bunch'a ferries

18:52 6 August, Camping Naoussa

As you're no doubt aware from reading the first two entries in this post rather than missing all the suspense by reading this one first, I have failed to mention what happened when I arrived in the port of Paros. As it turned out, I landed at just after midnight and, making my way through the chaotic morass of my fellow passengers and touts excitedly trying to advertise their hotels, I saw a sign for "Camping Naoussa". The camping area that I'm staying at is good enough to send a shuttle to pick up passengers disembarking at the port, and drive them the 15 minutes north to the campground. For this I am eternally grateful.

Anyway, I just came back from an afternoon at the beach. With the exception of a short-lived attempt to learn how to surf out in California (I simply mastered it so quickly and to such an extent that it became boring within half an hour) today has been my only daylight experience in the ocean since visiting Hawaii when I was 12. The simple reason for this is that I hate being cold and wet, and while others may describe a dip in the ocean as cool and refreshing, I tend to see it as an excellent way of contracting hypothermia. Today, however, I finally found a beach I can enjoy. Because the Mediterranean generally, and the Aegean specifically are warm seas, and because the water was less than a meter deep for quite a ways, the seawater was roughly the temperature of bathwater.

The beach is that-a-way.

So I was in the water for more than an hour for the first time in my life, and I enjoyed every minute of it. I think I'll aim to spend another relaxing night at the campground, doing my best to find any English-speaking campers.

12:24 6 August, Camping Naoussa

I'm currently sitting in the laundry room/garage/open-air sleeping pavilion on the camping site that I'm staying at on the island of Paros. Having started my trip in Iceland with three nights of camping in the Islandic wilderness, I felt reasonably prepared to spend a few nights on the Greek Isles in a tent. However, there are two chief differences between my experience camping in Þorsmörk and camping in Paros. Þorsmörk, while colder at night, provided the perfect temperature to spend the daylight hours (of which there were many) hiking and exploring. Paros is hot pretty much all the time, but from the hours of 12:00 to 5:00 its so hot that pretty much all mammalian life shuts down. Hiking is out of the question unless one wants to return in a state of sweat and filth that the primitive and unreliable showers (no water came out of the elevated pipe this morning) could never wash away.

The second chief difference is that while Þorsmörk was inhabited by a few luxury travelers, cruising through on Land Rovers, the majority of the population were campers and backpackers there to hike and explore. Paros, and the Greek Islands generally, are an excellent destination for anyone looking to stay in a mid-range to luxury hotel, spending their days renting boats and Land Rovers to explore the island. However, because my two weeks in Greece are but a small fraction of a larger trip, I did not budget the kind of spending that seems to be required to fully appreciate the isles.

The coastal town of Naoussa.

Nevertheless, I am still enjoying spending my mornings relaxing at the beach, and my afternoons exploring the whitewashed back alleys of the coastal towns (you see, it's hard to really complain). The waters are as blue and as warm as advertised, and despite the arid landscape of the interior, any place of human habitation blossoms with flowers supported by man made aquifers.

20:53 4 August, Sailing toward Paros

It has certainly been an interesting day. After waking up and heading over to the travel agency at 9:30 as I was advised to by the travel agent, I was told that there were no spots left on any of the ferries heading to Paros today, but that there was a chance that someone might cancel, and I could sneak into their spot. So I returned to my hostel, checked out, and spent the next few hours sweating to death in the computer room. In between water runs and writing blog updates (see below) I would periodically return to the travel agency to see if the situation had improved. Apparently the booking system became infected by a computer virus sometime around midday, and it shutdown entirely. Finally, after posting my entry below, I packed up my things, made one more stop by the travel agency to make sure that there had been no positive developments, and headed down to the harbor.

I don't really know why I thought this would improve my chances of getting ferries, as the whole system is handled through various travel agencies and one cannot simply buy a ticket on the boat. However, within 15 minutes, I was securing myself a round trip ticket to Paros. I had walked into the nearest agency to the harbor metro stop, and after being told that there were no spots available today, the agent did a quick check and found that one spot on the 19:45 ferry to Mykonos, with a stop in Paros, had opened up. I still wonder if this wasn't some kind of ploy to get me to buy the ticket as quickly as possible, but it certainly worked as I jumped at the spot, as well as the opening for the return voyage. I didn't know what class of ticket my 66 euro had bought me, but I was just happy to know that I would be getting to and from Paros, even if it would be rather late.

Before I continue, I should perhaps mention that the term "ferry" is deceptive, conjuring up images of half rusted shuttles with open air seating and thick layers of paint covering their iron railings. The ferries out to the larger islands, such as Paros, are more like smaller cruise ships, well over a hundred meters long. While there are far fewer cabins as overnight voyages are less common, the ferries are never the less large, modern, and very comfortable.

A good example of one of the ferries. I would actually mistake this ferry for the one that was to take me to Paros in an incident that you will be able to read about later.

Having secured the tickets in my luggage, I set out to find a way of killing the 4 hours before my ferry set sail. I looked into a few cafes, and even a McDonalds, hoping that I could find some free wireless internet, but when that failed to materialize, I simply plunked myself down on a park bench and pirated just enough bandwidth to send a email. Later, poking my head into a few cafes, this time motivated by hunger rather than a desire for connectivity, I finally settled on a charming little restaurant solely on the basis of its name.

A good place for some Cypriot food...

...and some Cypriot beer (which once one a Gold Medal in a 1987 beer competition in Britain, a fact they've been pointing out on their labels ever since.)

I have, as the family members reading this blog are aware, no real Mediterranean ancestry - least of all Cypriot ancestry - I feel a strong connection to this troubled little island mostly because of the passionate representation of Cyprus by my friend Jana who's father is a Turkish Cypriot. As I'm sure she's reading this, I ask that she excuse the fact that I was patronizing the establishment of a Greek Cypriot, and instead focus on my attempt to interact with her greater cultural heritage.

Having thus enjoyed my meal, I basically just dubbed around for a few hours, before finally finding and boarding my ferry. The former action was not as simple as it may seem. Both my ticket and the display boards scattered throughout the harbor clearly indicated that my ferry would be leaving from dock E2. Though it took nearly an hour, I slowly but surely made my way from dock E9 to E8 to E7 and so on down to E2. Just to be sure I was in the right place, I kept going, until I saw signs indicating that I was all the way to E1. So I returned to E2 quite sure that I was in the right location. However, such a sense of security in location does not warrant such a lengthy introduction unless the foundation of said sense is wrong. You see, unlike any other dock in the port of Athens, there are two dock E2s. A bird's eye view would reveal that my countdown from E9 to E1 follows a logical pattern of descending order, but moving passed E1, one comes to yet another dock E2. I suspect it was designed this way simply to cause undue stress and confusion to foreign tourists which affords the predatory harbor taxi drivers the chance to pick up a 2 minute fare.

Anyway, I made it to the boat with plenty of time, and translated the Greek characters on my ticket to mean that I could sit anywhere on level E. However, this is apparently not the case, and as I write this whilst reclining on a plastic deck chair, I have yet to find which seat is mine, assuming that I even have one. But the trip should take either 3 or 4 hours (I don't know if this is a high speed ferry or not) and as it's already quite dark, I intend to spend the majority of my time catching up on my reading in the lounge, and perhaps taking a promenade around the deck.

Overlooking the brightly-lit deck of my ferry.

It remains to be seen what will happen when I arrive in the Port of Paros, as while the hostel advertises a free shuttle from the port to the town in the northern part of the island where they are located, I don't know how late it operates. I'll just have to hope for the best, and if worse comes to worse I'll simply find a nice secluded place and set myself up Luxembourg-style.