rest and glue

Yesterday morning in motley company of limping strays and sleeping hawkers I watched dawn break over the small port of Rafina. It was tiring through the gummy-eyed, haggard clarity of insomnia to watch the docks come to life with the sun; policemen whistling at squabbling cars and ferries blasting as though I'd been mistaken to find it peaceful when I first took my bench. High night-winds, young lovers, rocks, thorns and finally the inevitable punctured Thermarest had conspired against my sleep since two days back on the road, after a long and lazy ten off it. Both mornings I gave up around four, embracing inexorable wakefulness to fire up coffee, sea-boiled eggs and take twenty or forty miles advantage of the fleeting day-break cool. Beautiful, to ride into dawn. It takes a couple of days; superglue in a leaky mattress; a long, earplugged and blindfold beach sleep, to shake the flickering doubts seeded by such a long break. Today, in blessed rest, healthy breakfast milage and a merciful mercury drop (below body temperature at last!), they're well shaken, fading. But what of the ten days?

The Athenian summer heat baked me to such an imbecilic torpor that I more or less surrendered the first six to guilty snoozing (sweaty, dribbly), e-books and of course Maria's fantastic feeding. Early evenings I roused and rode buses or wandered around Monastiraki and Syntagma beneath a twilit Acropolis, spying graffitied relics. In Athens the graffiti is prolific and indiscriminate, many ancient buildings sport a slogan or few. I suppose it is mostly political: 'screaming now over the ancience' to paraphrase an Englishman I met, or 'mindless desecration' a Greek. Either way the juxtapose is intriguing - if a little shocking, such young paint across such old marble. I had lots of interesting, talkative encounters those evenings with tourists and Greeks, several of which kept me late chasing the city through the night in cars and bars with streetfood, dogs and buskers.

Five hours and a million miles away on Paros I crashed the McWilliams' family holiday. It was an indulgent and perfectly set island escape all painted sunshine white and blues; blessed with good friends and cool breeze. Between balcony bouts of gin and rum and Gin Rummy we made time for beaches, sea-lapped restaurants and nightclubs and really the whole time felt like a holiday bonus-level. Needless to say the long break coupled with the standard institution of English holiday alcoholism has left me both perfectly unfit for, and perfectly deserving of the hot and hilly stage ahead. But in fact, with the pendulum back at abstinence and a few days behind me, I feel fine; increasingly strong again and making good progress up the long scrawl of island that tracks the Eastern coast of Northern Greece up towards Thessaloniki. I think it is called Evia.

Athens

Acropolis

Paros

Greek 'Crisis'

daybreak situation at Rafina

welcome clouds on Evia

crew