Monday, July 11, 2011—Diafani, Karpathos, Greece
Back in Karpathos (actually I got here yesterday morning—it’s just before five in the evening now). This time I’m in the northern part of the island, in a little port town called Diafani. I like this place much better than Pigadia. Here there are just enough travelers to keep things interesting but nothing approaching the tourist hoards I found down south. In fact there’s very much an old world feel here; there are even quite a few of the older women who still wear traditional dress, (which to my American eyes makes them look a bit like a cross between nuns, people in mourning, and medieval peasants). There’s not much too do here except go hiking and hang out at a handful of little pebble beaches, which is fine by me. The only negative is that this time of the year this side of the island is quite windy (the roar was great to go to sleep to last night). However, this wind has gotten me to appreciate the pebble beach: with no sand to fly in your face windy days on these things can be quite enjoyable.
Today I had a great day. I hiked down south about an hour to a beach area called Papa Mina Bay. The hike was great, a beautiful little jaunt thru pine and scrub communities. Papa Mina Bay, though, turned out to be a pretty mediocre, exposed stretch of pebbles (though it did have some shady areas). On the way there, though, I noticed a great little cove with a bit of beach to it that looked very accessible (there are lots of little stretches of beach around here you simply can’t get to by land). So, after hanging around Papa Mina a bit I headed back to the other beach, which was around the halfway point back to town. It turned out that I’d been right, the beach was quite accessible, via a little drainage which dumped me out right on the shore. When I got there there was a couple who’d beat me to the place. No matter, a little rock outcrop effectively cut the place into two sections, so they had there section and I had mine. After about an hour they left and I had the idyllic little place all to myself.
I then proceeded to play Robinson Crusoe for the rest of the afternoon. (I mean, that’s what it seemed like: though I was only a half hour or so from town I felt like I was at the edge of the world, that there wasn’t another human being for miles and miles). So yeah, it was a tough day, with nothing to do but swim in a little perfect green-blue indentation in the coastline and then sprawl naked on the warm stones, as the cooling water lapped up my body varying degrees, depending on how much the wind happened to be gusting at any given moment. Being so close to town I found it hard to believe that only two other people had found the place—it’s clearly visible from the trail. (But then I also only saw four people all together at Papa Mina, two at the beach and two coming there off the trail as I was leaving, so maybe there simply weren’t very many people around to discover it.) I believe it’s places like this, experiences like this that separate travelers from the tourists. To get to a place like my little cove you have to leave the resorts and strike out on your own, go backwoods and hit the trail—stop doing what you’re told, in other words. The sad truth is that most of the people lounging on crowded beaches in places like Rhodes or even Pigadia don’t deserve to have their own little slice of paradise—they simply haven’t earned it. The saddest thing is that most of them wouldn’t understand such a place even if they found it. “Where’s the snack bar?” they’d be saying. “Where my chaise lounge?” “You mean we have to walk all the way back too!”
[Reading over what I just wrote and I’m thinking it sounds like I’m being a bit superior, but, damn it, it’s the truth!—Most of the visitors I meet here have almost no sense of adventure or even much curiosity as to what might out there beyond the tourist walls.]
My day had only one negative: I got sunburned. This surprised me a bit because I’m so dark now that I thought I was past that stage and because I really wasn’t out there all that long. What I think happened was a combination of not having got much sun for several days, which means I’ve lightened up a touch, and the fact that I spend most of my time today lounging half in the water and half out it; the burn is almost entirely on my chest, the front of my shoulders and the tops of my arms, which leads me to believe that they were catching the sun reflecting of the water, which amped up its power. This is a bummer, as I wanted to go back there tomorrow morning. Oh well, I guess I’ll have to spend tomorrow mostly in the water or lying on my stomach—because I am going back!
I had a good time here last night too. I ate at a little restaurant called La Gorgona, which is run by an Italian woman. It’s a really neat place, in that I felt more like I was sitting out on someone’s private deck than in a restaurant. There were kids and dogs and cats running around (even more so than in most restaurants I’ve found here) and a general feeling that you were some weird family party instead of a paying establishment. I also stumbled into the Greek musical equivalent of and Irish session. It was just too guys, one who I think was the Italian woman’s husband on bouzouki, and another man on a bowed instrument that sounded a lot like a violin but which he played while it rested in his lap (they were actually playing at the restaurant next door to the one I was at, but it was so close that I could almost have reached out and touched the musicians--I think both restaurants are owned by the same people). I’ve yet to learn much about Greek traditional music, but I liked what I heard (it sounded to my very untrained ears kind of like Irish jigs and reels meet Middle Eastern music). I wish I could find more of this kind of stuff, but the truth is I really have no clue where to look, except to hang out in more remote areas and hope I get lucky.
Notes:
Trying to figure out my next move. I realize now that I left Rhodes Town in a panic: I really hated the place and it triggered a huge round of anxiety attacks and a spiraling depression unlike any I’ve experienced here. I’m back to considering visiting one more Dodecanese Island before heading back to Crete—one of the more out-of-the-way and less touristy ones, of course. I’ll be heading down to Pigadia again tomorrow afternoon and I’ll see what the ferry schedule looks like (some ferries stop here and some don’t, so it’s better to be down in Pigadia for that sort of thing). I still may just go down to Crete, though. I’m beginning to think that my book might require a second trip here, that I may be right back in these islands next summer. If I’m feeling that way a week from now that could change things for me this trip quite a bit.
Maybe it’s just luck of the draw in regards to the places I’ve chosen to visit on Karpathos, but this island seems to be strangely goat free: I’ve hardly seen any since I’ve been here. If that is truly the case I wonder why that is. Strange.
Monday, July 11, 2011
Saturday, July 9, 2011
Many Shots of Rhodes Town
The Rhodes to Ruin? / Going "Home" to Crete
Friday, July 08, 2011—Rhodes Town, Rhodes, Greece
I got into Rhodes around a quarter of eight last night. One of the rules I have while traveling is never to arrive in a new town at night, if it can at all be helped. It’s too disorienting and stressful, which are states that can easily lead to bad decision making. In this case that didn’t really happen to too great of an extent. However, I did allow something to happen I usually don’t let go down. For the first time on this trip I let myself be “captured” by one of those pension owners who wait at the dock when the boats come trying to pick up customers. Now these people aren’t necessarily bad or anything—just a touch aggressive for my tastes. Plus, I don’t like agreeing to stay at a place until I’ve seen it (I also don’t like that “hooked fish” feeling I get when they start talking to me). But in this case it was getting dark, I was tired, and I didn’t feeling like traipsing thru dark windy medieval alleys in search of a room.
So I let myself be corralled by the old lady whose place turned out to be a pretty good deal. It’s only thirty Euros a night, which is cheap for this town (especially since the room has its own bathroom and a refrigerator), and it’s in the Jewish Quarter, which is where I had hoped to be staying (it’s just off the main drag, but is relatively quiet, especially at night). The only problem, which I amazingly failed to notice when checking out the room, is that it and everything in it is permeated by the smell of cigarettes, which is pretty damn disgusting.
I did make one bad decision, though. By the time I got settled in here it was almost nine o’clock and I hadn’t eaten anything of any substance for about ten hours. So tied, hungry, and feeling pretty lost, I ended up eating at one of the tourist joints just down the road from my room. The food wasn’t bad or anything, but it wasn’t great and it was overpriced. Plus I had to listen to some really bad guitar-playing/singing duo who were doing songs by groups like REM, even though you could tell they had no clue of the meaning of the lyrics coming out of their mouths. Needless to say, this part of my evening was pretty painful. (It became even more painful when I realized this restaurant was only fifty feet from a very non-touristy place called Mandala, which was highly recommended by Lonely Planet and turned out to be even better they said it was—I had lunch there today.)
Rhodes Town itself is turning out to be everything I feared it would be: a touristy nightmare of staggering proportions. The medieval streets and crumbling fortress walls that this place is renowned for are fascinating. But that almost doesn’t matter because the place is so plowed under by tourists and endless tourist shops selling the same stuff and mediocre, interchangeable restaurants with annoying touts out front trying to get you to go in—it’s like Hania times ten. Still, I tried to make the best of it and do the tourist thing, well, because there’s really nothing else to do here (except go to what has to be one of the most crowded beaches in the world), and because there were some things I definitely wanted to see. So I went to the art museum, saw the Knights of St. John’s Castle, went to a famous mosque, etc. It was an OK day I guess—but a hot, crowded, and somewhat stressful one as well.
I did have one truly disappointing destination today and that was the mosque Lawrence Durrell lived in back in the 1940s. The tour books all mention it, but none say that it’s totally fenced off and you can’t go inside, that it’s a dilapidated wreck that’s only just now beginning to be refurbished. This really sucked because what I could see looked quite interesting (there was an old Muslim graveyard on the grounds that looked especially cool). Dear butt monkeys from Lonely Planet—what the fuck?
Speaking of Durrell, I was told there’d be decent bookstores in this town—but there aren’t any! I looked and asked around and everybody looked at me like I was crazy. So I’m still stuck with the bad SciFi I brought! A well-stocked Kindle is really looking like the way to go right now …
I did make a big decision today, which owes a bit, I suppose, to my experience on Rhodes. I’m scuttling the whole Dodecanese part of this trip and heading back to Crete. I simply don’t have the heart or the interest to expand my trip into these islands. There are several reasons for this decision. First off I don’t want to be a tourist flitting from place to place seeing things but not really experiencing them, which is what would happen if I kept heading north. I’m realizing that the Dodecanese are simply too big and far flung to travel thru the way I want to in the time I have left. Crete’s also too big to see in just a month. Since I’ve already devoted so much time to Crete, given the realities I’ve just discussed, there really isn’t any option but to head to that island. And again, there’s a book to be written, which I’ve said many times has to be a Crete book—and I don’t yet quite have what I need from there to write such a book. Plus, I just want to go back there. I already miss Crete, feel like I’m wasting my time searching up here for what I’ve already found there. Everyone has their special places in this world, places that speak to them. Crete’s such a place for me. It’s where I should be right now.
I’m not going straight back, though. I want to pick up my Crete travels right where they left off -- in Sitia. There’s no ferry heading there until Tuesday. There is one heading just to Karpathos, though, on Sunday morning. Now I didn’t have that great of an experience there, but as I was heading up to Rhodes the ferry I was on stopped at Diafani, a little port on the northern part of the island. The Lonely Planet guide didn’t make the place sound all that interesting, but it looked really cool from the boat, like a place that would be fun to explore, to relax in and hike out of. So I’m going to head over there on Sunday morning and then pick up the ferry to Sitia there on Tuesday.
Notes:
When I was coming into Rhodes I noticed something very recognizable to a Southern Californian: smog; it was hanging over the city like a yellow-brown halo. A bad vide moment. An L.A. moment in Greece. I frown.
I got into Rhodes around a quarter of eight last night. One of the rules I have while traveling is never to arrive in a new town at night, if it can at all be helped. It’s too disorienting and stressful, which are states that can easily lead to bad decision making. In this case that didn’t really happen to too great of an extent. However, I did allow something to happen I usually don’t let go down. For the first time on this trip I let myself be “captured” by one of those pension owners who wait at the dock when the boats come trying to pick up customers. Now these people aren’t necessarily bad or anything—just a touch aggressive for my tastes. Plus, I don’t like agreeing to stay at a place until I’ve seen it (I also don’t like that “hooked fish” feeling I get when they start talking to me). But in this case it was getting dark, I was tired, and I didn’t feeling like traipsing thru dark windy medieval alleys in search of a room.
So I let myself be corralled by the old lady whose place turned out to be a pretty good deal. It’s only thirty Euros a night, which is cheap for this town (especially since the room has its own bathroom and a refrigerator), and it’s in the Jewish Quarter, which is where I had hoped to be staying (it’s just off the main drag, but is relatively quiet, especially at night). The only problem, which I amazingly failed to notice when checking out the room, is that it and everything in it is permeated by the smell of cigarettes, which is pretty damn disgusting.
I did make one bad decision, though. By the time I got settled in here it was almost nine o’clock and I hadn’t eaten anything of any substance for about ten hours. So tied, hungry, and feeling pretty lost, I ended up eating at one of the tourist joints just down the road from my room. The food wasn’t bad or anything, but it wasn’t great and it was overpriced. Plus I had to listen to some really bad guitar-playing/singing duo who were doing songs by groups like REM, even though you could tell they had no clue of the meaning of the lyrics coming out of their mouths. Needless to say, this part of my evening was pretty painful. (It became even more painful when I realized this restaurant was only fifty feet from a very non-touristy place called Mandala, which was highly recommended by Lonely Planet and turned out to be even better they said it was—I had lunch there today.)
Rhodes Town itself is turning out to be everything I feared it would be: a touristy nightmare of staggering proportions. The medieval streets and crumbling fortress walls that this place is renowned for are fascinating. But that almost doesn’t matter because the place is so plowed under by tourists and endless tourist shops selling the same stuff and mediocre, interchangeable restaurants with annoying touts out front trying to get you to go in—it’s like Hania times ten. Still, I tried to make the best of it and do the tourist thing, well, because there’s really nothing else to do here (except go to what has to be one of the most crowded beaches in the world), and because there were some things I definitely wanted to see. So I went to the art museum, saw the Knights of St. John’s Castle, went to a famous mosque, etc. It was an OK day I guess—but a hot, crowded, and somewhat stressful one as well.
I did have one truly disappointing destination today and that was the mosque Lawrence Durrell lived in back in the 1940s. The tour books all mention it, but none say that it’s totally fenced off and you can’t go inside, that it’s a dilapidated wreck that’s only just now beginning to be refurbished. This really sucked because what I could see looked quite interesting (there was an old Muslim graveyard on the grounds that looked especially cool). Dear butt monkeys from Lonely Planet—what the fuck?
Speaking of Durrell, I was told there’d be decent bookstores in this town—but there aren’t any! I looked and asked around and everybody looked at me like I was crazy. So I’m still stuck with the bad SciFi I brought! A well-stocked Kindle is really looking like the way to go right now …
I did make a big decision today, which owes a bit, I suppose, to my experience on Rhodes. I’m scuttling the whole Dodecanese part of this trip and heading back to Crete. I simply don’t have the heart or the interest to expand my trip into these islands. There are several reasons for this decision. First off I don’t want to be a tourist flitting from place to place seeing things but not really experiencing them, which is what would happen if I kept heading north. I’m realizing that the Dodecanese are simply too big and far flung to travel thru the way I want to in the time I have left. Crete’s also too big to see in just a month. Since I’ve already devoted so much time to Crete, given the realities I’ve just discussed, there really isn’t any option but to head to that island. And again, there’s a book to be written, which I’ve said many times has to be a Crete book—and I don’t yet quite have what I need from there to write such a book. Plus, I just want to go back there. I already miss Crete, feel like I’m wasting my time searching up here for what I’ve already found there. Everyone has their special places in this world, places that speak to them. Crete’s such a place for me. It’s where I should be right now.
I’m not going straight back, though. I want to pick up my Crete travels right where they left off -- in Sitia. There’s no ferry heading there until Tuesday. There is one heading just to Karpathos, though, on Sunday morning. Now I didn’t have that great of an experience there, but as I was heading up to Rhodes the ferry I was on stopped at Diafani, a little port on the northern part of the island. The Lonely Planet guide didn’t make the place sound all that interesting, but it looked really cool from the boat, like a place that would be fun to explore, to relax in and hike out of. So I’m going to head over there on Sunday morning and then pick up the ferry to Sitia there on Tuesday.
Notes:
When I was coming into Rhodes I noticed something very recognizable to a Southern Californian: smog; it was hanging over the city like a yellow-brown halo. A bad vide moment. An L.A. moment in Greece. I frown.
A Few Pigadia Photos
Hitting a Wall in Karpathos
Thursday, July 07, 2011—Pigadia, Karpathos, Greece
I don’t want no ruins
I want a beer and the Boston Bruins
—Martin Mull: Rome and Bored
Heading out of Karpathos in about an hour or so; right now I’m sitting in a little café next to the docks waiting for the boat to come. It’s eleven-thirty in the and already really hot out. It looks like a good day for traveling: there’s only a moderate breeze and the water in the harbor is just slightly textured (when I arrived here the wind was really blowing and waves were slapping up against the cement dock). Feeling good—calm. This is interesting, as yesterday I was in a supremely foul mood. Over what? Nothing and everything …
Ok—here begins a long explanation.
I’ve discovered over the years that, for me at least (and most other people, I’d say), there are two underlying phases to any long trip: the phase where I in some sense fight my surroundings and the phase where those battles get put aside.
It’s a fiction, I believe, a conceit, to believe that anyone ever truly understands the cultural groups met when traveling: any real understanding needs to be based in a deep knowledge of the language first off, and second years of experience with the cultural group speaking it. What happens when a person travels is that cultural matrices rub up against each other; it’s a bit like the social equivalent of tectonic plates meeting. And of course when this happens there is friction, which varies in intensity depending on the time and the place.
I’ve noticed that people tend to deal with this friction in a couple of ways. Some people immediately retreat, complain and in some sense try make the people their visiting behave in the ways they believe that should be behaving—this I think is a mode of behavior quite typical for Americans. The other way is to suppress feelings. I suppose I go against the grain of most of my fellow Americans, as my nature is to follow this second course (there’s a third way to handle all this, which I will discuss later). The trouble with suppression is that this of course eventually catches up with you and you hit a crisis point—and that’s what finally happened to me yesterday.
What triggered this was an event that in itself was quite small and meaningless. (It’s usually this way—as my sister says “One doesn’t trip over a boulder.”) As I mentioned in my previous entry, it’s turned out that Karpathos has little going on that interests me; in retrospect I probably should have skipped this island and headed straight for Rhodes. Still, I did have a free day yesterday to get out of Pigadia and see a little of the island. So, having so little time here, I decided to pick a single destination that sounded interesting, a little beach area called Lefkos, and made a plan to catch the eleven-thirty bus there that morning. The details are boring, so I’ll skip them. But thru a mix up that was at best only partially my fault, I ended up missing the bus, which was the last bus heading to Lefkos that day. Again, minor stuff, not worth getting too bothered about. But it was kind of a last straw for me, I guess, and inwardly mostly I completely went off the rails.
Everything that's been bugging me about this place, about Europeans (as a broad group, as opposed to Greeks specifically), moved front and center in me in one huge wave. I don’t want to go into the details really, as they seem sort of silly when recounted outside the context of my then state of mind—endless cigarette smoking, icy German stares invading my personal space, arrogant idiot drivers, lame-ass electronic/house music everywhere (it’s like they can’t find of way out of the worst aspects of mid-nineties here), and just about all European men between the ages of sixteen and forty something: feminized nightmare fashions victims that aren’t really even men to my American soul, and the beautiful European women who actually find these guys attractive, etc. etc. (see—silly)—but suffice to say I found myself wallowing in petulant hatred.
But like any other wave, once it broke it was gone—the only evidence it ever existed is now found in my memory and these "pages." I now feel clean, much freer than I have during this entire trip—because I have passed into the third way of dealing with this journey’s cultural tectonics: I’m accepting.
Now a lot of people claim they’re in this state when they’re traveling. But if you look just a bit beneath the surface you’ll find that they’re usually full of shit, in denial of big chunks of their feelings. To really hit this place you have to go thru personal dramas that take some time—part of which is, on some level, to be honest enough to admit that you’re going thru this process. Now if there’s one thing I’ve learned about human beings is that dishonesty is practically all of our middle names (there are a few people who seem to be born Buddha souls or to be a reincarnation of Lau Tzu, but they’re so rare that they are almost not worth mentioning).
All of this is a long way of saying that I’ve finally hit the place where I can just let this trip be what it is, instead of fighting it because it’s not what I thought/wished it would be (it is in this battle that dreams become fascist states of being). I’m now in a quite cool frame of mind (of soul?) of course. It’s also an unusual state, in that I don’t think all that many people really reach it (I’ve never made it to this state on any other trip I have taken). Now the fun part begins: I get to find out where this new visions takes me.
OK, enough of the heavy stuff (it’s wearing me out too)—moving on, moving on …
Next stop—Rhodes Town. A huge city by Dodecanese standards (over 50,000 people). I’m finding myself looking more and more forward to the place. After dealing with all the Minoan stuff on Crete I’m itching to see all the Nights of St. John Castle and the general medievalness of the place. I’m also stoked about making a pilgrimage to Lawrence Durrell’s, where he lived in Rhodes just after WW II. It’s an old mosque (or was) and it’s where he wrote Reflections on a Marine Venus, which is still probably the most famous book ever written about Rhodes.
Realizing that I really do need to finish this trip off with a decent block of time on Crete. For this journey it’s the center of my Greek universe, and, as I’ve mentioned multiple times in this diary, the center of any book on Greece I might write. Plus, I just want to go back there. I’m beginning to realize that I’ve fallen pretty hard for the place—and there’s a lot of it still for me to experience. Also Gavdos is really calling me back. I really love that dilapidated backwater of an island …
Notes:
Realizing that I now have the wrong books with me, which is a serious problem. What I mean is that I’ve already read and discarded the “for sure” books I brought with me, books that I knew would mesh well with the (this) road, with Greece, and am now left with the “maybes”—and they’re failing quite miserably. English language books, beyond the Stephen King-type crap, are not all that easy to find here. However, I’ve heard that in Rhodes Town there are plenty of places that stock them. I’m also sure that in Rhodes I can get a hold of Lawrence Durrell’s books. Constance, the one book of his I’ve read here went beautifully with the surroundings—and it isn’t even one of his better books! Durrell is the English-language writer of the Mediterranean. I’ll probably have to lay out quite a few euros for new copies of his stuff, but it will be worth it, I’m sure …
What I’m currently dealing with book-wise:
Juniper Time: A supposedly “classic” bit of SciFi from the late seventies. It sucks: Space opera meets really bad, stereotype Billy Jack-vibe Native American mysticism, as the earth falls into environmental ruin. Three threads that never quite mesh and individually are not particularly well done. Dreaming of Durrell … Prospero’s Cell, a reread of Mountolive and/or Clea, more of the Avignon Quintet, the Revolt of Aphrodite … warm bath literature … exquisite … yummy …
Greece: another late piece of transport. The boat was supposed to leave here by 12:20. It’s not 1:25. No ferry in sight …
I don’t want no ruins
I want a beer and the Boston Bruins
—Martin Mull: Rome and Bored
Heading out of Karpathos in about an hour or so; right now I’m sitting in a little café next to the docks waiting for the boat to come. It’s eleven-thirty in the and already really hot out. It looks like a good day for traveling: there’s only a moderate breeze and the water in the harbor is just slightly textured (when I arrived here the wind was really blowing and waves were slapping up against the cement dock). Feeling good—calm. This is interesting, as yesterday I was in a supremely foul mood. Over what? Nothing and everything …
Ok—here begins a long explanation.
I’ve discovered over the years that, for me at least (and most other people, I’d say), there are two underlying phases to any long trip: the phase where I in some sense fight my surroundings and the phase where those battles get put aside.
It’s a fiction, I believe, a conceit, to believe that anyone ever truly understands the cultural groups met when traveling: any real understanding needs to be based in a deep knowledge of the language first off, and second years of experience with the cultural group speaking it. What happens when a person travels is that cultural matrices rub up against each other; it’s a bit like the social equivalent of tectonic plates meeting. And of course when this happens there is friction, which varies in intensity depending on the time and the place.
I’ve noticed that people tend to deal with this friction in a couple of ways. Some people immediately retreat, complain and in some sense try make the people their visiting behave in the ways they believe that should be behaving—this I think is a mode of behavior quite typical for Americans. The other way is to suppress feelings. I suppose I go against the grain of most of my fellow Americans, as my nature is to follow this second course (there’s a third way to handle all this, which I will discuss later). The trouble with suppression is that this of course eventually catches up with you and you hit a crisis point—and that’s what finally happened to me yesterday.
What triggered this was an event that in itself was quite small and meaningless. (It’s usually this way—as my sister says “One doesn’t trip over a boulder.”) As I mentioned in my previous entry, it’s turned out that Karpathos has little going on that interests me; in retrospect I probably should have skipped this island and headed straight for Rhodes. Still, I did have a free day yesterday to get out of Pigadia and see a little of the island. So, having so little time here, I decided to pick a single destination that sounded interesting, a little beach area called Lefkos, and made a plan to catch the eleven-thirty bus there that morning. The details are boring, so I’ll skip them. But thru a mix up that was at best only partially my fault, I ended up missing the bus, which was the last bus heading to Lefkos that day. Again, minor stuff, not worth getting too bothered about. But it was kind of a last straw for me, I guess, and inwardly mostly I completely went off the rails.
Everything that's been bugging me about this place, about Europeans (as a broad group, as opposed to Greeks specifically), moved front and center in me in one huge wave. I don’t want to go into the details really, as they seem sort of silly when recounted outside the context of my then state of mind—endless cigarette smoking, icy German stares invading my personal space, arrogant idiot drivers, lame-ass electronic/house music everywhere (it’s like they can’t find of way out of the worst aspects of mid-nineties here), and just about all European men between the ages of sixteen and forty something: feminized nightmare fashions victims that aren’t really even men to my American soul, and the beautiful European women who actually find these guys attractive, etc. etc. (see—silly)—but suffice to say I found myself wallowing in petulant hatred.
But like any other wave, once it broke it was gone—the only evidence it ever existed is now found in my memory and these "pages." I now feel clean, much freer than I have during this entire trip—because I have passed into the third way of dealing with this journey’s cultural tectonics: I’m accepting.
Now a lot of people claim they’re in this state when they’re traveling. But if you look just a bit beneath the surface you’ll find that they’re usually full of shit, in denial of big chunks of their feelings. To really hit this place you have to go thru personal dramas that take some time—part of which is, on some level, to be honest enough to admit that you’re going thru this process. Now if there’s one thing I’ve learned about human beings is that dishonesty is practically all of our middle names (there are a few people who seem to be born Buddha souls or to be a reincarnation of Lau Tzu, but they’re so rare that they are almost not worth mentioning).
All of this is a long way of saying that I’ve finally hit the place where I can just let this trip be what it is, instead of fighting it because it’s not what I thought/wished it would be (it is in this battle that dreams become fascist states of being). I’m now in a quite cool frame of mind (of soul?) of course. It’s also an unusual state, in that I don’t think all that many people really reach it (I’ve never made it to this state on any other trip I have taken). Now the fun part begins: I get to find out where this new visions takes me.
OK, enough of the heavy stuff (it’s wearing me out too)—moving on, moving on …
Next stop—Rhodes Town. A huge city by Dodecanese standards (over 50,000 people). I’m finding myself looking more and more forward to the place. After dealing with all the Minoan stuff on Crete I’m itching to see all the Nights of St. John Castle and the general medievalness of the place. I’m also stoked about making a pilgrimage to Lawrence Durrell’s, where he lived in Rhodes just after WW II. It’s an old mosque (or was) and it’s where he wrote Reflections on a Marine Venus, which is still probably the most famous book ever written about Rhodes.
Realizing that I really do need to finish this trip off with a decent block of time on Crete. For this journey it’s the center of my Greek universe, and, as I’ve mentioned multiple times in this diary, the center of any book on Greece I might write. Plus, I just want to go back there. I’m beginning to realize that I’ve fallen pretty hard for the place—and there’s a lot of it still for me to experience. Also Gavdos is really calling me back. I really love that dilapidated backwater of an island …
Notes:
Realizing that I now have the wrong books with me, which is a serious problem. What I mean is that I’ve already read and discarded the “for sure” books I brought with me, books that I knew would mesh well with the (this) road, with Greece, and am now left with the “maybes”—and they’re failing quite miserably. English language books, beyond the Stephen King-type crap, are not all that easy to find here. However, I’ve heard that in Rhodes Town there are plenty of places that stock them. I’m also sure that in Rhodes I can get a hold of Lawrence Durrell’s books. Constance, the one book of his I’ve read here went beautifully with the surroundings—and it isn’t even one of his better books! Durrell is the English-language writer of the Mediterranean. I’ll probably have to lay out quite a few euros for new copies of his stuff, but it will be worth it, I’m sure …
What I’m currently dealing with book-wise:
Juniper Time: A supposedly “classic” bit of SciFi from the late seventies. It sucks: Space opera meets really bad, stereotype Billy Jack-vibe Native American mysticism, as the earth falls into environmental ruin. Three threads that never quite mesh and individually are not particularly well done. Dreaming of Durrell … Prospero’s Cell, a reread of Mountolive and/or Clea, more of the Avignon Quintet, the Revolt of Aphrodite … warm bath literature … exquisite … yummy …
Greece: another late piece of transport. The boat was supposed to leave here by 12:20. It’s not 1:25. No ferry in sight …
Wednesday, July 6, 2011
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 …
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 …
Monday, July 4, 2011
Palekastro - Photos
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