Greece: A Slippery Adventure
Although Khatmandu is many thousands of miles away I think of it as being next door. I have been there twice, important things happened there and I know the road. When I remember it, follow the streets in my mind’s eye and see the faces I knew, the immense distance from there to here simply melts away and I feel I could slip effortlessly across the divide. The same is true of Melbourne, Nairobi, Santiago, Cape Town, Medellin or Maputo.
But when it comes to places I don’t know, have never been, like say Tahiti or Tokyo or Beijing, the feeling is quite different. What first comes to mind is the huge distance I must travel, the bureaucratic obstacles I must overcome, the cost in time and resources and all the myriad possibilities for pain and pleasure along the way – in other words, the journey rather than the destination.
All of which made my small adventure last summer rather confusing.
It has bothered me for some time that I didn’t know Greece. After all, that’s where Western civilisation began. How could I go to my grave without climbing the Acropolis and visiting the Parthenon? And how about those Greek islands everybody dreams about. And isn’t that where writers I have most admired, Leigh Fermor, Lawrence Durrell, spent so many of their years? I was determined to go while I was still mobile and, after all, I knew the road. I’ve travelled it twice; once in ’77 when Jugoslavia still held most of the Balkans together, and again in ’03 when the memory of the Bosnian war was beginning to fade. Nothing to it, I thought. A doddle.
So I decided to go to Greece and I compiled a list of places I would most like to see. As for getting there, I had my bike didn’t I? What else could I need? My main concern was the big meeting in Northern Germany where I was going to introduce my new book, Jupiter’s Travels in Camera. Picking up the bike in Duisburg has become so routine I hardly gave it a thought. Plane to Frankfurt; train to Duisburg; taxi to Dirk’s shop; there she stands, the old scarred and battered Funduro, and I know Dirk will have gone over her carefully. He isn’t there this time. It’s Sunday, and he’s moved to Düsseldorf, not too far away. The bike is re-registered too, in Düsseldorf, but he’s left all the papers for me.
Then there’s that moment of thrill and apprehension I always feel when I get on a bike after a long time away, and then off we go to a small hotel nearby to deal with the first night of jet lag.
I wasn’t giving Greece a thought. I had some family and friends to visit in Hamburg and Kiel before the meeting. On the last days of August the weather was kind. The meeting went well. I sold a lot of books, and then I started thinking about Greece. It began to rain, but not much, and I started off south. On a perfect surface, 30 miles down the road as I was just about to get on the autobahn from a little round-about at 10 mph, the bike fell over. Just like that. The front wheel simply decided to go horizontal.
I didn’t get hurt, just a little bruise on the ankle, but suddenly my picture-perfect vision of the trip became seriously skewed. There was nothing on the road surface to give the slightest indication why the rubber should glide away. If it could happen once, it could happen any time. Forty years ago I would have shrugged it off as one of those bizarre things, but I was shaken. Shit! I’m 82 years old. Should I be doing this? A large part of me was yearning to go back to the hotel.
The bike seemed to be OK more or less; a broken indicator lens and slightly twisted forks. On the other side of the road, a small bunch of bikers were gathered and came over to help me lift her up. The same thing had happened to one of them, only ten minutes before. I should have been comforted, but I wasn’t. That fellow’s bike had to be towed off to a shop. I could almost wish to be towed away myself. Instead I had 200 miles of dubious weather ahead of me.
I was gong to Schwabmuhlhausen, the unlikely name of the village where a friend, Doris Wiedemann, lived. Along the way the odometer packed up but otherwise everything worked well enough, and I began to regain my confidence. When I got there the skies opened up and I was pleasantly stuck for two days. We ate at two good restaurants, and I had this delicious dessert at one of them:
On the third day it was still raining so I buckled on my courage and we made plans for me to get another odometer cable from BMW in Munich. A mile down the road the bike stopped. Then I remembered, the bike had a reserve which I hardly ever used, so I flicked the tap across. Nothing happened. I looked in the tank. There was petrol. Shit! Again. I phoned Doris and she went to all kinds of trouble hitching a trailer to her car to rescue me. So we went to Munich BMW together.
When we got there I looked at the bike on the trailer and realised, with a burning sense of shame, that instead of switching to reserve I had switched it to OFF. The full weight of my 82 years descended on me. Doris was very kind, and the chief mechanic didn’t allow his feelings to show.
Perhaps an older man would have decided than and there that enough was enough, but I soldiered on, and in fact everything was fine until I got to Zagreb where I was just leaving a hotel when half a pint of oil fell out of the bottom of the bike. It was Sunday, of course. By Monday afternoon some willing youths had fixed it (though I never properly understood why it had happened). On Tuesday a huge thunderstorm engulfed Croatia. On Wednesday I entered Serbia on my way to Thessaloniki. Halfway down Serbia the motorway ends and it’s back to the old Autoput, a two lane road winding among the Balkan mountains – once Europe’s deadliest highway. I came up it in ’77, riding in the face of a tidal wave of German and Dutch holiday makers desperate to hit the sun-drenched beaches of Greece. The verges were strewn with wreckage left by impatient Beatle and Kombi drivers hurtling full-tilt into the TIR trucks from Turkey.
Now, in September, it was relatively quiet. I pulled over to a petrol pump perched on a shelf carved out of the steep hillside. A happy young woman filled me up, and I parked over by a picnic table thinking I’d get a snack. Two impassive Serbs registered my existence with indifference. I came out of the shop with a chocolate bar, climbed on the bike, kicked back the side-stand, started the engine, let out the clutch, and shot up in the air doing the first wheelie of my long life before collapsing to the ground with the bike almost on top of me.
Never in forty years had I parked my bike in gear. Now at last I knew the reason why. And they call me the Godfather of adventure biking! Oh, how have the mighty fallen!
One of the Serbs, still totally unimpressed came over to help me lift the bike. Apart from twisting the forks a little further the fall didn’t damage her, but the luggage was severely disarranged. On the next shelf up from the pump stood a ramshackle mechanic’s lair, where its grizzled proprietor was holed up, attended by a small boy. He was very skilled with his hammer and, together with an adjustable spanner, he managed to knock everything into a more or less acceptable shape.
Whatever my existential doubts I obviously had to go on and by the time I got to Greece I began again to believe that I might actually survive this journey, but all my bearings had shifted. I was so used to rumbling around Europe without incident that this unexpected sequence of mishaps was deeply shocking. All of a sudden my presumption of easy mobility was seriously challenged. If I could no longer depend on myself to stay out of trouble my world would shrink alarmingly – catastrophically even. To lose that freedom would be, for me, giving in to old age, and there would be no way back.
It was not very sensible of me to plan a journey that would mean travelling north through Europe in October, and I got very cold, wet and windblown for three days doing it, but there were no more incidents. Dirk says I need to get a better bike. I’m thinking about it.
Oh, Greece?
Greece was marvellous. I saw the Parthenon and the caryatids. I took a ferry to Naxos, and spent wonderful days there in Apollon, at the hotel Adonis.
There is a law that nobody can build over three stories, and all the buildings must be white. I am not a fan of laws, but this one is pure genius and the effect all over the islands is lovely to behold. I met great people and had lovely evenings in Thessaloniki and in Athens. I am so sorry that Greece is in such trouble, and I really hate the fact that it’s their northern neighbours in Europe who are administering such painful doses of austerity. All those Germans, Belgians, and Dutch(not to mention the British) have been rushing down there to soak up the sun and the Mediterranean way of life for six decades, and now they want to punish the Greeks for their loose ways. What ingratitude.
Prices are low, and of course I profited from the crisis, but I deserve it, don’t I?
PIC