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.

Rhodes

To leave Turkey I caught a bus from Selçuk to Marmaris and a ferry to the Greek island of Rhodes, arriving in Rhodes Town on a Friday night with no hotel booking. This was a risky business—Rhodes is a very popular destination, especially on a weekend—but I was lucky and found a room for four days until I could catch the next ferry to Crete.

Rhodes is a walled medieval town, apparently the largest inhabited in Europe, and its business is commercial tourism. The main drag goes on forever with souvenirs, jewellery, up-market fashion, down-market trinkets and carpets, and is punctuated by squares filled with restaurants, cafes and bars with families and couples and groups of holidaying students. Local children zip between them all on mopeds.

But there are also quiet lanes. On the Saturday, a hot, clear, bright blue summer day (as they all bloody are!),  I sat at a foldaway table and drank bottled beer from a glass beneath an umbrella in a weed-strewn, pebble-stone lane of stone buildings rendered in a crumbling pale yellow mortar with terracotta tiled awnings and weathered wooden doors. The tourist crowds jostled just two lanes away but here the only impetus was a light breeze pushing the crumpled paper wrapper from my gyros around on my plate.