beach in all of Crete, is verging on being a zoo: there are so many campers there it’s practically a tent city. Plus, now it’s truly a post-hippy hipster kind of scene. This doesn’t bother me—they’re about as close to being “my people” as any group I’m likely to run into. But too much of anything even something you like is not a good thing. This place is now verging on that situation.

Still, I’m feeling good, glad I came back here. Like I said before, this trip is essentially over for me—I’m just drifting, hanging out at the beach until I head home. This is a great place for that. Plus it’s cheap: I’m camping for free, which means that food is my only expense here. I need this, as my funds are definitely getting a little low …






Notes:


Greek women are really growing on me. As I’ve said before, there are definitely prettier women in the world, in Europe, but Greek girls definitely have something going for them. Though defining what this is is hard, I admit.


However I will give it a shot.


First off, they don’t seem to have caught the disease American women have that drives them to be as skinny as possible. Greek girls have curves—lots of them—and they’re not afraid to show them. The three Bs—boobs, booty, and belly—are on display in great abundance here, often to truly wonderful effect. I also like the fact that the Greek women tend to wear relatively little in the way of makeup. (In contrast, one of the things I can’t stand about American women is the amount of makeup they wear—about the same as the average circus clown, only arranged differently.) Added to all this is the fact that so many of them have these amazing manes of thick dark curly hair. When you put all this together I’m pretty much is heaven. Now if I could only speak Greek …






I’m beginning to think that this on-line diary might have been a mistake. If nothing else it’s limited my writing: knowing that it’s going to be read “in the raw,” so to speak, I censor myself as I’m going (both consciously and unconsciously), mostly in regards to my feeling, but in some cases events too. These entries will make nice memory triggers if I decide to write more seriously about this experience, but I’m beginning to think that on their own they might be a bit dull (I know this trip has been far more interesting than this diary shows).






The best thing about this trip is the perspective it’s given me on other aspects of my life, on who I am. At times “Too much fucking perspective,” as David St. Hubbins once said.






Thursday, July 28, Gavdos, Crete, Greece


A really hot day today. I don’t know what the temperature was, but it was ninety-plus for sure. What was the killer was that until late this afternoon there was almost no breeze. Oven hot. Still. Crete in true summer form. Most of the day I hid and read under a juniper tree a ways up a hill over-looking Agios Ioannis Beach. About three-thirty I headed down to the waterline where I cooked myself and swam until about five-thirty. I’m now about as tan as I ever remember being.


Not too much else to report. Gavdos is for beaching and for hiking—and it’s way too hot to do any hiking. So there we are.


I’m feeling refreshed by Gavdos; my burn out doesn’t seem as bad as before I got here. This has led me to revise my plans for my last days in Crete a bit. Tomorrow I will be taking the two-thirty boat to Hora Safakilon, where I’ll crash, just for tomorrow night (it’s a good place to catch boats and busses, but from what I’ve read there’s not really much to do there). The next morning I will either be heading over to Frangokastello for a day or two or will catch a bus north, on the road to Lendas, a little out of the way beach area on the southern coast of the Iraklio province (going north to go south—so Cretan!). Like Gavdos, Lendas is supposed to be one of the last little fragments that have managed to stay pretty much the way they were in the 1960s—I’m crossing my fingers that the guidebooks are right on this one too.






Later in the evening …


It’s 9:00 PM as I write this. It’s a lot cooler now, but there is still very little breeze. The junipers are the beach are clam, barely moving, as is the sea, a wine-dark lake turning to silver near shore and farther out as well, as Sarafiniko curves west and is hemmed in by a stone point. Crete is a charcoal gray silhouette on the near horizon (it looks so close I can almost fantasize about being able to swim to it—but it’s really 32 KM away), a giant Catalina closing off the north …

I want to go home—but to a different home.

The diary, I’m now sure, is a failure: it has captured only fragments of what this trip’s been about—and not the important fragments, for the most part. I guess a book calls me …