Short Trip to Greece or Travelling Without Herodotus

Note: Harry James, the author of this travel squib, hinted it'd been previously "butchered" in a MID East newspaper he doesn't want to name, and offered it to me to reprint if I wanted. Well, it was such a pile of debris I can't believe anyone actually would put such rubbish in print. I told him he'd have to revise extensively and put some content in the damn thing ... but after that he made himself scarce. You know Harry. So I finally did the job myself -- might as call me co-author, no hell, author!

By JD (sans Harry)

The cheerful, yacht-infested horizon of Bodrum drifted away behind us. The glistening white ferry throbbed and rumbled as it turned its bulk westward, aiming at a rocky outcrop some 5 kilometers away. Its blue & white Greek flag fluttered jauntily as off we chugged toward Greece on a warm September morning.

I’d stared yearningly for years at these tantalizingly close islands (at least four Greek islands can be seen clearly from Bodrum) from the Turkish side. Now I was on my way to see one – the nearest and commonest destination – Kos. The open-air three-decker was well populated but not packed by Turkish and Western tourists along with foreign residents of Bodrum, making a quick visa run.

It took barely 40 minutes for the propeller driven craft to reach Kos Town, which was evidence that the island was as close as it had always looked.

The only trouble was – Greece didn’t seem to have been informed of our arrival, mine or anyone else’s. Our ferry docked at Kos port simultaneously with one from another Turkish port. Out we trundled eagerly onto the receiving dock but suddenly the group came to a halt. As I stared in disbelief, another mob of arrivals now converged on the same narrow corner without even an open door to suggest ingress. Uncomfortable minutes, at least ten of them, each filled with 60 seconds, inched by painfully. The crowd behaved like a good bunch of souls--no one complained or cursed --and patiently adapted to stasis

Surely there’s a misunderstanding here! Surely, a big fat smiling Greek playing a bouzouki will leap out and shout, “Welcome to Greece!” But no, when they finally opened up, it was only a single narrow door– through which both groups trickled at a rate that could not be described as a “flow experience.”

Once we got inside, it was obvious that the Greeks were checking everyone thoroughly, as though for a civil service exam. At one point, a sop was thrown to the applicants – a “new line for Europeans” was opened– at which point the crowd rerouted itself appropriately and without a fuss. Yet the Greek customs man (small, not fat, not smiling) shouted “Silence!” The absurd comment hung in the air.

“Silence?” scoffed a quick-witted youth, “Hey let’s sing a song.” No Zorba figure however emerged to relieve the monotony.

Compared to the immigration process at this minuscule, seemingly insignificant seaport, Heathrow or JFK at rush hour would have been a breeze (as I cruelly kept repeating to people). I finally emerged on the other side of this constipated process a free man, or so I thought.

Little did I know that I was centimeters, no, millimeters, short of becoming a permanent resident (or detainee) of Kos due to a personal credit crunch that paralleled the disastrous one going on in the world at large.

However there was the usual perfunctory bus “tour” to get over with first. This one, led by a young woman with good intentions but poor judgment, did not rise above expectations. Dissent broke out first at Kos’s most famous sight, the Asclepion, where we had only a few minutes to see the ancient medical school where the island’s most famous resident, Hippocrates, (he of the famous oath) had taught in the 5th or 6th c. BC. I was not especially upset as I have a short museum attention span (that includes old rocks of any kind), but others complained bitterly. We sped through other minor sights that escape my memory.

The best of course, as always, was lunch. I’d long been anticipating my first real Greek salad in years. We were bussed up the steep eastern slope to a mountain village (Zia I believe) full of excellent views of the surrounding countryside and dozens of picturesque hotels and tavernas. We had lunch in the best known of the latter, The Olympus, where the group sat around separately in the neutral, desultory way of people who will never be more than strangers.

I ordered the long anticipated dish, plus rabbit stew and Greek beer. The food was decent but not spectacular. Quite a few of the diners entertained themselves (with no objection from the restaurant staff!) by throwing scraps of meat and French fries to an array of animals, cats, dogs and chickens, hungrily waiting on the street below. (I was amused by the way the chickens competed well for the French fries, picking them up in their beaks like worms, then down the hatch with a neat head toss). After lunch, there was time for a quick coffee in the atmospheric cafes, yes-real coffee, not Nescafe! I was delighted in one of these ancient bars to see a battered bouzouki sitting on a table (hmm, is that the one Zorba played?). The bus tape had included quite a few Theodorakis numbers that I’d enjoyed trying to identify.

[Descending the mountain slope, I spotted something on Kos that had intrigued me when looking from the Turkish side—a plume of whitish stuff rising in the air. What I’d imagined as an immense hot springs throwing off steam was actually a garbage dump! This was closed the year after.]

The brief bit of fun over, the irritable and increasingly rude group of mixed Western & Turkish tourists (they’d argued with the young lady guide the whole way) was brought back to Kos city for dispersal. I’d learned that Turkish Lira were not accepted in Kos (I’d paid by credit card for lunch and exchanged lira for euros with the tour guide to pay for the coffee), and so my first task was to get some of that coveted currency. As no banks were open on the weekend, I found an ATM machine easily enough. The damn fussy gadget rejected my US Visa card, which I had foolishly used in Turkey that morning to draw out Turkish lira that I now realized were worthless. Stupid card! Stupid bank! Or just plain stupid me. There might have been some limitation on the card that I’d forgotten. I tried my other, UAE based card. Confirming my suspicions of an international conspiracy directed at me, it also refused my request with the same bland but poisonous message: “This transaction has been declined, please try again later.”

Thanks dear, polite machine! (How I wished I could have wreaked a Terminator like destruction on the worthless mechanism in a reversal of the "I'll be back!" scene).

With no euros in my pocket, the charms of Kos rapidly receded. I considered my options. The last boat to Bodrum at 4pm was one of them, so I headed back to the port, guided by some friendly fellow passengers doing the visa run.

I thought: well, the Greeks didn’t want to let us in, so getting out will be a breeze. Wrong again. The same sticky line, same narrow door and same picky officials. When I’d inched (or centimetered) to the right window, behind the experienced departees and asked if I needed a boat ticket before boarding, the answer was sadly yes. In Turkey the option of buying a return ticket had been offered, but didn’t seem crucial since I was thinking of spending the night.

At this moment I understood the sinister implications of my series of small errors. No euros, no ticket! No ticket, no boat! And with those incredible sticklers behind the immigration desks on the lookout for the slightest faux pas, no boat could mean stuck in Kos for the rest of my life! Though deeply puzzled as to how I, an experienced traveler, at least so I thought, had fallen into such a trap, the boat's imminent departure prevented me from speculating on the deeper causes of my dilemma.

Instead an Odysseus like guile was required!

Quickly improvising, I went into the currency exchange business. Finding I enjoyed this line of trade quite a bit, I stood beside the boat ticket office offering excellent exchange rates for Euros, 31 to 50 to be exact. No one seemed to have this many euros, however, and so my chances diminished with the rapidly shrinking queue. The last man however, an affable Turk did and graciously swapped. What though if he hadn’t had any?

I made it onto the last ferry of the day – but not before learning that the privileged line for “Europeans” could have included me with my US passport but for my heroic humility in refusing any such thought and sticking it out with the Turks.

The explanation for this cash drought and near calamity was a fraud case that had temporarily closed down my UAE bank’s debit card operations. In apology for Greece, it seems that illegal immigration is rife on the islands, especially the outer rim such as the Dodecaleses. In the meantime, though, the Greek Tourism authority should cancel those TV ads that show the country as a nonstop Bacchanalia in utopia. I did not encounter one orgy.

Anyway, as a brief glance at tacky Kos--with its endless Euro-style sidewalk cafes and technicolor pix of fried chicken, hamburgers, French fries and Heineken revealed--the Turkish side is less mass-market and somehow more appealing. I rearrived in the city of Herodotus with a sense of relief. And by coincidence at that very moment I was reading the final pages of Ryszard Kapuscinski’s Travels with Herodotus wherein the author describes his journey to Herodotus’s birthplace. He writes,

"From the island of Kos, I sailed to Halicarnassus, where Herodotus was born, on a small ship. En route, the taciturn, aged sailor lowered the Greek flag on the mast and hoisted the Turkish one. Both were crumpled, faded, and free... The town lay well within the arc of the blue-green bay, on whose waters, in this autumnal time of year, many yachts were idling. The policeman whom I queried about the way to Halicarnassus corrected me–to Bodrum, he said, and that is how the place is now known in Turkish."

The lovely coincidence of arriving in Bodrum together (imaginatively) with an author I admired-- convinced me that in spite of the superficial and nearly pointless journey I’d made, there was perhaps a lot more significance to dig out of this place than I’d thought and what better way then to dig into the “father of history” – Herodotus himself?

I’d also learned something significant on my own: places that seem very near geographically may actually be very far away in other dimensions. Oh yes, and don’t forget to bring euros!

(Be sure to read the next exciting installment: Harry takes on Kos ATM minotaur)