Litoranea and Specchia

The Litoranea, a narrow and winding clifftop road on the coast bounded by stone walls that run for miles, took me down from Otranto through Porto Badisco, Castro, and on to San Maria de Leuca.  The sea was steely and the sky was grey, and much of the way it rained heavily as I slalomed through roadside sprays of pink and white oleander and lush green trees, listening to Bronx River Parkway and Chris Joss.  Cool.

In Leuca I tried to find a B&B recommended in my Lonely Planet, but was told by the waitress of the cafe which now occupies the building that it closed last year.  However, she happened to run a B&B herself five kilometres out of town in Morciano, to which she gave me directions.  Well, it was fifteen kilometres, not five, and the breeze-block town was depressing as hell, so I kept going until I hit a little town called Specchia.  In the last hour of light I saw a sign for B&B Vento Solare.  I rang the number and spent all my Italian enquiring if a room was available.  After I concluded that it was, the conversation descended into: “Pronto.”  “I’m sorry, I don’t understand.”  “Che?  No capisco.”  “Um… parla inglese?”  “Dov’è lei?”  Well, I found my way and found myself talking to the proprietress’ mother, who spoke no English, while I waited for the proprietress’ son to arrive, who did.  She was very pleasant, but the conversation was stilted and agonisingly slow as I fumbled through my phrasebook, telling her that I’m here on holiday, that Salento is pretty, that her garden is pretty, that I am hungry.  There’s nothing like necessity for learning quickly.

The next day I got a bloody €39 parking ticket in San Cesárea Terme.  The municipal police in Salento prowl for tourists in the high season.  I parked briefly in a lot clearly marked for parking but not for the need to purchase a ticket from the one hidden ticket machine.  I was there for all of ten minutes while I was declined access to my money by a cash machine up the road.

Baia dei Turchi

Just north of Otranto is the Baia dei Turchi, the Turkish Bay, with beautiful beaches concealed from the road.  Sheltered from the hot sun, I entered a pleasant grove of sparse and tall pines and immediately came across a bloke in a makeshift roofless bamboo hut selling drinks and sandwiches.  Next to him was another bloke in a hammock strung between two trees.  After a few minutes walking the grove grows suddenly dense.  I walked a worn dirt track through a tight green tunnel and emerged at a low cliff.  Below me spread the long and narrow beaches, some with rows of fixed umbrellas made of dried palm fronds and others with scattered umbrellas of random colours, against turquoise water.

11

Hanging a wrinkled shirt in the bathroom while you shower just results in a damp, wrinkled shirt.

The REAL top ten

Allow me to let you in on a travel myth: rolling your clothes instead of folding them when you pack does not prevent wrinkles.  Some travel writer just came up with this little gem to pad out a top ten list of travel tips, and it’s since become part of travel lore.  Well it’s bullshit, and I am throwing down the gauntlet.  I will buy a ticket to Milan to get a new shirt custom tailored for the first person to show me a shirt pulled from baggage rolled and wrinkle-free.

Here’s the real top ten travel tips:

1. Laundry.  Fuck.
2. Eurail passes are a rip-off.  It isn’t hard to buy a train ticket in Europe.  It’s harder to buy a bloody lottery ticket.  You still have to book a seat regardless.  Just save your money.
3. Flying makes you fart.  It does.  The body is pressure-sealed (or your lungs would deflate) and just as your ears pop, so do your intestines.  Everybody is either suppressing or releasing, which is either uncomfortable or embarrassing.  And there’s nothing you can do.  Just don’t eat sauerkraut or sit next to Germans.
4. You still need to do that laundry, and the hotel wants to charge you €4.50 for one shirt.
5. The next myth to be invented is the secret to stylish backpacking.  I’ll preempt it: either travel with sherpas or prepare to look like a goose.
6. Mobile phone: use it sparingly just to book hotels and for emergencies.  If you need to use it seriously, buy a pre-paid SIM card in the country you visit.  And data over the air for your iPhone?  Forget it.  There is no affordable solution but to use Wi-Fi.  Which is everywhere.  Except Seville.
7. Your priority of transportation in Europe for comfort should be:
   1. train
   2. ferry
   3. car
   4. walk
   5. dragged behind a tractor through blackberry briars and rose bushes
   6. bus
8. Jet lagged?  For crying out loud, you can put up without alcohol for 12 hours.  Don’t drink on the plane.  It’s a bitch for jetlag.  Brits in particular are shocking for taking this as licence to get shit-faced.  Drink water, all the time.  And then when you arrive, don’t sleep until it’s dark.  Next day: no jet lag.  Voilà.
9. For every week, allocate half a day to doing laundry at a laundromat.  Unless you’re in Greece, Turkey or southern Spain, where there are no laundromats because it’s so cheap just to drop it off and have it done.
10. Create a budget and stick to it.  When you get back, you will have only spent triple.  Be grateful.

Otranto, Italy

A night ferry took me from the west coast of Greece to the heel of Italy, a country where at last I could at least fumble my way through the language.  I had a a four-bed shared cabin booked (in fact, I had two; the previous one sailed while I was in Santorini), but I was the only one in it.  High season in Europe is funny.  It’s busy everywhere, except for little undiscovered pockets.

An eight-hour journey and a six-hour sleep got me to Brindisi at 7am, where I picked up a rental car and headed south.  My first night was nearly spent in the car in Otranto, a popular destination on Puglia’s eastern coast, where six hotels turned me away.  It was a Saturday and I didn’t have a reservation.  I finally found a decent place with a room, the friendly Hotel Minerva, on a side street for €75.  I showered and changed out of shorts and into jeans and wandered into the old town for dinner.

I was heading to a simple pizzeria by the Porta Terra which was recommended in my guidebook, but was arrested at the Piazza del Popolo by two guitarists, a female singer and some cool bossa nova.  All passers-by were stopping to listen, lingering and applauding, and when a prime table was vacated just as I arrived I took it as a cue that this was where I should eat tonight.  They were so good.  I could have closed my eyes when they did The Girl From Ipanema and believed I was watching Antonio Carlos Jobim and João and Astrud Gilberto.  The lead guitarist was a lefty, and not only did he play a right-handed guitar upside-down à la Jimi Hendrix, but it was strung upside-down as well, standard for a right-handed player, which means he deliberately learned all his chords and scales inverted!  Very strange.  And he was really good.

Otranto’s Spanish-built and sympathetically restored castle is today used as a gallery, where the next day I enjoyed a Salvador Dalí exhibit.  I’m usually ambivalent about Dalí and the surrealist movement of the 1930s, but this was sculpture, etchings and sketches from later in his life.

Romania by proxy

In Meteora I ran into a bloke from Romania.  Then he got up, we exchanged addresses, and he told me his name was Neculai (Nicholas) and was also travelling alone.  My Romanian is, of course, inferior par excellence, and being a gracious acquaintance I allowed him to practise entirely his English, which he learned from television.  It sometimes took us forever to convey an idea but, bless him, without his efforts we would just have stared at each other.  We saw two monasteries together and he encouraged me to flout the “no photography” rule until I was busted one too many times by the decent but exasperated monitor and slunk sheepishly away.  He was driving across Greece in his car, which was also his kitchen, bathroom and bedroom, and parlour after dinner when he entertained me with music on his stereo and a bottle of cognac parked on the side of the road.  I brought along a couple of beers and some Greek retsina, which neither of us have had before but concluded tasted like dirty hiking sock rinsewater.  The cognac was lovely, though.  Alexandrio, or something.  Who knows.  After cognac, beer and retsina, I was lucky to remember the way back to my hotel.

Delayed broadcast for your protection

Running behind on the blog again, by five or six days.  If anyone is friends with me on Facebook, my comments there are usually up to date, albeit brief.  I also get a couple of photos up now and again.

Meteora

The monasteries of Meteora in central Greece are built atop towering, sheer rocks. It's a marvel the medieval monks managed it, and it's testimony to their engineering skills. Originally 24 in number, the six monasteries that remain are well-preserved. Indeed, they are still occupied (and have surprisingly modern comforts—electricity, water, heating, and even elevators and small cable cars), though most of the week they are a tourist attraction rather than a place of contemplation. Each closes one day of the week in rotation to function as a monastery.

Busloads of tour groups would arrive and overwhelm the smaller cloisters. The larger ones absorbed them. Other tourists arrived by car, and some by public bus. Only one arrived by foot on the centuries-old stone paths winding through the forests at the foot of the towering rocks.

I visited three of the six monasteries and found exquisite frescoes in all.  St. Nikolas, the smallest and least preserved, is the most charming. The main chapel has a fresco of Judgement Day with God at the top, heaven on the left, and on the right a river of fire and souls flowing down into the mouth of the devil, an enormous fanged serpentine creature.

Kastraki

In Meteora, I stayed in the village of Kastraki. It has a clock tower. Some clocks play a simple melody on the quarter hour, but at 6.15pm, as I sat for an early dinner, the church bell rung just once.  So at 6.30pm I expected the same. Instead, it rang for perhaps three full minutes with no melody (there is only one bell, harsh and sharp sounding) and with no discernible rhythm. It was what you'd expect to hear if you let loose in the bell tower a toddler with Herculean arms and a steel mallet. It was fast, loud, long and very annoying, and yet when I looked around at the locals whiling away the evening in the outside dining area, nobody batted an eye. This must be the demented half-hour chime of the Kastraki clock. At 6.45pm it does nothing at all, and at 7pm it simply tolls seven times.

Athens to Meteora

The ferry from Santorini arrived past midnight and my train to Meteora was leaving at 8.30am.  I spent eight hours in Athens.  Five-and-a-half of those were in my hotel room and three of those in my hotel room bed.  There was a later train, but the five-hour journey would get me into Meteora in the dark.  Buses also drove the route throughout the day, but there is just no comparison to train travel.

From all that I've heard, the acropolis is about the only thing going for Athens, and in mid-July it's teeming in the humid heat with tourists.  I abandoned plans to see it so that I could spend those two extra nights in Santorini, which sounds like complete folly, but, as much as I would like to stand in the agora where Socrates challenged his listeners to think, it's a decision I don't regret.  I'll leave it for another trip.  There is certainly reason to return to Greece.

And so at 6am, with insufficient sleep under my eyelids, I hauled myself out of bed, put away as much breakfast as my addled body could stomach, checked out of the Savoy Hotel, and was wheeled to the train station by my backpack.

The train into the shrub-studded mountains of central Greece passed through charming, unkempt rural stations, the sidings always loaded with ancient wooden cattle cars with boards missing and paint so peeled by the sun that they looked as if somebody had whittled them for tinder, feathering them with a knife so they'd take a spark.  A man a few  seats away gently whistled, tousling the string of prayer beads which so many Greek men carry.  My carriage was less than half full, none of them tourists, all of them Greek and sharing casual comments with one another.  It was a pleasant change after spending the last three weeks in major tourist spots.

We passed the only indication on my trip so far that Greece is in econominc troubles: a long stretch of modern highway half complete, a ribbon of clean new concrete spreading over compacted earth and supporting columns with sections of bridge missing, empty tunnels punched through hills, cranes standing idle, and the entire site deserted.