ISLAND

HOPPING MAD

To enjoy Tinos as the Greeks do, explained our guide, leave the ferry on hands and knees and crawl through the town.

         When the bow doors gaped, however, the first passengers burst onto the quayside without obvious reverence.  The huntsmen were dragged away by their hounds.  Behind them, came the Athenian ladies, lavishly dyed and powdered and skillfully packed into children’s jodhpurs.  Then there were the pie-sellers and the priests, a puppy on a moped and - finally – the pilgrims.  Since 1822, when a vision appeared to the nun Pelagia, Tinos has been the holiest place in Greece, more visited than Lourdes.  As Patti predicted, some magnificent ladies fell to their knees and turtled up the municipal carpet into town, their handbags bumping along behind them like hatchlings.

         Patti surveyed her sixteen charges with mischievous satisfaction.  Before joining Explore, she had been a nurse and was a seasoned manageress of expectations.  Whilst, at first, we all regarded each other with healthy suspicion, she always seemed to think that she could make something of us, her Explorelings.  This seemed optimistic for so disparate a group; whilst some had traveled everywhere, most of us were splendidly incompetent.

         “I’m always dropping cameras down loos”, confessed one of the Explorettes who then lost another two in that week hopping the Aegean.  Initially, all we seemed to have in common was excess luggage – zippered trousers, poles, pouches, unguents and ointments – but soon we were hustling each other into photographs and ordering retsina in industrial quantities.  Two Explorelings even fell in love and when one was lanced by a sea urchin, he got the full, loyal escort to the clinic.

 

         Meanwhile, we followed the crawling ladies into Tinos town.  In the seventies, the Greek colonels, moved by uncharacteristic piety, ordered Tiniots to behave as if they were in church and all their women to wear skirts.  It was hard to imagine such severity; Tinos was a cheerful town of religious knick-knackery, omelette bars and hunting shops.  There were no tourists – just pilgrims, happily rummaging the shops for stuffed rabbits, backscratchers and magazines on God, busty women and Special Forces.  Patti peeled us away, to the safety of the hills.

         We stayed in the inn at Falatados.  The terrace looked out over a valley of broom, myrtle and lemon trees.  Each morning, the innkeeper stamped off into the undergrowth with a gun and, in the evenings, his wife, who was luminously beautiful, made the tables groan with game and her throaty wines.

         We were roused in the mornings by the village priest, his voice booming from the bell-tower just as Turkish muezzins’ had for centuries before him.  Patti took us and all our absurd equipment off to the hills.  We must have looked like some kind of deranged ski-troop, babbling along the mule tracks. Donkey-drivers, themselves inclined towards corduroy, were struck speechless with astonishment.

         We scrambled up into the fortress of Exoborgo, where the Venetians held out against the Turks until the eighteenth century.  Below us was an entrancing landscape of pastures and terraces, of tethered cattle and ginger pigs, whitewashed chapels and 1,200 medieval dovecotes, each decorated with lacy stonework.  Sometimes we strayed into villages – like Volax, where they still made baskets, and Koumares, where Greek editions of the classics, like “Robinson Crusoe” and “Ivanhoe”, lined the tavern walls.

 

         Of these villages, my favourite was our own, Falatados.  There was just room for two people to walk abreast down its stone-slabbed, whitewashed street.  It seemed empty but, if I spun round suddenly, I could catch half a dozen old ladies, nosily craning through their shutters.  There was one shop, largely preoccupied with medicines, and a kafeneion which had two customers, both russet-faced farmers.  I got adopted first by some sheepdogs, who howled at the evening breeze, and then by three children, who had set up a lively little bar in a chicken run.  Grandfather and I sat drinking ouzo whilst the chickens pecked the paint off his old Wartburg.  “Big party”, he said, “Tomorrow”.

         All the villagers came to the party, even the priest in his stovepipe hat.  The school rippled with flags and giant amplifiers scattered the sounds of bagpipes and bouzoukis across the island and deep into the Aegean.  A monstrous, hissing still oozed liquor all night and everyone danced: old, young, rich and mad.

         “In Ireland”, marveled our Dublin Explorling, “This would be so illegal”.

 

         We moved on to Andros, the most fertile of the Cyclades.  Almost immediately, Patti marched us back in to the hills.  We clambered up through almond groves and mulberry forests to the Panachrantos Monastery.  Once 300 monks had lived here but only two remained, living in a state of blissful decrepitude.  They collected our donations in a Roman centurion’s skull but never thrilled to our presence.  One of the Explorettes was trying to wear a jumper as trousers and, when a few inches of thigh wriggled free, we were politely ejected.

         It was a relief to be out in the sun again.  Andros was tirelessly exotic.  Sometimes, we marched along ancient pavements bounded by orthostats, massive stone-paneled walls.  Sometimes, we stumbled into orange groves or splashed along streams colonised by terrapins and operatic frogs.  Then we would climb into great, crackle-dry valleys, home only to pine martens.  We saw no one all day until we encountered some Dutch ramblers - all songs and singlets.  They made us uncharacteristically tribal.

         That evening, I went to Andros town, built on a rocky spur that nosed into the Aegean.  It was spotlessly wealthy, a town of elaborate, creamy mansions, fountains, gateways and marble streets so shiny that they made bicycles squeak excitedly.  There was even an art gallery with a collection of  Braques and Picassos.  I had my hair cut in a plump leather barber’s chair and then settled in the plateia, over a succulent hash of chorizo and pasta.  I was attended by five languid cats until some Greek-Americans - the New Andriots - sprayed them with expensive mineral water and forced an undignified retreat.

 

         Our last island, Evia,  was, for me, the best.  Despite its size and proximity to Athens, it was even more sparsely populated, if that were possible, and wilder than its sisters.  Zeus sensibly chose it for his courtship of Hera and the Turks clung on here longer than anywhere else in Greece.  Eviots themselves were different - some had fair hair and spoke a strange medieval Albanian dialect, Arvanitika.  But even on the top of mountains, their shepherds regarded us with maddening indifference; as intruders in their beautiful world we at least expected to be pelted with lumps of limestone.

         Halfway up Mount Ochi, we came upon the quarry of Killindri.  Seven great, Roman columns lay where the masons had left them, freshly nibbled from the rock.  It all seemed so recently abandoned that, for a brief moment, I enjoyed the sensation of proximity to these ancients.  Soon, less welcome sensations stalked us; hot limbs had to be plunged into goat troughs and the subject of delicious tea raised itself rather insistently.  I must have died soon afterwards because I then found myself before a delicious tea served by a man with an orange beard, called Roger.  Welcome to the Ochi Mountain Refuge.

         It would be ridiculous to try and imagine a more idyllic setting.  We sat on the edge of an ancient chestnut forest, with the Aegean spread out below, neatly scored by specks of shipping.  Spring water tinkled out of the mountain.  Chiff-chaffs and flycatchers sung for our crumbs and they in turn were much admired by Bonelli’s eagles.  In the evening, we strolled up to the summit, now pink and cool, and sat in the mysterious Dragon House.  No one has yet provided a sober explanation as to when or why it was built.  Each brick is the size of a family saloon.

         We dragged the Refuge mattresses into the starlight and, at dawn, were awoken by an avalanche of bells pouring off the summit.   There was no shepherd with the sheep – he sat at the foot of the mountain, calling breakfast on the horn of his moped.  We clambered down  the other side, the Dimosaris Gorge.  It took all day, through maple woods and clumps of cyclamen, down a staircase of waterfalls to the remote beach at Kallianou.

         That, our last, night we stayed with the Albanians who ran the inn.  Their smallholding sat at the foot of the magnificent gorge, on a nest of ancient ironmongery.  Dinner had all been shot or hauled from the sea and we washed away each sizzling course with greedy draughts of  grandfather’s retsina.  Alas, there is no provision for over-indulgence in the wildest Greek islands; breakfast was a glass of fresh, lumpy goats milk.

 

John Gimlette traveled as a guest of Explore Worldwide (01252 760 100).  Their 9 day Aegean Islands Hike costs £495 pp including flights, ferries, guide and B&B accommodation.

Further reading; “Greek Islands” (Cadogan £14.99)