To Loutakia – Day 6

Reminder to self. Remember the deck number you left your car on. 

I spent fifteen minutes with the backpack sweating it up and down narrow companionways with everyone else going the other way. 

Finally found the car, exactly where I had left him. Now, at last we could get off the boat. 29hrs at sea was getting long.

I followed the traffic out of the port assuming they knew their way. It was a vast apron of concrete with not a sign. Out and onto the road. Still no customs or passport check. So once you were in the EU that was it? Despite being from a ‘third country’?

The coast road was brand new. One of those european jobs and fairly empty. The drivers so different from the Italians. Respectful in that kind of disinterested way. Pedro and I bowled along at 130km/hr. All the windows down and the smell of wild thyme and rosemary flooding the nostrils. Quite windy and the flapping safety belts made even more noise than usual. I was getting quite the tractor tan on this route east. Starboard out and starboard home was the only way with a right hand drive car.

I went 20 klicks in the wrong direction when the satnav got confused. But I knew  because the sea was on the wrong side.  Coming to a section of the motorway without a crash barrier we did a sneaky u-turn.

 

In the late afternoon we reached Loutakia.  An eye-pleasing bay on the road just beyond Corinth. Pretty rough and ready on the roadside with cars parked higgledy piggledy and of ages that made Pedro seem a youngster.

This is the sort of place I always like to stay but you would never find it online. It wasn’t even on the map. It had a touch of the wild west about it, a feeling of opportunity with its lack of gentrification.

I checked into the first hotel I came to. A nice place with a garden that led down to a private beach and just 37 euros a night.

Then sauntered down to Anykoniades restaurant and ordered a Fix. Sitting like Shirley Valentine in a chair on the pebbly beach with my toes in the water.

I had a boat booked from Piraeus in two days time and had flirted with the idea of staying in Athens to visit the Acropolis. But it was too hot, the crowds too big, so that got binned. The wonders of the Parthenon would have to wait for another day. I’d no doubt get my fill of archaeology in Turkey. And that wasn’t what this trip was about, really. Why put yourself through the hassle just for the bragging rights of having been there and done that? This was something that yoga had taught me.  The beauty of JOMO.

It was 5pm in the restaurant and under the beach awning two old dowagers were picking through some fried fish and smoking at the same time. They’d ordered massive platefuls. A bored factotum, bug-eyed and looking a little like Peter Lorre, was chain-smoking Marlboro reds and sitting at the end of their table. Their driver I imagined. After an hour they creaked off leaving behind the Nescafe they’d just ordered. 

Meanwhile in front of me, a father and his two young daughters were shrieking and giggling as they entered the water. It took them nearly half an hour to get in. But once they had he couldnt get those two water babies out again. He’d made the error of getting out first expecting them to follow and now he was dry and dressed he couldn’t go back in and catch them. They teased him for half an hour before relenting. 

Later that night I went out for a chat and a snifter. Coming back in the almost pitch blackness I stepped off the pavement and into thin air. The unguarded drop off was only about 4ft but I put out my arms and whacked my elbow on the top of the wall. The Wild West held its dangers as strongly as its opportunities.