S/V Tavarua

We survived waterskiing without sunburns, but not without sore muscles. Seems it has been quite a long time since we were pulled behind a boat. Watching the folks at the school waterskiing barefoot and backwards this morning definitely puts the humble in your already humble sports ego.

The good side is hot weather, great scenery (looks like a lake here, even though it is salt water), great smells (pine trees, jasmine in bloom) and a light wind (nothing like the southern islands with the strong summer gales)… and the down side is flies, mosquitoes, and loads of wasps and hornets. We were chasing around spare mosquitoes in our room with a towel last night to see if that would help the nights sleep. Alas, the swatting didn’t help, a few of the bastards were still buzzing us all night long.

Today is a holiday, family gathering style. I suppose this is the equivalent of Labor Day weekend, but with a religous bent: Feast of the Ascension. Lots of families everywhere. Complete with a handful of dogs. One of our favorites has been a basset hound that has a mellow disposition and seems to show up everywhere. It really is amazing that she doesn’t step on her ears.

We are doing better here than New York it seems, since we just saw the power outage news on the CNN World News on the patio here.

Getting ready to head back through Athens to Santa Cruz and prep for Burning Man. Wow, summer is almost over… how the hell did that happen?! We are sooo looking forward to an American style shower and burning these overworn clothes… and food, Mexican food to be exact.

We are hanging out for a week on an island near Athens. Not much happening here, but the weather is good and there is a waterski school down the road that has drop-in waterskiing and wakeboards.

We went out skiing yesterday and certainly have some sore muscles to prove it. Derrell is rusty enough to not remember whether his left foot or right foot should go forward on the ski (snowboarding has made that rather confusing), but in hindsight having determined he had them backwards, he still managed to get up on the ski. What a dude! Me? I had 6 false starts and then was put on the beginner bar. Oh, the humility.

The water is warm and there is a raft dock out in the middle of the bay, so we have a good destination for morning swims.

So overall, we are just chillin’ for a week.

We escaped Kos after a really tough day in a cafe keeping watch over the sunbathers renting umbrellas and lounge chairs and being served watermelons containing a caustic mixture of watermelon foo-foo drink, paper umbrellas and bendable straws. The final result culminated in one team of sun worshippers wearing the watermelon like a helmet on their heads. They, of course, ordered a third watermelon. That should be one head full of fruit in the morning for them.

We found Leros to be a island just coming around to the idea that tourism should surpass fishing. (On the way to the island, our cellphone, and every other on the boat, receieved an SMS message welcoming us to Turkey. A welcoming country, but we stuck with Greece.) It took us a bit to navigate the town, since there were no signs pointing us towards the town we wanted, the tourist information was closed for lunch, and we hestitated too long on deciding to rent a scooter and they closed for lunch. A taxi driver eventually appeared after we succumbed and settled in for a two hour lunch (good Dolmades! great fava beans in tomato sauce! fine greek salad! toasted homemade bread with oregano and a side of blue cheese butter! fresh cold watermelon! - a minor 15 Euros - all served with cold water! - Win!)

The town is still half fishing village. We walked by a guy delivering huge blocks of ice to a building. Vans and trucks were circling through the villages once a day announcing the arrival of fish on the loud speakers (sort of like one of those old Greek or Italian movies). Fishing boats were all painted in garish combinations of white based primary colors and look exactly like the toy boats you used to have in the bathtub when you were little. Men were sitting around playing backgammon, repairing nets or just plain jabbering on the short stools out on the streets.

And the other half is Greek tourism. Tiny bathing suits on the older men. Lots of kids with pails, doing the age-old dance of moving piles of sand and rocks around. Menus in two languages, but no pictures. Uplighting on the castle fortress on the hill. Yachts in the harbor, but no cruise ships. Rather the most pleasant tourism we’ve run into on the islands… good and low-key. We even heard an older group screaming ‘Opa!’ repeatedly in the late afternoon, and we assume Retsina or Ouzo was involved.

The mix ends up with the owner of the cafe heading out to check on his net in the water holding squid and cooling other perishables for the restaurant and finding out that the pint-sized Greek tourists had opened the net and the peices are floating all around along the edge of the beach. (He wasn’t very pleased.) It ends up with octopus drying on meat hooks in front of the cafes, and folks gutting fish two tables down from where you are having an afternoon lunch. It also ends up with a young local kid with a spear gun swimming among the handful of tourists paddling around in the water. (We couldn’t decide what he might catch, but steered clear enough to make sure it wasn’t us.) It has tourists on motor scooters toting umbrellas, followed by weather-worn locals doubled up on scooters in traditional fishing caps wearing blue and white checkered collared shirts. And it is punctuated by good grilled smells then overripe fish, combined with women and children scrubbing down the road in front of their stores.

The first meal on the island was great, the rest were the standard fare that makes you think the guy should have stuck with fishing and not started terrorizing others with his cooking. Sometimes a nose for fishing isn’t a nose for cooking.

Trying to get off the island was a challenge. Ferries not leaving until the middle of the week, flights full, a power outage when resorting to the Internet, the tourist information office still closed. It is a weird having that ‘you may be trapped here’ feeling when the oldest scooters on the planet, all without mufflers, are running you over in narrow streets that have no sidewalks with gale force winds running off the bay. When it all works out and you get off the island, there is a true moment of relief, joy and belief that the universe isn’t Completely out to get you.

We escaped Rhodes and made it over to Kos this morning. From the ferry we got views of Turkey, literally a stone’s throw away. It sort of looks like what you’d expect: Brown rocky edges with short scrubby bushes… um, similar to the Greek islands?! (Exactly how do you get the raised eyebrow sentiment into a sentence?)

Well Kos is a modern, Oahu feeling place. It has all the touristy kitsch found on Rhodes, but with bigger, more open cafes. The fine print differences between Rhodes and Kos sums up to our departure of Rhodes: standing on the deck with three young German guys blaring a Sinatraesque lounge music version of Mr. Bojangles on their boom box… causing a strong sense that someone like Fred Astair was going to scoot across the parking lot with some fancy dance steps, then Mickey Mouse was going to be marching along behind, all with the backdrop of a Knights of the Round Table fortressed wall in the background and the Agean Sea behind us… ‘Hmm.’

Kos is just your standard Vespa unmufflered scooters weaving down the main street along the harbor kind of place, lined with fast food cafes and lots of Guiness signs (the Brits have settled). We decided Kos was a bit more palatable than Rhodes.

We already found a cafe on the back streets and finally had our FIRST conversation with a someone that lives on the islands. One of the restaurant workers that is seasonal on the island. After two weeks, we were convinced that Greek culture doesn’t really exist. Sometimes you just roll through too much high volume tourism that keeps the local people you meet out of conversation spectrum. That’s not to say that we don’t get a snippet of conversation from folks working the cafes being nice, it is just that we haven’t had more than those 15 second conversations with anyone. Basically, July and August are nuts and way overpacked here.

Food highlights of the moment:
- Gyro: pita stuffed with greasy pork, tzatziki, and.. woo-hoo!… french fries
- Pork in Spicy Red Sauce: schnitzel in mushroom cream sauce (spicy?! Oh, you menu-writing bastards, may you suffer bland food for life!)
- Turkish Pitta: a fantastic folded bread baked in a wood-fired oven with a cumin flavored dry sausage, tangy cheese, fresh roasted onion and green peppers (Win!)
- Roasted Corn: found on every street corner that usually hosts an icecream trolley, a pastry shop, and a pretzel vendor (We’ve yet to pick one up, but they smell darn good… and rather odd to watch a business man walking around chomping down on one… wonder who is selling toothpicks before the afternoon meetings)
- Ouzo: offered at random and much to our distress as a ‘bonus’ as a post dinner apertif
- Retsina: a fine acquired taste.. we read that the pine resin in the wine is only 1% these days, but in the past it was up to 7% (singe your taste buds on that thought and turn you into a squirrel)
- Fresh Orange Juice: everywhere and cheap… just give up on that U.S. reconstituted goo

Organics in view on these islands:
- Hibiscus: yep
- Banana trees: yep
- Plumeria trees: yep
- Cactus: holding up
- Magnolias: yep
- Olive trees: well, of course
- Lemon and Orange trees: of course
- Plants out of town: scrubby stuff kept in check by goats
- Cats: lots, better fed, some almost chubby on this island, a few with collars, neutering non-existant, good sunspots and bushes to lounge under

Internet:
- satellite connection (Win!)

We keep losing our postings due to poor connections at these Internet cafes, though. You would think I’d learn to copy into a buffer before posting after a third retype… but noooo, not me. Holding on to naiveity with an iron fist keeps you young, I say.

Is it Disneyland or is it Hawaii or possibly Rhodes? Well, there are medieval towers, Byzantine alleyways, synagogues, Turkish mosques, hordes of tourists, hotels that look like they should front the Kona beaches, hundreds of cafes, more plastic reproductions than you can imagine for sale… hmm, must be Rhodes.

We wandered through the Palace of the Grand Masters and viewed Roman and Hellenistic period (aka, pre-Roman) floor mosaics. Got another rough sampling of clay pots, pottery and a few sex scenes on the oil lamps. Derrell asked “Well, just how many clay pots can you look at and stay interested?” That was just as we rounded the corner and inspected the handles of some cooking pots that were phallic in shape. Well, that retrained our interest on the finer details of the cooking equipment. “Hi honey, I’m home! I bought a new cooking pot for you today. You did say cooking everyday was getting to be a drag… didn’t you?” The museum livened up only slightly after that.

We took a flight over from Crete to get here. The Rhodes airport is under-construction. Now that isn’t much of interest. What was for us was the challenge of finding the bus station to get to ‘Rhodes Town’. After asking one of the construction workers, it turns out that you need to walk to the road across a few parking lots and stand on the far side of the street (no crosswalk or posted signs pointing the way) to catch the bus. One battered sign that was uprooted and leaning against the wall marked the lonely stop, was supported by the graffiti written by some past tourists labeling the area in black marker in English and in Japanese as the ‘Rhodes Bus Stop!’.

By this time, we considered it a matter of principle to wait for the bus. Taxis were located at the airport; the bus was hidden without signs a huge walk away. With no posted signs and only the reassurance from our guidebook that there are 21 buses a day running from 5 am to 11 pm, we waited it out. Okay, we weren’t martyred too much, we did have a good bench in the shade with a fine breeze. To prove our resolve at shunning the airports push of 12 Euro taxis (the taxi stand was the Only(tm) thing you see when leaving the tiny airport), two different taxi drivers stopped by and offered reduced fares.. best offer of 8 Euros. Hey, not bad, but dammit we’ve got principles! We held our ground, and amazingly, a bus actually did roll up and deliver us to the town after a 50 minute wait. Hah! Another blow to the rigged tourist traps of the world. Oh, alright,… we would have gotten to town faster and that lady behind us wouldn’t have smoked on us during the ride and we would have had a cooler ride and not lost at least a pound in sweat and we wouldn’t of had to figure out where our hotel was and we would have had a shorter walk… but sometimes you just Need to go against the grain.

With enough squinting, Rhodes is actually a fine place to breeze through. The people are friendly, the food crappy and overpriced, the tourists looking enthusiastic, the water a mix of that Conde Nast tourquoise and lapis luzuli blue, a Balder’s Gate looking medieval wall surrounds the place… Overall, much prettier than Iraklio (Derrell: “Iraklio is a pit.”) and much more along our expectations of Greek tourism. We’ve seen seashell shops, dancing Hawaiian dolls, fake medieval suits of armour, Uganda gorrilla image t-shirts with the word ‘Greece’ below (honestly, who buys this shit?), and 20,000 jewelery shops. Combine it with sunburned kids, ghostly white legs of northern European dads in shorts toting a camcorder and a non-digital camera, icecream cones, Greek music blaring under vine canopied cafes.. and a slow Internet connection… and you’ve got a fine place to hang out for a day. ‘A day’ = ‘one day’, of course. Two days and we might start sending home plastic headless greek statuary.

Okay so all our ferry rides, bar the first, are running from 1 to 3 hours late in arrival. Once aboard, they are pleasant enough, but some definitely are better than others. The government price fixes the routes, so the size, shape and condition of the boat is irrelevant. On our way to Crete, we ended up on a fully booked, assigned seating, highspeed catamaran with no outdoor areas and completely non-smoking (good for us, but hell for the chain smokers already on board for 6 hours). It was a pleasant ride once the majority of the passengers departed at Santorini.

We met another two Norwegians on the ride. One was a 4th grade school teacher that was taking last minute, discount package vacations down to Greece. This was his second. He was hoping to fly back and catch a third one. So there are some deals to be found in Europe this year. The other guy was just hanging out with him and enjoying the islands. They had an opinion on world humor: Brits, Scandanavians, Austrailians and most of the USians have cross-cultural humor. When it comes to the rest of Europe, none of their self-deprecating humor works, everyone just stares at them frowning. Okay, given that opinion and the fact that we know about it… you can guess that these two Norwegians were Extreme extraverts.

On Crete, the city of Iraklio is 115,000 people, a rather uninspiring looking city, but completely walkable. They say the per capita wealth here is the highest of any city in Greece. It doesn’t really show in anything but the bustle of people and cars moving about. The architecture is a sore sight on the eyes, but then the city was wiped out in WWII. Guess the rebuild didn’t have any funding for any budding Michelangeos around.

Food Notes:
- We ate at a taverna on the waterfront where the waiters had to cross a busy road to bring out the food to the packed tables. A new occupational hazard for the serving staff.
- We ate at a second taverna that had us point at the current hot and cold offerings of the day, also a very packed place. I found some odd items to order, baked artichokes with fresh dill, carrots and potatoes, ladyfinger okra in tomato sauce, and stuffed tomatoes. It may not sound like a big deal, but they actually eat VEGETABLES in Greece. After Italy and Spain, I feel like we exited winter and hit summertime cuisine. (Recall Italy got a reprimand from WHO for not having adequate fruits and vegetables in the mainstream diet.)

Museum Notes:
- The archeology museum was actually open, no construction in sight. The Minoan culture was a very flowery-girly culture. They had flower designs, swirly-bloopy designs, dolphin and octopus designs and a real thing for bull imagery with gold horns. A true matriarchal society. None of that heads-rolling, blood dripping patriarchal living room design for them. How else could you get the ‘Prince of the Lillies’ designed on your palace wall? Guys just wouldn’t usually go for that title.

Small World Note:
- We were rolling in for the evening and flipping through the cable stations. We are sitting there staring blankly at zdf.de, a German station, wondering if we can decipher a word or two… and… what appears but Ken Adelman’s head on our TV. In German, we listened to a coverage story of the California Coastline project, with interjections of ‘Kenneth und Gabrielle Adelman’, intermixed with images of their helicopter and the California coast. That was waaay too weird.

Smoky Internet cafes here, but they’ve got networked games going. This attracts many under 18, loud, enthusiastic boys all shouting back and forth across the room at each other. With down-tempo house music blaring, of course.

We headed over to hit an overcroweded beach by way of a small taxi boat. The ride over was beautiful, the beach was too crowded to even get our towels deployed on the beach. So, after sitting/sunning on the rocks thinking a few lizard thoughts, we headed back over to the town.

This is the land of the 6 to 8 Euro cocktail, and the land of restauranteurs adding a bonus to the end of your meal with shots of free ouzo. I guess they figure if they get you started drinking, you’ll eventually pay the hefty price for the cocktails. It didn’t quite work for us, but they did get us to buy a cheaper beer to erradicate the taste of licorice.

We are starting to wear out on Greece and the tourism. Overpriced, crowded, and tacky… but great beaches (when you can find a spot, that is) and beautiful vistas of turquoise water.

… we are headed over to Crete to see what lays on that tourist mile… uh-oh in about 15 minutes.

Gotta dash…

We’ve gone lower in population (only 9,000 on this island), but higher in tourism density. So it actually seems much more populated than Naxos. Dang, I’m allergic to tacky souvenier shops. This island makes up for it with the, um, dramatic?, views, though. So hard to find a single word to describe what we are seeing.

The island used to be round, but in 1650 BC the volcano blew and removed the center leaving a round cresent of two islands with a bump of a volcano island in the center. It is probably the origin of the lost city of Atlantis legends, along with the end of the Minoans that were living here at the time. Regardless, it certainly must have been an eruption straight from the depths of Hades.

Okay, how about ’spectacular’? The edges of the island plunge a 1000 feet straight down into the water. “Where is the town?”, you ask. It spills over the top of this cliff and hangs onto the side, and hopefully, keeps hanging.

We’ve never seen so many stairs on our way to our hotel room. And we’ve been stuck on the 4th floor in a number of our hotels. This room has a winding set of stairs that goes down from lip of caldera over 6 stories. The good news is that we are right next to the pool, the bad news is Derrell’s bruised and skinned body is whimpering the entire journey up and down. Down is actually tougher than up with the cobbly slanted steps. Go figure.

I don’t think we can get a more picturesque room than this. We have a small balcony that is outlined by grape vines complete with huge bunches of ripe green grapes. (I thought at first they were plastic renditions. Oh, the jading you get in life by the creators of the tacky.) The balcony has six chairs a small table and a fine unobstructed view of the water a good 700 feet below. The seagulls are sailing around at eye level. The boats are toy sized on the water. It competes with paradise by providing us with the entertainment of the hotel’s mama cat and spunky half-grown kittens. Not a bad showing against paradise.

Now if only we can get over the tourist schlock of the town. The big draw is the nightlife here, but after Ibiza, we aren’t ready to commit to rotating hours around to see dawn and give up pool time. Ibiza was like a double dose of jet lag, getting onto the hours and then recovering to get back onto human hours. Ouch. Guess the Greek pace of life is slowing us down.

I wonder what it takes to move here? Oh, yes, right, this darn Internet connection. Maybe we’ll hold off on declaring the location of paradise for awhile longer.

Time to swim through the throngs of souvenier shopping tourists, climb some stairs, climb some more stairs and find some lunch. Hopefully, no food suprises.

(Derrell wanted me to note, he has now had potato in his gyro. And to recall the past culinary delight of a deep-fried-to-a-crisp (no batter) large artichoke soaked in olive oil that was served to us in Rome that contained no identifiable edible parts. We spotted a second of these monstrosities being served to an Italian on the last island, and noted with curiosity that this must be just an item to play with at the table, since the person didn’t actually eat any of it but instead tore apart and arranged and rearranged the partially burned brown leaves around the plate looking for something to eat.)

A slice of island paradise!

The water is beautiful, the weather cooler than Athens, the brown desolate looking islands highlight the sparkling white-washed buildings with blue doors that match the water and sky. Wow, Greece has been holding back on us!

Derrell is of a mind to move here already, but I imagine that will wane as the reality of the dial-up network connections from these islands sinks in. 33k modems or IP over satellite, mostly the former… either way when shared with others at an Internet cafe… refreshes go slower than your ice melting.

We aren’t the only Americans who think this island is fantastic. An Austin-ite opened a Mexican bistro and is serving up fantastic chips and salsa, margaritas and fajitas. It rejuvenated our homesick tastebuds. Actually spicy food! And in a recognizable form!

No Americans have actually been overheard on this island (we didn’t actually meet the owner of the mexican bistro), but lots of Brits have been spotted. The age level has receded back to the 30 year old tourist set, punctuated by a very tan and leathery 45 year old German crowd. No white haired little old ladies (that aren’t Greek) are to be seen.

English is the common language in the tourist loop, street signs are in Greek and English, menus the same, and we are hearing Greeks switching back and forth between Greek and English as they are chatting (but not as mixed up as Morocco where the language switch was within a single sentence, sometimes several times). The island is relaxed, the tourists are relaxed. With only 18,000 total on the island and with these views, how else could it be?

Our trip over from Athens was by ferry. The ferry is the same size as the Washington State ferries. The interior is more like a cruise ship, though. And the exterior was painted with a full end to end, glaringly red Vodaphone advertisement, so in that sense it didn’t look anthing like a Puget Sound ferry from the outside, either. The ads all over the ferry must have had an effect. Derrell is now mumbling about “needing” a new camera phone…

I tried out a Greek coffee at the on-board cafe. Woof! The first sip was grit-city chalky and by the end, the espresso grounds were sticking along my teeth, not the most pristine of morning sensations. It tasted great being the Italian Illy coffee, but I’ll stick with espresso and enjoy the invention of filtration that doesn’t destroy that post-toothbrushing sensation of clean teeth so sadistically. I suppose knowing that it used to be called Turkish coffee (until Turkey invaded Cyprus in the 70’s), really should have tipped me off. I’ve chewed my way through that teacup of grinds before.

Beyond beach time, we rented scooters and scooted our way around the island. What a fantastic way to travel. The scooter is narrow and so are the roads. Roads here are empty, curvy and erraticly maintained. You wind around a corner and there is a pile of dirt, rock or marble blocking a lane… or a very shaggy goat… or a donkey loaded with an old man and his booty of cut dried grass… or a herd of goats bleating their way across the road… or a large tour bus toting passengers to one of the two ’sights’ on the island.

The views as we scooted around were amazing. There were a ton of bees in the air that we kept having to avoid. Thyme honey is a specialty of the island and the bees were busy collecting from the wild clumps of purple that thoroughly speckled the brown and white hillsides. The countryside outright smells like a fresh bowl of Muselix! The highest point of the island is over 3000 feet, so we had vistas of small churches and shrines, complete with white-washed sides and rounded blue domes on remote cliffs with the sparking water reaching out forever from the island.

Derrell was pleased to note one of the tombstone like roadside shrines contained a Coca-Cola bottle along side a bronze challace and picture of the Virgin Mary. We couldn’t decide if it was intentional or not. He was convinced it was… cola being a holy substance in his mind on a hot day.

Now the downside of motor scootering is that you really should be careful on turns. Derrell is 0 for 2 on scooters now. He laid the little beast over when his kickstand caught on a slow roadside turn and threw the back wheel out. He now has a 6 inch bruise behind his knee and a set of skinned knees and hands that would make a 3-year old proud. Given salt water is a fine retaliation for open wounds, we dumped him into the ocean after the ride and he is now in whimpering, embarrassed recovery.

Beach time!

We haven’t mentioned much about food for awhile. Our luck with ordering at restaurants was hitting near zero on the Zagat rating scales. That isn’t to say the food hasn’t been entertaining, just that we sort of peer down at our plates and consider whether it is better, worse or the same as college cafeteria food. It usually has been equated to the same. The entertaining side comes from ordering an item (no descriptions on most menus, just the food name) and then being rather suprised at what shows up.

Leaving Spain out of the food picture, I can give a few examples today that describe the entertainment.

1) Order: Fresh Lemon Juice
Arrival: A soda fountain glass of straight lemon juice over ice.
Reaction: Well, it is sour but it sort of grows on you by the end.

2) Order: Greek Salad
Arrival: Tomatoes, cucumber, onion, 3″ square block of feta, oregano, olive oil and lemon juice
Reaction: Shouldn’t there be lettuce in here somewhere?

3) Order: Soulvaki
Arrival: Lamb kebab
Reaction: Oh, that’s Soulvaki, it isn’t actually stewed lamb similar to what we get in California at Vassili’s and the place in Palo Alto

4) Order: Gyro
Arrival: A gyro, meat contents Pork
Reaction: Hmm, never had a pork gryo before, well, that’s a different taste sensation

Those are the success stories of our ordering when the food comes out and at least migrates onto the entertainment scale. Other times, we’ve just run across the dregs of the cooking school. The standard overcooked, undercooked, over salty, not seasoned, fatty, greasy, soggy items from owners that really took a wrong career turn when they decided to open a restaurant.

With a string of recent oddities on the culinary front, we looked up the Zagat guide for Athens and headed over to Daphne’s restaurant for a non-backpacker guide restaurant. Ah, nice surroundings, good bread, attentive waitstaff, hot food from a menu that actually describes its entrees. Woo-hoo!! Our taste buds are revived. Baklava exists! Greek food rocks! We can actually get our check in less than 45 minutes! Heaven.

And the meal even came with spectator entertainment. A mom was dining with an 11, 12 and 16 year old. The teenager went to sit down and pulled out a chair just as the 11 year old facing away talking to mom went to sit down. We had a full chin bonk as there was no longer a chair for him to sit upon. Full mayhem ensued, including waitstaff and owner, and lasted at their table for the remainder of the meal. The conclusion of the teenager salting all of the communal food plates in order to pay back the 11 year old for the whimpering was over the top. Siblings really look like a mixed blessing. I think they would have all sold each other to the lowest bidder during that meal. The mom just looked absolutely dazed.

Back to food. In summary, Athens is such a food upgrade from Spain, even with the weird suprises. Ahh…