Leaving Santorini

I was dragged away protesting by the bus from Oia and shuttled under duress to the awaiting Athens ferry.  There I was treated to the strangest sight.

As the foot passengers queued to enter the gangways either side of the vehicle ramp, four men came scuttling out of the car deck. They were carrying what looked like someone on a stretcher, judging by the care with which they were handling the load, but it seemed too small and too heavy to be a person. As they approached, it came into view: strapped to a wooden pallet beneath a wet blanket was a giant sea turtle, alert and looking around with small head movements to assess the predicament he'd found himself in, which was no doubt as much a mystery to him as it was to any of us. The ferry stewards halted the queue of passengers and the turtle-burdened four conveyed the confused creature back into the ferry and disappeared up into the passenger decks. Maybe he had a first class cabin.

When all the aquatic reptiles and sea fauna carried on litters were comfortably aboard, we cattle charged up the stairs and spread through the vessel in a game of musical chairs, fastening ourselves to seats and then looking around and wondering if we should abandon this one for the really good one in the corner, chancing it, losing it, turning back and being foiled and charging up stairs to the next deck where perhaps better seats were counting down. The limited lounge areas that quickly swelled with bodies and backpacks were augmented with seating in a burger restaurant, Goody's, which attracted packs of holidaying teenagers. The only place to read a book or get any writing done was on the outside decks. Here there were plenty of seats, ingeniously designed for a Mediterranean ship to be an unbearable greenhouse: all perspex walls, plastic ceiling and airflow non-existent. Who would want fresh air on the open sea? It is clearly a clever ploy to drive you to upgrade your ticket for another €16.50 to access the cool, quiet, comfortable and civilised business class "distinguished lounge" on deck six, which is precisely what I did.

The Aegean

I suspect it's a cliché to say it, but the colours of the Aegean waters are strikingly beautiful in their variety. It's remarkable that, if you were to dip a glass into the water at the shore and another in the middle of the vast sea, a substance of which two samples are identically transparent can vary in colour so dramatically from overlapping shades of peacock blue and turquoise at the beachside to the deep sea's lazuline cobalt at noon and purplish ultramarine at sunset.

Two hours after boarding the morning ferry to Santorini, Crete disappears.  In every direction now the water meets the sky.  To the west the firmament is a pale powder blue and to the east it’s almost white.  Crete lies over the southern edge of the sea, betrayed only by a faint beige burst on the horizon of smog and ambient heat twisting and coiling into the sky like a daylight nebula.

Out in the middle of these two great unbroken hemispheres of blue we pass a solitary sailboat.  Why does this amaze me?  I’m sitting aboard a vessel which is the descendant of these very such craft which populated the Greek islands for millennia.

The ferry from Rhodes to Crete

The ferry leaves from Akantia harbour, one of three in Rhodes Town.  It is 33°C and cloudless, and semi-industrial Akantia is hot, dusty, and shadeless with trucks and freight trailers splitting the backpackers and ferry passengers on the oily road who arrive on foot.  They’ve probably been told, as I have, to arrive an hour before the ferry departs, but it isn’t here and we all crowd into the little shade from the overhead sun that the ticket booths provide.

It finally arrives and everyone clambers aboard.  This is going to be a thirteen-hour trip arriving at 4.30am, so I scout as peaceful a spot as I can for a few hours kip later on.  Seated at the table next to me, however, is an unshaven thirty-something-old Greek bloke (Greek men all must shave with the handle end of blunt butter knives).  He is talking non-stop at the top of his voice to two wordless women across the table as if they’re on a mobile phone half a continent away.  His monologue is relentless.  Food doesn’t stop him; he talks right through it.  His voice is so obtrusive that others at tables around us stare at him.  He appears to enjoy the undivided attention he must think he commands, not realising that to disregard him is like trying to ignore a jet engine while standing on the runway.  I move across the lounge next to a family with a baby for some peace.