briefly from Athens

I left Patra beneath an afternoon drama of rotors and sun-choking smoke, wildfires tearing across its mountain backdrop. Twenty miles East in Agio I stopped at a fire station  and joined the shift for five o'clock jobs frappucinos outside the engine house. They were scheduled for midnight reliefs at the Patra job (45 pumps, 7 helicopters) and were stood down, relaxing until then. It was pleasant whiling some time with them, noting all the samenesses, the occasional difference. Somebody recommended me a beach to sleep on, another produced a packet of apricots, my bicycle was inspected, approved, and I left happy and a little sad. There were two days of easy, sea-level road with headwinds cooling if not quite slowing, before I hit Athens' wall of concrete heat.

It feels like a hot, tatty London with here and there something very ancient. I hiked up a small mountain to St Elias' chapel together with an Indian and his Greek in-laws, enjoyed the sunset city panorama (Athens is huge) and later the dinner invitation. My hosts here, Maria and Polis, run the city's fledgling Salvation Army corps. I had hoped to now regale with heroic vignettes from my charitable efforts at the frontline of Greece's crisis. Alas the Army is still at a reconnaissance stage; targets and resources still being identified, premises not yet comandeered. After three months riding my bike around and meeting people, feeding on their goodwill, I'm feeling a bit spare and unsure of my function. It would be good, if only for me, to find the occasional voluntary situation to ease my balance of give and take. For all their regrettable qualities tourists are at least supposed to contribute to the economy, so it's funny how in certain circles (backpackers, myself) there is a parasitic tendency to equate travelling virtue with spending as little as possible. In Greece I've been trying to counter this, chiefly in restaurants. A peculiar trick to moralise my greed! But we enjoy it, the restauranteurs and I; the food is wonderful and I leave feeling somehow a little more justified after the daily offering, the daily gorging. I hear of a monastery on a peninsula somewhere around Thessaloniki where with the right permit (God is a stickler!) one can do penance in the vegetable gardens. That might be just the ticket after the few days I plan to spend in holiday gin on Paros next week.

But for now I creep around Athens in the shadows, a conspicuous voyeur with my yellow hair and bicycle, looking for signs of crisis like Balkan bulletholes. Actually it looks like many other big cities to me - the familiar contrast between the recklessly rich and wretchedly poor just a little starker than usual; the city ghettos perhaps a little more visible. But compared to where? I didn't see Athens two years ago. Outside St Elias I had a conversation with an urban magazine photographer about the nature of crisis and, if optimism is too strong a word, the inevitability at least of hope. Maria and Polis talk about up to two million foreign illegals clinging desperately on amidst rising xenophobia from the city's six million Greeks many desperate themselves and, interested as I am, the conversation quickly wanes when there is nothing I can say.

more or less defunct  'shipping' channel at Korinth

St Elias over Athens