PAME!

2007-01-15T21:01:00.000+01:00

PAME!
(approx. pronunciation: par-´may)

by Phil Newton

Contents

1 THE TRAVELLERS DEPART

2 A VERY LONG ROAD

3 THE OVERNIGHT STAY

4 CAPUT AUTOS ON THE AUTOPUT

5 ROSY-FINGERED DAWN

6 THE BUS STOP

7 THE BUS LEAVES

8 THE MOUNTAINS

9 A PASS AT KATARA

10 THE TRAVELLERS ARRIVE

2005-10-05T21:00:00.000+02:00

1

THE TRAVELLERS DEPART

“A coach!? Three days on a coach to Greece? Good idea! Well done.”
Well, it was a good idea – seemed like it anyway. I think it cost something like ₤26 which was excellent for 1975; before the days of cut-price cheap never-come-back air fares. To fly would have cost hundreds of pounds.
“Ok, meet you at Euston next week.”

We seemed to be taking this journey to Greece a little more seriously…but as it turned out not seriously enough…

According to my diary I didn’t do any packing until the day before I left which is really being a little too relaxed when you consider I had to pack for a whole year. In the first suitcase I packed my stereo - padding it in with a couple of sheets – and then a few records which I did not think I could live without for so long. A few people had said at university that it was a bit dangerous taking stuff like stereos into Greece because the customs were very hot on it. Apparently there was a big market for people bringing stereo equipment, TVs, other electrical goods and even cars into the country because they were all so expensive in Greece and you could flog them for huge profits.

“Ah, I’ll be ok! Why should they want to look in my case?” was my standard reply.

In the other case I packed everything else I would need for a year; clothes and erm…more clothes. Actually I hardly had any clothes but I had just been on a cheapo cheapo shopping trip through town to get shirts and trousers and stuff. And finally there was my guitar. I had to improvise a kind of shoulder strap for the guitar case having realised at the last moment that I only had two hands and that two cases needed at least a hand each to carry them.

It was my dad who pointed this out. Casting a sceptical eye over my “kit” as he called it he said, “how in the name of Christ are you going to carry all this? We carried less stuff when we landed on the beaches of Normandy.”

What is hard to remember these days is that something like going off to Greece for a year then was seen as something ranking alongside Captain Cook’s voyages of discovery in the South Pacific or Scott of the Antarctic’s doomed attempt to be the first to reach the South Pole. People just didn’t go off for a year…especially as far as Greece and if they did there was a distinct possibility that they would never come back.

And so the neighbours and relatives had been discreetly visiting over the couple of weeks prior to my departure, as if it were some kind of pseudo-funeral, to express their condolences, take their leave of me, remind me of their moral support and sort of imply that I’d had…well…a good innings and a nice life.

So why was I undertaking this trip? Me, who up to now had never managed to plan any trip more ambitious than to the local ale-house.

Well, it was the consequence of a decision made over two years earlier in the 6th form at school - a decision to do Latin, Ancient Greek and Ancient History for A-level. Now this would normally lead to doing Classics at university…but when the time came to look for a degree course to do we discovered that at Birmingham University there was an alternative. They were offering a four-year course in Ancient and Modern Greek which spanned the birth and whole development of the Greek language from the time of the linear B tablets from Crete, around 2000 BC to the literature of the present day - and down there in the small print was this bit which said that due to this being partly a modern language course, students who took it would spend the third year in Greece to enable them to master the language. Unfortunately they could not offer the same feature for Ancient Greek because the Science Faculty had not yet invented the time machine (that last bit wasn’t really in).

So the chance to give up Latin AND have a year swanning about Greece…that was the very fellow for me!

The incredible popularity of this course meant that in the end there was a total of two students doing it. Bob and I. Deborah was also unsurprisingly alone in studying French and Modern Greek and she wisely had opted to spend her 3rd year in Greece instead of France. And it was this very self-same Deborah who had booked the coach and whom I was going down to meet at Euston the next day.

At Euston Deborah and her boyfriend Tim were there as arranged. Phase one completed successfully.

Deborah also had a mound of luggage but between the three of us we managed to manhandle the stuff over to Victoria coach station where phase two would begin.
There were still a couple of hours before the coach left so we went for a pint…a last pint…into a scruffy horrible pub around the corner.

When we got back there were a few people already waiting for the coach. They were all Greeks. This coach would take us to Dover where we would catch the ferry to Zeebrugge and there be picked up by the splendid European Express Coach which according to the brochure was going to be a pretty impressive piece of engineering...air conditioning, television, bar, toilets…when I looked at the brochure later after experiencing the reality I noticed that they never actually stated anywhere that these features would be on the coach but more or less just that they did exist somewhere in the cosmos.

More Greeks turned up. It looked like we were going to be the only English people on board…pretty obvious really; any normal, sensible, in-their-right-minds English people would have been going to Greece on holiday and so would be well back by now, 27th September.

More Greeks turned up. We were beginning to hope that a lot of the people had come to see a few of the people off. But looking at their luggage it was more likely that these were just the Trojan Horse advanced guard before the real hordes of passengers arrived. If I thought we had a lot of stuff with us what they had looked like the collected wares from the last five years of jumble sales around the country. Boxes tied with string, plastic bags, pots and pans, carpets, trunks, probably a couple of budgies in their cages and no doubt a kitchen sink or two.
However it did give us the advantage of feeling we were actually travelling ridiculously light and so when the coach pulled into its berth and the driver got out and gazed in disbelief at the amount of people and junk he was going to have to cram into his poor coach, we were able to catch his glance, gesture over to the Greeks, roll our eyes and tsk.

Somehow all the people and all the items of luggage managed to cram themselves into this coach which was sinking lower and lower on its suspension. The driver watched, hands on hip, shaking his head in dismay. He squeezed himself in, we waved farewell to Tim and to London in general and off we went. Nothing much happened on this part of the trip because nothing much could happen – none of us could move a muscle we were so tightly packed in. And then we got to Dover and the driver opened his door - we all kind of oozed out in one big blob, like toothpaste from a tube.

We tramped on to the ferry, dumped our stuff by a seat and went up on deck. It was a curious feeling watching the sailors sever the last link which bound us to the place where I had spent all my life so far. A delicious thrill of delight and foreboding.
We had a few drinks at the bar and listened to the parents vainly trying and failing to stop their babies from screaming all the way over the Channel and along the French and Belgian coast. Four and a half hours is a long time on one of these ferries. You can walk around them in say ten minutes…and then? We decided to go on deck and have a look at the white cliffs. I remembered my dad telling me how when he was on the ship to Normandy in the war (and let me just clear this up, although he always used to talk about fighting on the beaches of Normandy and show us his medals, he also freely admitted that he didn’t arrive there until D-Day 30 or so, about a month after the murderous landings), he had stayed at the back end of the ship – aft, I believe is the technical term – and watched the wake just in case the ship got bombed and sank…so that then he would know which way to swim to get home!

England slowly disappeared into the mist and fuck me I had a lump in my throat!

Chapter 2

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2005-09-30T20:59:00.000+02:00

2

A VERY LONG ROAD

We arrived at the port of Zeebrugge at around about 11.00 p.m. British time/00.00 European time – a new time zone…oooweee - and disembarked. A courier from European Express collected us and shepherded us to the new coach. We jammed our cases into the open luggage compartments of the coach and then jammed ourselves into the seats and finally jammed the remaining bag and guitar case between our knees. The bus set off, slowly navigating through the narrow streets of Zeebrugge town. It is a measure of my lack of travelling outside the British Isles if I say that Belgium, where we now were, seemed to me deliriously exotic.

I didn’t realise it at the time but Belgium is not exotic. In fact it is just totally boring and it lulled me to sleep as it always does. So I was unaware of passing Brussels and later Luttich and climbing the steep hill afterwards which leads to the route into Germany.

We came to the border and had to wake up to show our passports to the German border police and soon after I got my first view of Germany. It must have been about 4 in the morning in the very beginnings of dawn and I just happened to open my eyes and look out of the window to the left. And there it was – this enormous…building, a huge thing with cooling towers belching out steam; with hundreds of lights glistening on its sides. A massive edifice -like some alien artifact on a forbidden planet - sitting there near the side of the motorway dominating the horizon and spewing out power. It seemed to say, “THIS is a German power station and this is what Germany in the middle of its economic miracle is all about, mate. Power…pure power so don’t fuck about while you are here.”

It left me feeling hugely impressed and slightly uneasy (I have since passed that power station hundreds of times driving to and from England but it never ceases to impress me. On one occasion I was even taken there by the police who wanted to weigh the...hmmm, well, slightly overweight back axel of the van I was driving. There was a weighbridge in front of the edifice and while the police were busy ripping me off with a fine I am sure they just pocketed, I took the opportunity to gaze up at the mighty splendour of the huge structure).

It slowly sank beyond the horizon and I then started to notice the signs on the right of the motorway – Ausfahrt. What a brilliant language! How did they know that after the beer in London and another on the ferry and the cup of “coffee” and biscuits in Belgium that they were dead right with these signs…the wind was really starting to build up in my gut and I would gratefully Ausfahrt-ed quite regularly. I assumed that these signs were for drivers travelling alone who could poop in peace without gassing anyone.

Germany in the hands of European Express just turned out to be one very long road which we bombed along all morning until in the early afternoon we saw mountains which looked suspiciously like certain hills which once had been alive with the sound of music.

Chapter 3

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2005-09-28T20:58:00.000+02:00

3

THE OVERNIGHT STAY

Hallo Österreich – Hello Austria.

I see in Wikepaedia that the Tauern tunnel in Austria which allows traffic to avoid the Tauern mountains, the highest mountains in Austria and the highest range of the Alps east of the Brenner, was opened in 1975. Well, either it was after September that it opened or our driver just wanted to avoid the toll but we suddenly found ourselves growling up mountain roads, squeezing around s-bends and generally taking forever to cross this daunting mountain range which we could have driven through in ten minutes using the tunnel. We were heading for Graz where we would spend the night in a hotel and right now after two days of sitting on trains, ferries and crammed into coaches, that seemed like having winning tickets to a night in paradise.

It wasn’t like that at all, of course. Night had already fallen when we finally reached Graz. There was an audible sigh of relief from the passengers when we saw the sign for GRAZ but then there was a slight delay because the driver couldn’t find the hotel…and then having found out where it was he got caught in a one-way system which was more like a none-way system and ended up going away from the place…we were getting mildly frantic by now; it was getting later and later which meant less and less time in the luxurious hotel bed we had been imagining. Now we were passing the hotel…no…there was a parking space…we stopped…. YES!!!!

What a sorry lot we must have looked as we debussed in Graz and staggered on legs which no longer seemed to respond to outside stimulus into the foyer.

Showers we wanted - and food - and beer – and a bed. Oh and erm…well…I wanted a sausage too.

You see when I had learned that we would be going through the Sausage Lands, Germany and Austria, I became determined to have a sausage there. We hadn’t managed it in Germany and now I wanted one here in this last outpost of the sausage zone before we were whisked away into whatever the next country might be. So after the shower and the food I ventured out into the Grazer evening with Deborah who gamely offered to keep me company on my quest. Around the corner there was a stand selling them!! And there I got my first taste of Bratwurst and mustard in a bun.

Yummy.

The hotel, like the coach, was not quite how it had been described in the brochure…oh no, just a moment, that is not strictly true. In fact the hotel where we should have stayed was regrettably and inexplicably fully booked that night - due to a mistake on the hotel’s part of course…the night before would have been ok and the night after but unfortunately, and they were really really sorry but they had had to find alternative accommodation at short notice and the only place available was this fucking dump, "The Grazer Grothouse".

Oh well, at least there was a bed. Well, I think it was a bed. It might though have been a slab of concrete being stored on a wooden frame. And I experienced Austrian bed covers and pillows for the first time. The mattress/concrete slab was covered with a sheet. On that there was a very thick duvet and another sheet and an incredibly thick pillow. Was it a very thick duvet or a relatively thin extra mattress - was it a pillow or a duvet for a dwarf? Did you sleep on the one sheet and under the duvet/mattress or on the duvet/mattress and under the other sheet? Were there no instructions?

I just made myself as comfortable as I could which was not very and lay there awake.

After what seemed like a few minutes there was a pounding on doors coming along the corridor and eventually reaching my door.

THUMP, THUMP, THUMP.
“Six o’clock, breakfast in ten minutes!”

Breakfast was a sad, tired affair…and we were tired too. A greying hard-boiled egg and a couple of packets of jam or honey to spread on slices of wood…and coffee that even I, as an Englishman who thought coffee came in granules in a jar, could complain about.

Ho hum…where are we anyway? Austria…next country Jugoslavia and then Greece…ha, no problem!

Chapter 4

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2005-09-05T20:57:00.000+02:00

4

CAPUT AUTOS ON THE AUTOPUT

For anyone who had grown up in England in the 60s and lived through the weird phenomenon of the Sound of Music running for about two years in the local cinema, the landscape in Austria was not unfamiliar and it continues not to be unfamiliar as you enter the first part of Jugoslavia. Crossing the mountains and descending towards Bled and driving on to Zagreb you could still be in Austria although I am sure any Austrians or Slovenians would dispute this hotly; for who wants to be told they resemble their neighbours?

We must have passed Zagreb in the mid to late morning and we were now driving along a narrow pot-holed street, two-way traffic, pretty busy, a bit wider than a country lane.

“This must be the road to the motorway,” I said to Deborah.

“No!” said a Greek in front who had turned to look at us between the seats, “this IS the motorway…the Autoput !!” And, treating us to a facial expression that could have come right out of the most blood-thirstily depressing Aeschylean tragedy, he turned back into his seat.

We looked at one another. There was a road sign coming up…a bit bent, battered and rusty…

Just Beograd?

Four hundred and thirty seven kilometres and nowhere before?

Nope.

Apart from a few shacks and hovels at the side of the road this
narrow country road snakes across the centre of what was
Jugoslavia and at that time it handled all the traffic from the west of Europe to countries in the east such as Greece, Bulgaria and Turkey.

And that means whopping great pantechnicans and an endless
stream of slow-moving clapped out old trucks and late holiday
makers with ludicrously big caravans hitched onto underpowered
cars and Turks transporting the gross national product of their
country on their Ford Transits…and our coach.

And that in turn means that the road surface is wildly overloaded and therefore full of potholes over which we were jolting with painful regularity.

And that also means that the traffic moves extremely and unbelievably frustratingly SLOWLY!

Which in turn means that anyone with a little bit of extra horsepower under their bonnets and a suicidal streak in their hearts spends the whole time looking for the slightest gap in the oncoming traffic in which to overtake the obstructing vehicle in front.

Which explains the macabre but bounteous harvest of a veritable multitude of overturned burnt-out wrecks of all makes, shapes and sizes along the roadside; left there to rust or rot in the rain or sun, demonstrating with black silent eloquence that no make of car is a status symbol when it is on the scrapheap.

At one point in the long hot afternoon during which the advertised but not actually onboard air-conditioning would have been really good, all the traffic in both directions ground screechingly to a halt. Cars, trucks and lorries stretched bumper to bumper from the horizon behind us to the one in front. People started getting out of their cars. We risked it too. Ah, the joy of stretching your legs even surrounded by this hopeless dollop of sticky traffic jam.

We went over to a nearby wreck and sat on what had been a bonnet.

“I feel as if I have spent my whole life on this coach”

“Me too. It’s like a strange coach-shaped never-ending journey.”

It was a phenomenon which I experienced every time I did one of these coach journeys. There comes a point where you simply cannot remember ever having had a life outside of this coach and you are also incapable of imagining a future life anywhere but inside the coach.

After about an hour of stillness there was talk of something happening far up ahead in the distance. Like a look-out on an old sailing ship sighting land, someone had spotted movement ahoy. Gradually we got underway again. No doubt one of the wrecks we passed had been the cause of the hold up but we would never know. Accidents on this road wouldn’t even merit a mention in a very local newspaper - assuming there were any places around here in this forsaken region with enough inhabitants to warrant a local paper – you would really only have needed a local back-of-an-envelope.

On we trundled at about 70 to 80 kilometres an hour…that’s 45 to 50 mph…also known as "a v e r y s l o w c r a w l". The road signs to Beograd still seemed to have the same number of kilometres on them as they had at the start, as if they had just had a hundred copies made of the sign we saw outside Zagreb.

From deep down in my lower intestinal tract, messages were coming in to my brain of the need for a bowel movement…not yet urgent but dull and insistent. The food I had eaten over the last couple of days, going at a speed similar to our speed at the moment, had finally made it to the dispatch department.

I get a bit grumpy and groany when I feel like that and Deborah complained that I was getting on her nerves. So I had a sulk. I was too polite to tell her, “I just need a crap!”

So, Deborah, if you are reading this, now you know the truth!

On and on this 400 kilometre-long procession of vehicles droned; through boring forests, up boring hills, alongside boring fields we jerked and jolted. The sun slowly moved to the west up in the harsh glinting sky and that was also pretty boring.

More forests, more hills, more fields…and then a few more forests and hills...

Hour after hour on this fucking road…a dullness spreading through me from the small intestines to every part of my body and then extending out through my skin into the landscape outside…dull, dull, DULL!!

With a very great disinterest I noticed we were finally nearing Beograd. 101 kilometres, 49.5 kilometres, 23.025 kilometres – I have often wondered why they put these road signs in exactly these places…why not just go down the road a bit to where you are say 100 kilometres away or 50 or 25? I have often wondered that but not on this occasion; right now I couldn’t have cared less.

Beograd was all I could have wished for in my present miserable mood. Endless rows of horrible grey communist concrete blocks of flats…like Lego towers drained of all their pretty colours. This is where the architects who “designed” the inner cities in England in the 60s came to die.

Night was falling and we were somewhere deep in the bowels of Jugoslavia probably at some point in the never-ending wooded valleys between Niš and Skopje. I was beginning to lose my will to live…like a hypothermia sufferer…I felt perhaps I could just snuggle down into this coach seat and drift off, never to awake…

The news that we were getting near to the Greek border which filtered through the bus improved my mood a little. I looked out of the window and saw the silhouette of a hill topped by a fort of some kind lit by the full moon and was reminded of the never-ending Balkan wars we had studied. It looked quite romantic…I was obviously feeling better.

Then, abruptly we bumped and banged into a brightly illuminated sort of large lay-by with guard posts.

This must be Greece…! There’s a sign…YES!!! Thank the Olympian gods for that!!

Chapter 5

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2005-09-05T20:56:00.000+02:00

5

ROSY-FINGERED DAWN

This is it…ra-ta-ta-taa!!

The courier had warned us that with there being so many Greeks on board we would have a longish wait at the border while the police checked their papers and luggage. So I took the opportunity of going to the bog for my long-awaited…well, you know...

I was intensely aware of the fact that in stepping off the coach I would be putting my foot down in Greece for the first time – Zarathustra…2001..daa daa daaaaaa……dadaaaaaaaaaaa…bom bom bom bom bom – the coach had become my lunar module: “I am stepping down onto the surface – beep - that’s one small step for man – beep – one giant leap for Philkind – beep – and where’s the bog - beep?

I found one at the back of the guard post. It was unlocked and inside it wasn’t too unbelievably clogged with faeces. So I went in, locked the door and began my business.

What a relief that is; what a load off your “mind”, when the world falls out of your bottom; poets don’t wax lyrical about the divine joys of a good crap but they should. I felt like myself again; the world looked wonderful; the air outside was scented with the sweet smell of very-early-in-the-morning exhaust fumes.
I walked back to the coach and I noticed people looking over to me…one or two were pointing. Had they also noticed that I suddenly cut a different figure after my evacuation?

I got to within a few yards and heard someone say, “neffton?”
It was the border policeman.

“Neffton…neffton. Pheeleep neffton…”

Oh fuck, he means me…

He was standing by the open luggage compartment of the coach. Round and about some of the Greeks were repacking and closing their cases having obviously been obliged to get them out and open them for inspection…and now me?

Fuck.

Open my case for inspection…oh double fuck…the stereo!

Suddenly I could hear my own voice around me saying a hundred times or more, “why should they want to look in my case?” Was my bravado about to be my undoing…was I to spend my year in Greece locked up in a cell for smuggling, learning only the Modern Greek for ball and chain and bend over?

“Neffton…NEFFTON!!”

“Ok, ok…here I am. Hello, nice country you have here.”

“Anixte afti ti valisa, sas parakalo”

Hmm, pretty obvious what that means…open this case please – and thereby prove your guilt as a smuggler.

He wanted me to open the case which had my clothes in first…prolonging the agony. Ok, here you go pal…get an eyeful of all this horrible cheap and nasty polyester clobber. He looked at it and poked it a bit. It didn’t do anything.

He turned away and shouted, “Papadopoulos!”

“I suppose that’s the guy with the handcuffs,” I thought as I put the case back in and started looking for the other case; the illegal case; the court case case.

“Papadopoulos!!!”

One of the Greek passengers came over to where we were standing.

“Papadopoulos”, said the policeman.

“Ne”, nodded Mr Papadopoulos sullenly and he began to pull out his case from the luggage compartment.

I looked slowly round. The policeman was now occupied with Mr Papadopoulos and the contents of his case…

“O . . . k . . .”, I thought and became very nonchalant. I took my hand slowly but not too slowly from the handle of the second case. Then I wiped the dust off the top of the case as if that had been why I had touched it. Then I turned and casually walked around the policeman and Mr Papadopoulos trying hard not to look enormously relieved and smug and also trying very very hard not to punch the air with my fist and shout, “YES! You blind Greek customs-bloody-MAN!”
I got back into the coach and sat down in my seat, now smiling smugly.

“What was all that about?”

“I had to open my case…but not that case, the other case.”

“Oh shit! A case of choosing the wrong case? And now?”

“Case dismissed. And just in case…case closed!”

Chapter 6

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2005-09-05T20:55:00.000+02:00

6

THE BUS STOP

One of the wonderful things about studying Ancient Greek and Latin is to go to Greece or Rome and actually see the places you spent so much time being forced to read about. That was occurring to me right now for the first time as we drove through the Vale of Tempe; sacred to Apollo and celebrated by the poets for its enchanting beauty. And it really is beautiful. It was dawn and the sun was coming up in the east – the perfect lighting to view it from the road which runs along the eastern ridge of the valley. The railway runs along the other side and somewhere down below in the mysterious mist and darkness flows the Pinios River which created it all.

We were scooting along now down the National Road which goes from Thessaloniki to Athens and is as close to a motorway as you could wish. Having at that time still very little idea of the geography of Greece and the distances between one place and another I was kind of hoping that the driver would not forget that we needed to go to Ioannina and that we wouldn’t suddenly arrive in Athens. Just as I was thinking that the courier came down the gangway to us.

“The driver is going to drop you off in Larissa which he says isn’t far from Ioannina.”

“Oh right, great. Thanks.”

Soon after, it must have been around 7.00 a.m., the coach pulled into a bus lay-by. The courier waved down the gangway to us and motioned to the door with her head.

This was it.

We struggled out of our seats, shuffled to the front, got off, got out our cases; watched all the time by all the Greeks on board. They obviously couldn’t believe that we were getting off. But we were, and with a blast of the horn our home for the last few days (or eternity) pissed off merrily into the morning traffic.

The driver had pointed over to the right… “Ioannina,” he had said.

So we kind of looked, for want of something else to do, to see if we could see Ioannina.

We couldn’t see anything that looked even remotely like Ioannina. But then as we had absolutely no idea what Ioannina looked like anyway that was not really much of a surprise. I can’t believe now when I look back on this journey 30 years later that we had arrived here so totally unprepared. We had no idea whereabouts in Greece we were and no idea whereabouts Ioannina was. We had sort of assumed that the coach company would drop us off near enough to Ioannina for it to be obvious.

So now what? It was just after 7 o’clock on a mild September morning and we were in Larissa apparently. There were two of us and we had four heavy fully-stuffed suitcases, one huge carrier bag and a guitar between us. And no map. We were still standing looking south in the direction our coach had gone. On the one side to our right there was the main road, some buildings and a street that looked as though it went into town. On the other side to our left there was a fence and some trees and a street which looked as if it went nowhere at all.

A couple of Greeks passed us on their way to work.

A child passed on a bike.

We were still there. It was about half past seven. So…now what?
A grey car with a sign on the roof that said “TAXI” went past. That woke us from our stupified inactivity. We started to wave our arms about to flag him down but it was too late, he’d gone round the corner.

“Ah bugger…we’ll get the next one…”

We heard a squeal of tyres somewhere behind us, some voices raised in anger and then the high-pitched sound of a car reversing a little too quickly for the engine’s liking. It was the taxi we thought we had lost.

The driver jumped out, insisted on putting all the luggage in the boot himself, held the door open for Deborah who got in the back and held the front door open for me to get in the front. Then he got in and closed his door. He turned to me and I turned to him.

“Ah! Erm…Ioannina,” I said, realising what he wanted. He did what looked like a double take and then nodded and shot off across the main road and into a labyrinth of side streets.

I sat back in my seat, closed my eyes for a moment and then looked out of the window at the people on the pavements around us all getting ready for the coming day not knowing and probably not caring that here were two English travellers who thought they were nearing the end of their quest.

The taxi driver turned to me and a stream of vowels and consonants came out of his mouth. The sound seemed vaguely familiar. I looked at him with narrowed eyes and then turned to Deborah in the back.

“That’s Greek,” I revealed to her.

She gave me what was - now I come to think of it - a quite supercilious look which might have included just a hint of eye-rolling.

The taxi driver spoke again, “zwqxdhe rtsh dbehfjwwjj apsorutu jtzumgidmdl leophoreio dhfjgntjchs etcvdbfgr nqowxysbr…”

Ah, more Greek; but hang on, there was a word I recognised; leophoreio.

I brought all the force of my two years studying and learning Modern Greek to bear upon this word: leophoreio…

“Leophoreio”, I said to Deborah, “we’ve had that…”

“Bus”, she said.

“BUS!! Leophoreio – bus, yes!”

Meanwhile the driver was saying something else. Leophoreio was in there again and then I noticed “Ioannina” too.

Leophoreio…Ioannina, leophoreio……Ioannina…, leophoreio – bus…Ioannina…

“He’s taking us to the bus for Ioannina!”

I turned to him and said in my best Greek, “great, brilliant, yes, good idea…” He looked at me, puzzled. I smiled at him, nodded and gave him a discreet thumbs up.

He drove us to a small square and dropped us in front of a café on the corner.

He gave us one last blast of Greek which contained the words leophoreio – by now an old friend, Ioannina and a new one I kind of recognised, eisitiria.

We nodded and waved and he sped off.

“Shit, what’s eisitiria?”

We looked around for a bus station or a bus stop or something that looked even remotely bussy. Nothing, just the guys in front of the café drinking coffee, watching us curiously and twiddling their worry beads.

“Well, we might as well have a coffee and maybe ask the woman in there where the bus station is.”

“Mmm…erm..what do we say?”

“Well, let’s see… to leophoreio is ‘the bus’ and then we have Ioannina and then pou is ‘where’ and pote is ‘when’ so we should be able to cobble something together.”

“Yeah, and ine is ‘is’…”

“So something like, pote ine to leophorieo se Ioannina kai pou…erm…something..”

“So that is, ‘when-is-the-bus-to-Ioannina-and-where…something’? That’ll do!”

I would like to write that it was I who went in to the café to ask the woman but I took the coward’s way out and sent Deborah in on the grounds that her pronunciation was better than mine…which it was. I offered to do the hand movements and sound effects in return.

We went in. Deborah enunciated beautifully the sentence, “pote ine to leophreio se Ioannina kai pou…?” And at that point I made some bus leaving noises and hand movements…sort of doors closing and the hiss of hydraulics and then I mimed a driver steering and made the sound of an engine going up through the gears.

Despite the embarrassing grammar and the unrecognisable mime and noises it seemed she had understood.

“Sta Ioannina? Etho, stis ennea.”

I think we were taken so by surprise that she had understood anything and then actually replied that we just stood there looking at her blankly.

“ETHO, STIS ENNEA!”

Well that was the same answer but louder. Ok, let’s see…etho is ‘here’…ok, so ‘here’… and ennea is ‘nine’…and stis ennea is ‘at nine o’clock’! Jesus, it worked.

“The bus to Ioannina leaves from here and goes at nine o’clock.”

We are language ACES!!

“Now, what about tickets?”

Encouraged by the success of my mimes, I tried to get this information too.

“Erm…leophoreio..” I said and then made a sort of tickety shape with my index fingers.

“Eisitiria? Nai. Etho!”

“Eisitiria?” I said still making my tickety shapes in the stale air of the café.

“Malista. Eisiteria,” and she held up a book of tickets which were fairly similar to the shape I had been miming.

Piece of piss this language stuff. Now all we have to do is get on the bus.

Chapter 7

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2005-09-05T20:54:00.000+02:00

7

THE BUS LEAVES

At nine-ish a bus approached. A pale hospital green with the KTEL emblem painted on the front and IOANNINON in the destination window.

This must be it.

We stood outside the café and waited for it to pull up. We were alone on the pavement. The bus wheezed and groaned to a halt. The doors started to open. Suddenly, from nowhere came an enormous crowd of little old ladies in black. They swarmed around the doors of the bus, pushing and shoving and elbowing, a mad aggressive black froth of bus travellers trying to board; squeezing and squashing themselves between the passengers on the bus who were engaged in hand-to-hand combat trying to get off.

We stood with our mound of luggage and gaped; waiting patiently – true to our British-in-bus-queues-iness – for the chance to get on too.

Arguments were raging, screams and ululations were coming from the little old ladies, dust was getting kicked up everywhere. Sometimes it seemed that those getting off had the upper hand and were successfully getting themselves extricated but then those outside would rally again and press them all back on amidst grunts and groans.

Gradually though, it seemed the wild battle was resolving itself and everyone was managing either to get on or get off as they wished. We grabbed the handles of our cases in readiness.

The doors of the bus snapped shut and the bus shot away.

The people who had got off and had been involved a few minutes before in a life or death struggle were now smiling and chatting and slowly drifting off to their homes…and we were still standing there…cases in hand, guitar round my neck…

The woman in the café just glanced at us as we went back in with a look which seemed to say, “that was fate, you stupid foreigners”. She was a real Anagke in an overall.

“Pote ine to …” we started.

“Stis thotheka!”

“Thotheka? TWELVE O'CLOCK!!!??? Three more hours of hanging around here…?” We slumped despondently back into our seats at the table outside and ordered more coffee and watched the dust slowly settle in the road again.

We used the time to make a strategic plan of action. This time we would be prepared. It was something like this; when the bus stopped Deborah would run over to the door and make sure it didn’t close and I would run back and forth with the cases and bag and guitar and throw them on one by one. Then she would jump on and I would jump on behind her…and we agreed to take NO PRISONERS – anyone in the way would be trampled on! The little old ladies in black would learn what it means when two British citizens want to catch a bus!

B-hour approached. All was still quiet in the square…uncannily quiet. You could hear the odd dog barking and someone in the café expectorating a week’s supply of phlegm from his lungs. I had the feeling hidden eyes were watching us from behind the twitching curtains in the windows opposite.

High noon was approaching. My trigger-finger…or rather case-handle fingers were getting twitchy. I practised picking up a case quickly…zish!…zash! “Ow…fucking ‘ell”, I dropped it on my foot.

A bus was coming…a rickety blue thing. It passed by without stopping.

“That wasn’t it, was it?”

“No, look, there it comes!”

True enough, in the distance another pale green bus was labouring up the street trailing a cloud of dust.

We braced ourselves for the imminent onslaught.

The bus got closer.

I kept looking from side to side for the arrival of the black-clad host.

The bus pulled in. The driver got out and came to help with the cases. We got on. We sat down.

The bus left.

THAT FUCKING SHOWED THEM!!!

Chapter 8

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2005-09-05T20:52:00.000+02:00

8

THE MOUNTAINS

Another bus, another road, another pot-holed surface. But this was the last leg and the European Express coach driver had said Ioannina is not far and there were not so many passengers on board. Opposite was a couple, in front were a few more passengers and at the back a group of about ten soldiers in uniform presumably going back to their barracks. Up ahead in the distance was a high range of mountains so it must be before that…an hour at most. Time to get there, find a cheap hotel near the centre, have a shower, get changed and go out to explore.

Great.

An hour later we seemed to be getting very close to these mountains and there was not a town in sight.

Another half an hour and we were now climbing the bastard mountains.

I tried to catch the attention of the Greek couple on the other side of the gangway.

“Ioannina…ti ora?” I tapped my wrist where there was no watch but I was by now pretty convinced of my miming abilities.

The Greek guy did a typical Greek thing. He shrugged his shoulders. Greeks do that even if they know the precise answer to a question. Then he did another very Greek thing. He waggled his left hand from side to side in the air, palm downwards. Obviously the answer he was at some point going to give me about when we were supposed to arrive in Ioannina would only be accurate to within about two or three months. In the end, after screwing up his face a little and furrowing his brow quite frighteningly, he spoke.

“Stis pende.”

“Oh no!! FIVE O’CLOCK??!!” I turned to Deborah, “he says we don’t get there till five.”

“Presumably today?” She was feeling the same as me. I turned to the Greek again, “simera?” He started his shrugging, waggling, frowning routine again and eventually said, “ne.”

“Today, yes! Well thank Apollo’s bum for that!”

I sank back in my seat. Oh well, only four more hours. In four hours though you can drive a very long way, if you are driving fast. Or a very short way, if you are driving slowly. And we were driving slowly. Slowly up a narrow road into the mountains. The bus was quite comfy though and we had space for our cases and our legs which was bliss compared to the European Express experience.

We were going a bit faster now, still uphill. I noticed in a net bag on the back of the seat in front of me there were some brown paper bags.

“What do you think these are for?”

“They look like the sick bags you get on the plane sometimes”

“Huh?”

“When it gets turbulent they hand them out to people in case they need to throw up.”

“And what do we need them for? I mean I know we are going up this mountain but he’s not going to take off at the top is he?”

“Hope not!”

Looking out the window we were getting pretty high up. And the road was getting a bit narrower, the s-bends a bit sharper. I now noticed for the first time that they also didn’t have those little fences at the side of the road like they do in Austria, sort of crash barrier things. This road was just open to the sky…and the driver was going faster. We reached the top of the ridge and started going down again. We were now passing a few road signs with various speed limits on them but nowhere did it say on them “breakneck” for the speed. But that would have been a fair description of our velocity.

Faint stirrings of a feeling of slight panic made me look over the seat to the driver in the front.

Well, he wasn’t slumped unconscious over the steering wheel...in fact he was in conversation with the passengers in the seat behind him to his right – that’s good. But he was turning round all the time to look at them as he spoke – that’s bad.

We were now…well, I suppose I have to say the word…hurtling down towards a bend which looked so sharp that the road seemed just to end in mid air. As we came to it a lorry lumbered around the corner coming up. The driver was sharing a joke with the passengers. I found myself pushing with both feet on imaginary brakes. Deborah was doing the same. We were gripping the sides of our seats tightly both trying to spit in the eye of gravity, defy the centrifugal force and somehow magically hold the bus on the road. Whatever mechanisms in the universe we managed to influence, if any, it must have worked as the next moment we were somehow round the corner. There was a groan from the back. I looked round to see the whites of the soldiers’ eyes staring to the front as if they had just looked death in the face – which, on reflection, perhaps they had.

More bends ahead. We were fortunate that we were sitting in the middle seats and so we weren’t being tossed from side to side as much as the lads in the back. One or two of them looked quite pale. We belted towards another near death experience and skidded impossibly around the corner…tyres squealing, brakes screeching. The soldiers were getting thrown right and left and up and down and now a couple of them reached for the brown paper bags. Jesus! They are sick bags…on a bus!! And they at the back are soldiers !!

There was now a kind of silence on the bus…well, I say silence, there was the horrible bubbly choking coughing noise of most of the troops at the back puking up their breakfasts and probably the linings of their stomachs too and then there was the noise of the driver and his two mates still chattering away and laughing at the tops of their voices…and indeed there was also the rather disturbing noise of the bus itself shrieking and groaning, sounding as if at any momnet it would simply shatter into a thousand screws, rivets and nails…but otherwise there was a kind of silence…a sort of of held-in-breath…almost holy. Holy, yes, that’s right. We had been for at least an hour now just a burst tyre or a loose bolt away from shooting off the side of the road and into the aether to fall to certain death on the rocky crags miles below. We were in the hands of whatever gods stalked these desolate mountain heights.

And these gods, if they did exist, would have made a brilliant squad of goalkeepers or slip fielders. They saved us a good few more times from flying over the edge and into the abyss.

Chapter 9

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2005-09-05T20:51:00.000+02:00

9

A PASS AT KATARA

We had come down these mountains now and the road had straightened out. We pulled in at Trikala. The soldiers got off – a little sheepishly I thought. As they did the Greeks waiting to board, noticing their pale faces, smiled and slapped them good-naturedly on their backs. This lot getting on didn’t look as though they would have any trouble up on the mountains…they had the faces of born and bred mountain people plus the fact that they smelled like mountain goats. Brown crinkly faced…that rugged weather-beaten look and a distinct lack of the full number of teeth. Actually I think one of the passengers getting on was a goat.

We set off again. The road was being fairly well-behaved right now but we were obviously crossing what looked like the floor of a crater on the moon and there were mountains around us on all sides. It was the mountain traveller’s version of the eye of the hurricane. Of all the peaks around us we were heading for the highest. A sign flashed past a bit too fast for us to read at that moment but it left its image on my subconscious.

I examined it in my mind’s eye and tried to put the pieces together with Deborah.

“Right, it said ‘pass’ - so we are heading for a mountain pass. That means we are going up into the mountains again.”

“Death, here we come.”

“1705 metres…that’s a bit bloody high isn’t it?”

“Erm…what is that in yards…about the same but a bit more?”

“Yeah, must be over 1800 yards…that’s more than a mile! We are crossing a pass one mile up! Oh shit.”

“You know, there is something about that name too…Katara…that rings a bell.”

Deborah had a good memory for this kind of thing. Odd words would stick in her mind and she would trot them out in our translation courses impressing the professors tremendously and irritating the shit out of the rest of us. I had had this glorious smart-arse experience only once when I was the only one in the whole class, including the professor, who knew that theiko oxi was the Greek for sulphuric acid. It was such a unique occurrence that I should be the one who knew, that no-one believed me, in fact they ignored my shouts of “sulphuric acid! Sulphuric ACID!!!” until the professor took down an enormous dictionary and looked it up to find that I had been right all along! Even then she only gave me a suspicious look as if to say, “what kind of strange life must you have been leading to know that??” She had never much cared for me since the time back in her first year extempore translation classes when I – innocently but erroneously - translated the question, “are you married?” in the text she had given us with the Modern Greek equivalent of “do you fuck?” I mean how was I to know that the Ancient Greek verb gamo which in those days meant “I marry” had changed its meaning in Modern Greek to “I fuck”?

But I digress…

Deborah was deep in thought... "it was in one of those Greek Folk Songs we did last year…hmm…”

“Oh right! ‘I kissed my true love’s lips, tra-la-la…and my lips turned red…hey diddy ho…it was the clap…fiddledy-dee.”

“Got it! It was a song about a woman scorned…katara…yes! It means ‘curse’.”

“Oh well, that’s just fucking brilliant! We are heading up to a pass one mile high which is called ‘Curse Pass’ and the driver is a graduate of the Kamikaze School for Bus Driving.”

I almost but not quite got used in the next hour or so to seeing nothing but extremely thin air, almost anoxic air below us as the middle section of the bus swung out over the side of the precipices. There is a Mickey Mouse cartoon where Mickey, Donald and Goofy go on a camping trip. Their caravan somehow gets separated from their car and careers down the mountain side shooting off the edge of the road and only being pulled back in again by swinging round on the pole of a road sign. This stretch could have been the inspiration for it.

We sat there quiet and tense. I didn’t realise how tense until we came down the other side and I tried to relax my muscles. I was more stiff than I had ever been in my life. It was as if I had climbed over the mountains with my bare hands.

Thankfully, the road levelled out and straightened again. There was one more mountain ahead but the road looked as though it wound round the side of it.

It was getting near five though, so we must be near now. I had actually forgotten in the sweaty panic of our trip through hell that we even had a destination. This part of the road had been cut through the side of the mountain and so it was bendy but they were gentle bends. There was now a palpable sense of expectation amongst the passengers too.

Chapter 10

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2005-09-05T20:50:00.000+02:00

10

THE TRAVELLERS ARRIVE

Then the road bent once again to the right around the mountain and the view to the left just opened up. We were still quite high up on the side of the mountain and there down below…well, that had to be Ioannina. The town sat there squat against the lake, back-lit by the late afternoon sun. The light slanted across the buildings and flashed up at us reflected from the little waves on the surface of the lake. Breathtakingly beautiful but terrifyingly alien and shockingly oriental.

This was not the Greece I knew from Ancient Greek studies – the Greece of Homer and Perakles, clean smooth marble and Apollonic clarity. This was something from Ali Baba or Aladdin…the Turkish Kastro lurking to the left of the town, the minarets poking up to the sky, the haziness of the light…something mysterious and chthonic was going on here.

And we are going to live here for a whole bleeding year!

There are situations in life which provide definitions for words – in this case the word was “trepidation”.

The road kept going behind rocky outcrops which hid the view for a moment as we slowly descended but then it was there again…Ioannina, each time at a slightly different angle…and now seeming even to harbour a little broodiness.

From our vantage point up the mountain the town had also seemed very serene but as we came down and rounded Perama and got onto the road into the centre of town that all changed; cars, mopeds, handcarts, kids, old men, old women, masses of clapped out vehicles and hobbling people spewed out all over the streets…this was Ioannina in the early evening – a loud time.

No doubt this didn’t happen but I recall the bus skidding round abruptly in a semi-circle and coming to a kind of sideways halt in the bus terminal. The doors hissed open and another titanic struggle began in and around the doors where the passengers were now trying to get off. These people who had all seemed so friendly and good-natured on the journey suddenly turned back into wild maniacs, eyes blazing, foaming at the mouth, pushing and shoving madly.

Then they were off and we, somewhat dazed, started to get off too. The passengers had now calmed down but now a new squabbling had broken out. A group of blokes with handcarts had started fighting over the cases; grabbing them from the bus, pulling them out of each others' hands and trying to snatch them from their colleagues’ handcarts. These were presumably porters.

And there again the alien nature of our environment went up a few more notches in intensity. I mean I knew what porters were and what they were supposed to do…but for me they had always been very peaceful chaps who stood around on platforms in the larger railway stations in the vague vicinity of a trolley which was invariably empty and they had the inborn ability to become invisible whenever a train approached the station and looked like stopping.

These Greek porters on the other hand were now streaked with sweat and red in the face from the effort of their murderous tussle for business.

A short stocky bloke deftly manhandled our cases onto his cart and sped off down the road; his feet pattering on the uneven pavement. We ran after him shouting, “hey…hang on!”

When he was at a safe distance from his competitors he stopped and we caught him up.

“Wskvnhfzrsldofhycnfvinfenfnalslfjknrnekodoen…” he said.

We had been practising for this very moment on the bus having finally realised that a little strategic preparation is quite a good thing.

“Xenodocheio…?” we said, trying to include in the intonation the extra information that this ‘hotel’ should also be cheap but not too nasty and not too far away.

“Koitaxte..” he replied, “shcbndrkyxnsmkfkdkkpsldmfnenfn.”

I remember having time in that moment to think, “hmm… koitaxte…that is the imperative plural of the verb koitazo which means ‘look’. What in the name of buggery does he want us to look at?”

It was weeks later that it dawned on me that just as we would say, “now, look…” to introduce an idea, the Greeks say koitaxte for the same thing. At that moment though I hadn’t a clue what he wanted.

He set off again purposefully and we tried to keep up with him. He disappeared into a narrow doorway and we followed him. It was very dark and seedy inside.

Looking at the hotel later, it was very dark and seedy outside too. We were in the reception at the very dark and seedy Hotel Metropole. Does the hotel ranking system with stars also use negative numbers? Whether they do or not we were about to spend our first night in Ioannina in the hotel frequented mainly by the town’s prostitutes and their clients!

A journey of three and a half days and two and a half thousand miles to spend the night in a brothel.

This was going to be some year!

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