rhodes

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Hi, One of the perks in this job is during our bye weeks we often take a three or four day trip to someplace in Europe that we haven’t been to before.
The Aegean Air flight into Athens was a considerable improvement over my first venture to Greece. In 1964 I took a boat from Brindisi, Italy through the Adriatic to Patras and then a bus over a treacherous tiny two-lane highway with sheer cliffs an inch or so from the wheels of our over loaded and careening vehicle. One missed turn and we would plunge five hundred or so feet to our death. I assumed the driver had made the trip before and hoped that was the reason he was passing on blind curves in the middle of the night with only his parking lights on. I learned to pray on that trip so it wasn’t a complete loss. I promised the Lord I would abate the teen age self sex ritual I’d pretty much mastered, if he would only get me safely to Athens. He kept his part of the bargain.
We were sitting in the first row behind the first class section, which looked the same as coach except during the lunch the stewardess pulled a curtain across dividing the two sections. I think it was to keep us from seeing that their peanuts were an upgrade from ours. She asked if I wanted salt or sweet and I thought she was asking about the water but it turned out she was asking about the peanuts. Good thing because I asked for salt. The water was sweet.
Upon arriving in Rodos, or Rhodes, the Greek island sixty miles off the Turkish coast we grabbed a taxi to our hotel in the Old City. Our cab driver had come to Rodos nineteen years before on vacation from Athens and never went back. There was a small speck of rain falling on the windshield, which he called Sahara Rain because it was warm and sort of sandy and presumably came across the Mediterranean by itself, and not on Aegean Air.
We walked over cobbled streets just wide enough for the few automobiles to move along without scraping their sides on the four thousand year old walls. None of the cars were new or newly painted probably because a second paint job would make it impossible to fit. Our hotel was rather inauspicious from the outside but turned out to be delightful. The rooms were small but clean and richly furnished and the four-poster bed made me feel like I was back in a former life in the early nineteenth century.
We walked around the walled city and down to the harbor in our shirtsleeves, which was a nice change from being bundled up for two months in Vienna. We enjoyed a wonderful meal in a small family run restaurant. Nancy had calamari and I had musaka along with a typical Greek salad of vegetables and goat cheese and a nice local wine. Goats are everywhere on this island seemingly wondering at their own leisure. That probably explains why feta, the goat cheese is so abundant.
We slept late and began our day about nine with a morning meal served in the breakfast hall across the lemon tree adorned patio from our room. It featured a stone archway and tiled floor with wine barrels and period pictures hanging on the walls. I asked Anna Maria, our landlady about the myth of the Colossus, one of the Seven Wonders of the World whose statue supposedly stood over the harbor entrance. She said most people here believed one shouldn’t raise what has fallen. But that the new theory was the old harbor was nearer the Palace and the fortune hunters would soon begin looking there for evidence that the big fella did exist.
Our meal consisted of yogurt, honey, jam, orange, tomato and kiwi slices. A sweet roll and hard-boiled egg along with bread and cheese with slices of spiced lunchmeat pretty much filled up the small table. We washed it all down with fresh orange juice, probably picked from one of the nearby trees that morning and European coffee which unlike in American hotels actually tastes like coffee probably because they use more than one bean when brewing it.
“The sun has teeth today,” meaning it was clear but cool, Anna Maria said to us as we prepared to leave for the day. I thought the teeth were false because I didn’t need my sweater but wasn’t about to argue. We decided to rent a car, which Anna Maria called for us and were picked up just outside the Old Town walls. The agent was a nice talkative fellow who explained that when we were done just park the car in one of the free parking lanes and leave the keys on the floor. “They don’t steal cars in Rodos,” he said. Try that in the good old USA.
We drove down the east coast and stopped a time or two along the way. First at a little cove where they had filmed the crash scene on the movie “The Guns of Navarrone.” The second stop was to walk up 297 steps to a monastery overlooking the coastline. It is a monastery famous for its fertility success where women come to pray to become pregnant. My hope is that either it is a fable or Nancy prayed that I would make it back down the winding pathway alive and not to my ability to produce.
Our destination was the small village of Lindos about forty miles to the south. It turned out to be a beautiful place filled with tiny alleys only motor scooters and people could traverse. The majestic Acropolis overlooking the tiny-whitewashed town was reached by hiking up another vertical path. Having done that once we decided to ride up on donkeys, which was easier on us but considerably more difficult for the beasts, especially because the burden in my case was very large. My donkey was the reluctant leader moving along pacing himself and nipping at Nancy’s ass whenever she attempted to pass. That would be, as in Nancy’s donkey.
We had a great lunch while listening to Greek music at one of the many roof top restaurants looking out over the buildings at the azure blue waters of the Aegean. Our afore mentioned donkeys were grazing the hillside just below the Acropolis and I couldn’t help but think Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn would have been wealthy young men had they lived here instead of in Missouri as everything was painted a picket fence white.
The next day we drove down the east side of the island stopping first at another monastery in Philerimos about ten kilometers from Rodos. I’ll say this; the monks should have been in real estate because they had an uncanny knack for finding the plot with the best view. Fortunately we were able to drive up this particular hill. Our second stop was at the “Valley of the Butterflies” and we had a long uphill walk under a canopy of trees that blocked the sun. The path followed along side a hesitant stream with just enough water to comply with earth’s gravity. Unfortunately it was too early in the season to see anything with wings fluttering bye, but I couldn’t get the feeling out of my mind that James Fenimore Cooper must have had a place like this in mind when he wrote “The Last Of the Mohicans”. I have expected Magua to jump out from behind one of the Styrax trees.
After a great fish lunch overlooking a small harbor we drove to a local castle perched on a monk like piece of land peeking out over the sea. Three small islands dotted the horizon with Turkey’s landmass off in the distance. It was a breath taking view and only required minimal climbing and not on a long eared ass.
Sunday morning we left our small fiat at the harbor with keys under the floor mat for our rent a wreck man and jumped on a Catamaran for the island of Kos the third largest and one of the most fertile islands of the Dodecanese, located only five miles from the Turkish peninsula of Bodrum. It was a two-hour ride with a stop at the picturesque village of Symi. We walked around the small harbor filled with ferryboats to Turkey and Columbus type sailboats as well as sleek jet hydrofoils. After purchasing two paintings from a street vendor we went looking for a tree that according to legend Hippocrates, who was born and lived on Kos, sat under while teaching his pupils about modern medicine.
The famous tree is held up by support scaffolding and looks like it could use some of the good doctor’s magic. We rested at a nearby café overlooking some ruins called agora, which was a commercial area in ancient Kos. Placido Domingo was singing “Don Giovanni” or Don Meredith in the background as we sipped on our bottle of Mythos, which is a very good Greek beer. After a walking tour of the city we enjoyed a lunch of appetizers larger than most meals at a small café inhabited by very friendly locals.
The boat ride back to Rodos was delightful as we skirted the western Turkish coastline. The majestically rugged, surely uninhabited mountains looked as if they must have exploded out of the sea hundreds of years ago. They seemed to look down menacingly as Ferry’s and cargo ships passed heading east and we headed southwest passing smaller sail boats playing in the waters of the eastern Mediterranean.
We concluded our day by enjoying great food at Momma Sofia’s Greek restaurant. The sun had set and the cats were begging and hunting for food and a final ouzo seemed justified before Nancy and I walked hand in hand over the cobblestone street back to the St. Nicholas Hotel.
In the morning, Anna Maria drove us to the airport and on the way gave Nancy her family recipe for Tzsiki a Greek yogurt, cucumber, and garlic spread mostly used as an appetizer on bread. In September I’m sure we’ll dream of Rodos as we enjoy Anna Maria’s creation. Ok.

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Photos

shore line
west coast

hello
i hear you

dog and cat
anything you can do...

blue seas
east coast towards turkey

dream
wish i were there

hole in the wall gang
love those ruins

sunset
the colossus of rhodes

big red
relaxing