Our Greek Odyssey -- Introduction

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In the ‘brave days of the old’ the Greek hero Odysseus sailed the Mediterranean for ten years trying to reach his home, Ithaca. (For ten years before that, he was fighting at Troy.)

What do people like us do in these ‘coward days of new’ if they want to sail the Mediterranean and do not have 10 years to spare?

They take a 4-nights-five-days Aegean cruise.

Being cowards, they do not even take a chance of ferries getting cancelled between islands and consequently, getting stranded on one island.

That is exactly what we did.

After our successful Japan trip, I had full confidence about my ability to plan travel to minutest details to a country but I found travel-planning for Greece an impossible task. We wanted to visit Athens and the three islands - Mykonos, Santorini and Crete in the first week of April, a time of the year when the inter-island ferries or flights normally do not operate; or if they operate, there is every chance of them getting cancelled due to storms. So, you have to come back to Athens from each island and then take the ferry or flight to the next island. It takes minimum two hours to reach the Athens airport from Piraeus, the port of Athens. The ferry/flight timings are such that by the time you reach Athens from one island, the ferries/flights for other islands have already left the port/airport.

I tried every permutation and combination of the ferry and flight to the three islands but I just could not fit the four destinations - Athens, Mykonos, Santorini and Crete -- into the seven day that we had in hand.

The mainland sights of Greece are equally worthy of sightseeing but seven days are not enough to see the mainland sights as well as visit the islands.

“You will need seven days to visit Macedonia alone.” Our Bulgarian friend had warned.

“Why? Isn’t Macedonia a part of Greece?” I asked innocently. I had not yet ‘read up’ on Greece.

“It depends on the point of view. Macedonians regard Greece as a part of Macedonia.” He said with a tongue-in-cheek expression.

“Of course, the Georgians also regard Russia as a part of Georgia.” he added with a twinkle in his eyes.

We laughed but I have come across people like that, who claim that their regional language should be made the National language of India because it has more ‘merit’ than Hindi.

However, we could not have visited Macedonia and its ‘minor’ part, Greece in one trip.

Ultimately, we decided to take the 4-nights Aegean cruise rather reluctantly. After all, it was horrendously expensive. I believe among all the cruises in the world, the Mediterranean cruises are the most expensive. (We had been on a Hawaii cruise before.)

However, we found the cruise to be value for money. The cabins were more spacious, the food superb, the nightly on-board entertainment expertly performed, the shore-excursions fabulous because the scenery is out-of-this-world. So, no regrets!

And we did manage to visit Greece and its islands, with two additional islands, Patmos and Rhodes, thrown in the limited time. We could even have visited the Ephesus in Turkey but we had ‘done’ that before. And we managed to fly back home in 7 days. And yes, we did not have to pack and unpack, lug our suitcases around, haggle with taxi-drivers, reach hotels at unearthly hours or worry about missed connections. Everything was taken care of. Our hotel sailed while we slept comfortably in our cabins.

However, there is a downside to it.

No bard will ever sing about our brave (?) deeds. No Homeric Epic will ever be written about our exploits. The most the readers can expect is a boring, wishy-washy blog, that too from our own keyboard. (read ‘pen’ for keyboard.) The wonderful photos will be a sort of compensation though.

I wanted to title my travelogue as “Our Greek Odyssey” but Avi strongly objected to it. He thought, to call our 4-day cruise an ‘Odyssey’ would be rather too presumptuous on my part.

Oh, those ‘brave days of old’ have vanished forever!

However, these blogs are still titled ‘Our Greek Odyssey’ with Avi’s reluctant concurrence. I will tell you later how this came about.

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