While working in Siran picking grapes, we had met a few folks. One very hard up English bloke desperate to get home was selling off his belongings. We bought his tent for a fiver. It was luxury compared to the Wendy house and a necessity now that we were no longer homeward bound. Four other blokes - three Scots and a Scousser - were travelling to Greece by car and very kindly offered to take my rucksack to save me lugging the thing. We planned to meet them in Patras three days after leaving Siran. We were travelling by bus this time, no hitching involved so three days was ample time to allow them and us to get there. The thought that they may make off, never to be seen again with my duds hadn’t once crossed my mind. I packed some clothes for the journey in Tony’s rucksack. He grumbled about it. A little bit jealous that no-one had offered to transport his stuff by car.
Richard, a hairdresser with a mass of black curls down beyond his shoulders, beard and moustache, sun bronzed giving the appearance of some godlike character until he opened his mouth and shattered the illusion with broad Glaswegian dialect barely understandable… was the one who had chivalrously offered to haul my luggage. I remember little of the other Scots except that one of them needed to get larger swimming trunks. The ones he had didn’t cover much. The Scousser was an odd character still pale and looking ill even after a spell in the Mediterranean sunshine. That was just the type of him. He would always look ill to me.
Off we went to Lyon to catch the bus to Greece and Patras to meet our friends coming from the Brindisi ferry. By the time we reached Lyon, I realised that wearing shorts wasn’t such a good idea. The temperatures further north were nothing like what they had been in Siran. We had deposited the rucksack in left luggage which was now closed for the night. Having decided to wait overnight for our bus in the station and not spend anything on accommodation, I had no choice other than to shiver until morning.
The bus took us through northern Italy and Yugoslavia with only a few stops for refueling and food. Arriving in Athens we caught another bus to Patras. Either we were early or they were late but our friends hadn’t arrived. We booked into a cheap hotel and waited. Two days later they arrived without the car. It had broken down somewhere on the way and so they abandoned it. We’d seen enough of Patras already and planned to move on the next day to Nafplio to spend our few weeks lawling around in the sun before the money ran out and we would have to head back to Northern Ireland.
Next morning we all caught the bus. It was a strange system they used for seating…. the tickets were numbered in correspondance with the seat numbers and seemed to be given out randomly with no consideration that people may be travelling together. We weren’t aware of the rules and just sat down as a bunch near the back of the bus. Several stops later a small Greek man with attitude got on the bus and began to protest that I was in his seat. The bus was half empty. None of us could understand why he couldn’t just sit down somewhere else. The bus driver was keeping an eye to the situation in his mirror but saying nothing. Richard (my hero again) stood up in my defense when this adamant little man grabbed my wrist and tried to pull me out of the seat. At this point the bus driver shouted something at the man and he wandered off to a vacant seat. It was much later that I noticed my watch had gone. Cheap digital thing. It wasn’t worth stealing.
Nafplio was a small town with a huge fort on top of the hill. We immediately met up with some other travellers at the bus drop off point and got talking. One guy John, was from Twinbrook in Belfast and had been living/working there for some time with his Dutch girlfriend Uri. At this point we realised there may be an opportunity to stay in Greece for a while if we too could find work. John said he would recommend us since he was heading off to the Netherlands. Maybe his boss would need more help. We pitched the new tent where camping was illegal… among the trees near the beach within a little community of lawbreakers. That night a drunk Greek unzipped the tent demanding cigarettes. It was the same Greek who had earlier invited me to go and pick prickly pears with him. Tony, half asleep, told him in a spontaneously acquired German accent that he would shoot him if he didn’t %^&*! off. Next morning we booked into the same cheap hotel that our Scottish friends were staying in. One of them had been arrested for stealing an embroidered shirt from a souvenir shop. He was drunk, although that probably would have made little difference. He was also an idiot. John took us next day to see his boss. He had no work to offer us at the time but knew someone who might. Within a couple of days, Artemis, a carpenter, came to collect us in his truck. He needed help in his workshop and offered accommodation of sorts in a half built house above the business.
There were a lot of half built houses in Greece at the time. It was a tax dodge. If you had a half built house or work in progress there was some sort of rebate. Everybody was at it. In Artemis case… he had completed his own bedroom and the rest was a shell of bare brick and cement. It was shelter and it was free. We said our farewells to the wastrels in Nafplio and moved in to Artemis’ cave further north in the village of Figtia.
