Chapter 13

Autumn of the Gods

Kusadasi, Turkey

October 14

The next afternoon, as we steamed past the grey coast of Albania, Kara and Willie decided to go swimming in the ferry’s little fifteen-by-twenty-foot pool. It was a pretty bold decision, since the pool wasn’t heated, and it was only about sixty degrees outside. The ferry didn’t have much in the way of on-board entertainment, so as Kara and Willie gingerly dipped their toes into the icy water, at least forty bored passengers in thick jackets and sweaters gathered ’round and waited for them to take the plunge. When the kids finally leapt in, the spectators all cheered enthusiastically like they were watching the sea lion show at Marine World. Willie enjoyed the attention so much he wouldn’t come out of the pool until his lips turned blue. When Devi and I finally wrapped the kids in towels, several passengers came over and told them how brave they were, and for the rest of the voyage, Kara and Willie were minor celebrities.

When the ferry finally moored in Patras, Greece, we wheeled our bags across the docks and up a hill to a discount car rental agency. In France and Italy, we rented shiny new minivans. But in Patras, Devi decided to save a few drachmas, and we ended up in an old, beat-up black Mitsubishi minibus with red and orange racing stripes. This beast was roomy enough to hold a dozen people and a ton of luggage, but its maximum speed dropped to twenty-five miles per hour whenever we climbed a hill. Normally that wouldn’t be a big problem, but we soon found out that speed and agility are critical when you drive amongst the madmen of Greece.

Officially, the highway out of Patras only had two lanes—one in each direction—but that didn’t stop any of our fellow motorists from forging a third path down the middle of the road whenever they felt the need. Apparently, the preferred time to do that was while passing a semi on a blind curve. The entire drive from Patras to Olympia was an exercise in terror. Little coupes and motorcycles blew past us at ninety miles per hour. Big trucks roared straight at us from the opposite direction and swerved back into their own lane only at the last possible instant. Devi gripped the steering wheel with white knuckles. “These people are lunatics!” she cried.

“You’re telling me,” I screamed. “Look at that truck!”

“Whoa! He missed that little car by inches.”

“Devi, Devi! Look out for that truck in the middle of the road!”

“Oh my God! He nearly took our bumper off!”

Eventually, Devi decided to drive the whole way to Olympia on the shoulder of the highway, away from the field of play. Even then, we had a few near-death experiences. By the time we limped into the hotel parking lot, Devi was shaking. “I’ll never complain about Italian drivers again,” she said.

“At least we’re alive,” I replied, and under the circumstances that seemed like an accomplishment.

After regaining our composure over gyros and beer, we set out on foot toward Ancient Olympia’s famous ruins. As usual, we got lost and had to ford a small stream and pass through a piney wood to get there. Eventually, though, we found ourselves in a warm, grassy valley nestled between rolling foothills studded with ancient cypresses and gnarled old olive trees. Laid out before us were the tumbledown remnants of white marble temples, rich treasuries, a grand stadium, and a hippodrome. Originally dedicated to the earth goddess, Gaea, and later to Zeus, this sanctuary was the site of the first Olympic games more than 2,500 years ago. All that remains are stone paths and wide fields, piles of carved limestone, a stairway or two and some platforms where temples once stood. Still, the valley was a deeply serene, almost mystical place, and I wanted Kara and Willie to imagine the days when Plato and Aristotle came here from Athens to watch the footraces and Herodotus read his Histories to cheering crowds.

“Imagine you lived in ancient Greece,” I said. “And you were the fastest kid in your town.” Willie, who’s fleet of foot like his mother, liked that idea. “Once every four years, you would come here to race against all the best runners in Greece.”

“How would I get here?” asked Willie.

“Well, there weren’t any buses or cars, so you’d have to ride in a horse-drawn chariot or walk—sometimes for hundreds of miles.”

“I’d take a chariot,” said Willie.

“When you finally arrived, you’d train for several weeks at the gymnasium. Then you’d pray for victory here at the Temple of Zeus.”

Kara looked around and said, “There’s no temple here.”

“Not now. But if you put together all those stone wheels over there, they’d form columns that supported the roof of a magnificent temple.”

“Who knocked it down?” asked Kara.

“I’ll get to that in a minute. Anyway, on the day of the big race, you’d pour oil all over your body and walk naked through that passageway into the stadium.”

“Naked!?” screamed Kara and Willie. I knew that would get their attention.

“Yep, all the boys had to run naked—except for warriors who ran in full armor.”

“How ’bout the girls?” asked Kara. “Did they run naked?”

“No, they wore tunics—which are like short dresses.”

“I don’t think I’d run naked in front of girls,” said Willie.

“Girls and boys had their own separate Olympics,” I replied. “And no girls were allowed in the stadium when the boys were running.”

“Okay. Then I’d do it.”

“Finally, you’d run from one end of the stadium to the other. And if you won the race, you’d get a crown of olive branches from one of those trees up the hill.”

“That’s it?” exclaimed Willie, “olive branches?” He wanted something more substantial—like a bag of gold.

“That was the beauty of it,” I replied. “The ancient Greeks, as Herodotus wrote, competed, ‘not for money, but for virtue.’ Of course, if you won a crown of olive branches, everyone had to be nice to you for the rest of your life, and they’d even tear down a section of the city walls so you could return triumphantly in a four-horse chariot.”

“That’s better,” said Willie.

“Okay, but what the heck happened to this place?” Kara repeated. “It looks like there was an earthquake or something.”

“Well, they held the Olympics here in the sanctuary of Zeus, on and off, for more than a thousand years. Then the Byzantine emperors became Christians and they didn’t want anyone praying to the old Greek gods. So they banned the Olympics and burned the temple. And yes, Kara, you‘re right. There were two big earthquakes here about fifteen hundred years ago. After that, people carted away most of the stones to make walls and other buildings.”

I knew Kara and Willie would have probably forget everything I told them about Ancient Olympia in a matter of minutes, so I came up with a way to help them remember. “Listen, you guys, do you want to run the same race as the ancient Greeks?”

They thought that was a good idea.

“Okay, then let’s go over to the stadium, and have our own family Olympics.”

“This time, the boys and the girls can run together,” said Willie, confident of victory.

We walked through a long arched entryway called the Krypt onto the floor of the huge rectangular stadium. The grassy slopes where spectators once sat were still intact. At the sound of “Go!” Kara, Willie, and even little Lucas ran the diaulos. Only Devi and I were there to cheer, but we yelled more or less the same cries of encouragement that echoed through this same stadium more than 2,500 years ago. Willie won as expected. We didn’t have a crown of olive branches or a four-horse chariot for him, so he had to settle for a donkey ride from a grizzled old vendor outside the ruins.

“Everyone has to be nice to me for the rest of my life,” Willie declared from astride his humble mount.

“Well, maybe not for the rest of your life,” I said, “but at least for the rest of the day.” Willie agreed that was good enough.

The next morning we left for Athens. Once again, the drive was terrifying, and by the end of it, Devi didn’t feel like driving around the city in search of our small hotel. We hailed a taxi and offered the driver 2,500 drachmas (about ten bucks) to lead us in. Good thing, too, because the hotel was in a small, well-hidden building on a back street in a neighborhood called Syntagma.

Up until this point in the trip, I’ve been a staunch advocate of cheap hotels. When you’re travelling as long as we are, even moderately priced accommodations begin to add up. But in Athens, we proved it was possible to go too far down-market. The hotel was well located, within walking distance of the Acropolis and the festive Plaka district, but half the lights in the room didn’t work, the bathrooms were dicey, and, believe me, you wouldn’t want to eat off the floor. Worse yet, the hotel was patronized almost entirely by college students—notably, a group of Danish party boys who drank heavily and sang in the stairwells every night ’til three in the morning. I thought about complaining to the management, but at the prices we were paying, I figured we didn’t really have a case.

Anyway, due to the late night revelry, we weren’t particularly vigorous when we set about to climb the Acropolis. “Acropolis” means “High City” in Greek, but we didn’t realize just how high it was until we stood in its shadow. Kara, in particular, seemed unimpressed by the notion of climbing a fifty-story mountain to see—and I quote—“a buncha broken-down temples.”

I said, “At least we haven’t taken you to any churches or art galleries lately.”

“Yea,” she replied, “now you’re taking us to buildings that aren’t even standing anymore.” In retrospect, St. Peter’s and the Louvre were starting to look good to her. Despite all the grumbling, Kara and Willie were, by this point in the trip, first-rate hikers, and with Lucas strapped in his stroller, we breezed right past the ambulance they keep near the top for coronary-prone tourists.

Outside the Propylaea, the grand entrance to the Acropolis complex, we were approached by a crusty old guide in a Chicago Bulls cap who offered to show us the marvels of the High City for twenty bucks. Yourgos had been an Acropolis guide for more than thirty years, and he knew the place inside out. He showed us the siege tunnels used to smuggle in food and water. He explained how the lines of the Parthenon were ingeniously curved to correct for optical illusions, and he recalled the sad day in 1687 when the Venetian army scored a direct hit on the Parthenon, detonating a store of Turkish gunpowder and blowing off the roof.

Yourgos didn’t have too many kind words for the Turks, who’ve been the Greeks’ mortal enemies for centuries, but he saved his most trenchant remarks for members of his own government. After a short while, our tour of the Acropolis was roughly 50 percent historical analysis and 50 percent vehement jeremiads excoriating Greek politicians. Some of Yourgos’s remarks were pretty colorful, and it was lucky that the kids couldn’t fully decipher his accent.

A simple discussion of something like the siege tunnels would start out innocuously with “this is how the ancient Greeks sneaked spies into the enemy camp.” But it always ended up with “of course, in the old days, you could only bribe and steal to save your city. Nowadays, these thieving politicians bribe and steal just to line their own filthy pockets!”

When we innocently asked about the conspicuous restoration projects underway at the Parthenon and the Temple of Diana, we were treated to a ten-minute harangue about the late culture minister, Melina Mercouri, and her band of thieves, and how they stole all the funding and gave lucrative contracts to their friends and yudda, yudda, yudda.

Eventually, we had to cut Yourgos loose and make our own way around the Acropolis with only a guidebook. Not only was the temple complex magnificent, but the views from the high plateau were breathtaking. You could look directly down into the Theater of Dionysus, a 17,000-seat arena where the plays of Sophocles, Aeschylus, and Aristophanes first debuted, and far below, you could see the Ancient Agora, where Socrates cross-examined his students. But most of all, you could just see Athens, sprawling to the Saronic Gulf in the south, and off to the north and west as far as the eye could see. It was hard to imagine that, as late as the mid-nineteenth century, this cradle of civilization was a forgotten Ottoman backwater with only a few thousand inhabitants. Now—despite Yourgos’s complaints—Athens was a spirited metropolis, full of classical wonders, bustling squares, wonderful restaurants, and artsy neighborhoods.

Devi and I had one very stimulating moment in Athens. We were walking down a crowded thoroughfare when we saw five or six policemen waving every motorcycle on the road over to the curb. The cops had nabbed at least twenty-five or thirty drivers, and they were giving them all traffic tickets. For some reason, this struck Devi as a colorful scene, and she decided I should photograph it.

“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” I said.

“Go ahead. It’ll make a great picture.”

“Believe me, Devi, policemen do not like to be photographed.”

“Oh, it’s only the traffic police. They won’t care.”

“Alright,” I said, acquiescing against my better judgment, “but just one quick shot.”

I leaned over to get a good angle, snapped the picture, and looked up to find a rather large Greek policeman standing in my personal space.

He started screaming at me—and even though it was all Greek to me—I quickly caught his drift. He wanted my camera, or at least the film inside it. The roll in question had all of our Acropolis pictures on it, and I didn’t want to lose it. So purely by instinct, I put the camera back over my shoulder, held up both hands in the universal sign of surrender, and slowly backed away. The policeman was barely satisfied with this ostentatious display of submission and grudgingly let me go.

“That was a little more excitement than I needed,” I said to Devi.

“Oh, he wasn’t going to do anything to you. He just wanted to scare you.”

“Well, in that case, he was successful,” I said, my heart still beating like a drum.

Our last morning in Athens, we rose before dawn and went down to the port of Piraeus to catch the 6:00 A.M. ferry to Mykonos. The ferry, which made interim stops at the islands of Siros and Tinos, was bursting with life. A bouzouki band played traditional Greek music for coins. Passengers conversed loudly, and all sort of peddlers passed amongst the passengers loudly hawking food, souvenirs, and worry beads (or “worry beans,” as Lucas calls them).

After six hours skirting tiny islands on a gorgeous turquoise sea, we made port on the fabled isle of Mykonos. We found a taxi and rode three or four kilometers to our hotel. The road was rough and narrow; the hills, barren and rocky; but every time we rounded a bend, there was another fabulous view of the wide blue Aegean. Furthermore, every house, church, and story on the island was white stucco with doors and windows in brilliant shades of red, blue, orange, yellow, and green.

We stayed in a condominium complex that consisted of several hundred small white houses. Taken together, they could have easily accommodated a thousand guests. But except for the caretaker and one group of three rather corpulent ladies from Athens, the place was entirely empty. In fact, we soon realized we had most of the island to ourselves. There was little sign of Mykonos’s famous gay scene—or its renowned nightlife—and except for the two afternoons when a cruise ship steamed into port, even the main village was devoid of tourists. Apparently, Mykonos is strictly a summer resort, and nearly no one—except a few misinformed numbskulls such as ourselves—shows up in mid-October. The reason quickly became evident: except for a few hours in the middle of the day, Mykonos in autumn is a somewhat cold and windy place.

That’s not to say we had an unpleasant time. We drove a tiny 4×4 all over the island visiting charming tavernas where, more often than not, we were the only patrons. Devi and the kids rode horses in the barren hills above the sea, and the children loved the ubiquitous cats and donkeys and the famous four-foot pink pelicans that wander at will through Mykonos’s portside restaurants.

We even spent a passably warm afternoon at Paradise—one of Mykonos’s famed nude beaches. I was worried at first that the kids would point and giggle when they saw a bunch of naked grown-ups frolicking on the sand. But first of all, there weren’t that many nature-lovers around, and second, the beach was pretty well divided. The center section was reserved for families and other patrons who found it too embarrassing (or too cold) to go au naturel. The far ends of the beach were for full-on nudists, and the areas in between were essentially topless. Every so often, a nudist would stroll past the family section, but the kids hardly noticed.

I’m afraid the same can’t be said for the busload of Asian tourists that pulled up midway through the afternoon. The men in the group were neatly dressed in khaki shorts and polo shirts. Initially, they settled in the conservative center section of the beach with their wives and girlfriends. But one by one, they all decided to take a walk on the wild side. They left at regular intervals so they wouldn’t look like one huge group of Peeping Toms, but by the time these guys hit the nudist area, they looked like spectators at a tennis match. You could sort of tell that the nude beaches of Mykonos were a big selling point for the tour. After about forty-five minutes, the whole group abruptly packed up and left—probably off to Super Paradise, an even more licentious beach up the coast.

One day, near the end of our stay in Mykonos, we all piled into our little rental car and took off in search of a particular taverna on the island’s north shore. The mountain road was only one lane wide, and after a while we found ourselves stuck behind a big old truck loaded with telephone poles. The truck stopped every twenty meters or so, and each time it did, two guys jumped out of the cab, pulled a telephone pole from the back of the truck, rolled it to the side of the road, and climbed in again. Then they drove another twenty meters and did it all over again.

I watched the pole crew repeat this procedure about ten times before I realized something was different—namely, I wasn’t going berserk. I mean here we were stuck behind a truck going five miles per hour and stopping every thirty seconds. There was no way past it, no way to turn around, and no end in sight. Four months ago, this same situation would have driven me berserk, but now, I wasn’t particularly bothered.

Another time, we booked a day trip to the nearby island of Delos. The boat wasn’t leaving for an hour, so we took the ticket clerk’s advice and went to a nearby outdoor café for a quick breakfast. The waiter took forever to bring our food, and eventually we had to choose between eating the meal we ordered and missing our boat. Before we left California, I would have found this situation very stressful, but in Mykonos, I just strolled back to the booking office and calmly asked the agent if we could go the next day instead. “No problem,” she said, examining the tickets, “I forgot to date them anyway.”

I think these incidents signify that I’ve finally completed the transition from a way of life characterized by constant over-scheduling, impatience, and mindless rushing around to a different way of life, where I’m more likely to live in the moment and accept things as they come. This is a welcome change, and a much more healthy, sensible, M.O., but I have to tell you, it didn’t require any great resolution or effort on my part.

When you travel with three small children for any length of time, you eventually learn that speed and efficiency aren’t part of the plan and schedules are meant to be broken. When Kara or Willie has to go to the bathroom or Lucas gets hungry, that’s that. The whole expedition grinds implacably to a halt. If I couldn’t accept that, I would be in for a lot of self-imposed aggravation. If I can accept it, then I can easily learn to live with all manner of mishap and delay—cancelled planes, hotels that lose reservations, even getting stuck behind a truck for several hours on a small mountain road in Mykonos. I know my new laid-back attitude wouldn’t be too useful in the business world, but its wonderful for travelling, and probably pretty good for life in general.

Of course, Mykonos isn’t the worst place in the world to develop a relaxed attitude toward life. I don’t know if our experience here was typical, or it was because it was off-season, but we found virtually everyone on the island to be wonderfully relaxed, generous, kind and trusting. When we had trouble booking our passage from Mykonos to Samos, the caretaker of our condominium complex told us we could stay an extra day without charge. When we forgot to refill the gas tank in our rental car, the owner said, “It’s okay. Just come back and see us again.” And once, when I didn’t have enough Greek currency to pay the lunch bill, the proprietor of the restaurant said, “Just bring it by tomorrow, when you have time.” In short, we found Mykonos to be the perfect tonic for the stress of modern life, and we vowed to return someday—preferably when it’s warmer!

Maybe it was because of all the bad blood between the Greeks and the Turks, or maybe it was because we were travelling on the cheap. But there didn’t seem to be any way to book a ferry from Mykonos to the Turkish port of Kusadasi. Travel agents in Mykonos didn’t seem to know very much about Turkey, and the maps posted in Greek booking offices all depicted the country as a big tan void. Finally, Devi decided we should take a midnight ferry to the Greek island of Samos—just off the Turkish coast—and try it from there. As she predicted, Samos had a harbor side office that booked small boats to Kusadasi. Almost as an afterthought, I asked the booking agent whether Betty’s Guatemalan passport would pose a problem at Turkish immigration.

“Not at all,” he said confidently, “you just pay your money, and everyone gets in.”

“Are you sure?” I asked. “Because we tried calling the Turkish Embassy in Athens several times, and we couldn’t get through.

“I’ve been doing this for ten years,” he said, “and I assure you it won’t be a problem.”

The booking agent seemed like a reasonable, experienced man, and his words provided great comfort right up to the point where the Turkish border guard seized Betty’s passport and told her she was being deported. But I’ll tell you about that in my next report.