A Donkey On The Catwalk by Marjory McGinn

Author:Marjory McGinn [McGinn, Marjory]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Greece
Publisher: Pelagos Press
Published: 2021-05-04T23:00:00+00:00

Chapter 11

Crete expectations

I’VE never enjoyed media events on boats. For a start, if the function proves to be a terrible bore you can’t escape very easily. In November 1990 I found myself on a boat sailing about Thessaloniki harbour in northern Greece with a media contingent and the city’s mayor and dignitaries. It was a glorious setting: the waters of the Thermaic Gulf were calm, with a sunset glimmer of red and gold over them, and the city was spread out along the waterfront and up into the low hills behind. Perfect.

However, halfway through the evening, while everyone was eating canapes and quaffing champagne, I was below deck in the toilet, being sick. The culprit: prawns. Not that anything the mayor served up for the visiting media was off – far from it. But prawns had become my temporary nemesis in a long sojourn in Greece that had begun nearly two months earlier on the island of Crete and proved to me the wisdom of the Greek saying, “When man makes plans, God laughs!”

It all started in the latter part of 1990 when the Sydney newspaper I worked for as a feature writer offered me a media trip to Greece, one of the wonderful perks of journalism. Of course I was eager to go. It was around 10 days’ long, starting with a few days in Athens and then a flight to Thessaloniki to cover an autumn travel conference and to visit the attractions of this unique northern city. However, I contrived to turn it into a longer trip by changing the date of my outward-bound flight and tacking on to the front of the media trip six weeks of holidays that I’d accrued over a few years, which had to be taken. No hardship, of course! So here I was having a kind of sabbatical in Greece, the first trip there for a few years. I planned a week in Athens to enjoy some favourite hangouts with a few old friends before sailing to Crete, where I’d spent some time in the 1970s after finishing up a year’s work stint in Athens.

I took a ferry to Hania, the pretty Venetian town in the north-west of Crete, and checked into a harbourside hotel. The town still retained much of its charm from earlier decades despite the addition of modern shops and bars from the increase of cheap flights and mass tourism. I took a room at the front of the hotel with a protruding Venetian-style balcony offering stunning harbour views. I also made some short excursions by bus around the west of the island and to the village of Hora Sfakion on the south coast. It was from here that around 15,000 allies were evacuated after the German occupation of Crete in World War Two, many having walked over the White Mountains and through the nearby Imbros Gorge to reach the village.

My final excursion was a sentimental journey back to a tiny coastal settlement a few miles west of Hania, where I’d stayed for a few months in the 70s.

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