It’s All Greek to Me

Road tripping through Greece is a wonderful thing to do (anywhere outside New South Wales has a bit of a novelty feel to it). Travelling through Northern Greece, close to the Albanian border, feels fantastically foreign. We are the absolute odd ones out tourist-wise, sharing our space with Bulgarians, Serbians, and Romanians. The locals appreciate our attempts at speaking Greek and quickly discover our nationality, always accompanied through the post covid lens (‘Oh Australia! You are allowed out now then!’)

It feels like so long, we’ve forgotten how delightfully different it feels to be in another country. In Sydney we are blessed/governed by a litigious and confined set of rules, and that’s not even during lockdown. Such as driving, which in Greece presents a gamut of scenarios unfamiliar to the Australian layperson. Driving on the other side of the road is always a hair-raising exercise. Layer in a barrage of helmetless moped riders zipping in and out of every lane and it’s hard not to clutch your seat belt to your chest. But pulling into a petrol station offers welcome relief. They still offer actual attendants who fill up your car and even clean your windscreen for you, though this provides the new problem of needing wads of cash everywhere as the smaller stations don’t have the hang of cashless transactions yet. Tolls are plentiful and loom out of nowhere, taking you right back to the 1990s – there is one eTag lane, but the Greeks refuse to change their habits (something about the prepayment springs to mind as the sticking point here) – so we queue in the cash only lanes along with everyone else while the eTag lane remains clear. We did use the truck lane once, but the booth was about two feet above the driver’s window, not ideal when my flustered husband dropped his euros.

Roads vary wildly in size and width with no warning of the speed limit. Overtaking happens indiscriminately despite unbroken central lines. You learn quickly to hang to the extreme right-hand side (clearway) so people can roar past you, as you gamely stick to the speed limit you’ve just spotted but which no one else is paying attention to. But it all works, somehow, and everyone rubs along quite happily. There are occasional roadworks, true, but these comprise a bloke in jeans and a t-shirt, cigarette hanging from his lips as he shovels steaming bitumen from his barrow to plug the odd hole. You’re more likely to get held up by a herd of goats, or one time, several cows solemnly walking unaccompanied through the village, presumably on their way to get milked.

We eventually got the hang of driving, down tiny, unsealed mountain edge tracks, and all. The key was to work out the lie of the land as soon as possible. If someone crested the forty-five-degree lane at the top of one place we stayed to come down just as you mustered the revs to get up, it proved literally impossible to move without initial momentum. Only four people getting out and the air conditioning turned off made any headway. Some access lanes were so weeny they made Birdwood Lane seem like a three-lane highway, but by this time we could handle anything.

But pride comes before a fall. When our sat-nav sent us down a lane past a narrow access sign, we actually laughed out loud! (I’ll show you narrow access!)

We weren’t laughing minutes later. The houses either side of the roughly cobbled lane grew closer and closer until we ground to a halt. Ominous deep gouges on both sides and multicoloured paint scrapes adorned the walls. A small crowd gathered and flattened themselves nearby to enjoy the spectacle – this was better than the telly after all. The right-hand group were locals, all nodding and giving us the thumbs up as they peered through the tiny tunnel. The tourists on the left were all shaking their heads and conveying generally non encouraging body language. Pressure mounted as a queue of locals on bikes, held up behind us, blared their horns in irritation at the ‘stupid touristas’ blocking their access. Wing mirrors in, we nudged forwards literally an inch at a time. At the narrowest point there can’t have been more than a couple of millimetres either side. Somehow, we made it through to a round of applause. Later on, after a very stiff drink and a lie down we returned to the scene to watch others navigate their fate. It turned out to be easy, just as long as you didn’t care if you scraped all your doors or lost a bumper.

Boarding ferries presents a whole other world of untapped wonders. We arrived at one port where you couldn’t prepurchase tickets. There were no signs or anything resembling information. We drove through some unmanned metal gates and found ourselves on a concrete wide jetty. A small ferry sat steaming to the right, with crew madly waving at us – ‘quick, quick, we are leaving now!’ So, we drove on, literally as the ramp was raised and the boat chugged off. The crew guy took us to a tiny office where we could buy our tickets (cash only –probably went straight into his Christmas pot). So much more flexible than Circular Quay and you don’t even get to take your cars on our ferries.

Later ferries unveiled the delight that is the Whistling Police, who seem to be traffic control officers employing the unique pairing of wild gesticulating and perpetual whistling, both long and short peeps with no discernible pattern. Passengers all had to disembark separately to those driving cars, so we would clatter off and then stand somewhere (hopefully) obvious ready to be collected, amongst a melee of taxi drivers, bus drivers and anyone else holding up signs. Enter the Whistling Police. I can only assume their objective was to move us on, but all that happened was we formed and reformed little eddies, jostling with the waiting sign-holders, until our car popped merrily down the ramp, wherein you would eject yourself from the group and dive headlong into the passenger seat like a bank robber into the getaway car to avoid incurring the whistlers’ wrath.

Food presents more challenges, though it’s all so delicious it doesn’t really matter what you end up with. All food is locally grown, and prepared, and sensational flavours abound. We pulled up at a mountaintop taverna one evening, the only customers, and perused the limited menu board before making our selections.

Waiter: What would you like?

Me: The Yemesta (Stuffed Tomatoes) and the souvlaki please.

Waiter: The Yemesta’s finished.

Me: OK, the souvlaki.

Waiter: Also finished.

Me: What about the moussaka?

Waiter: Finished

Me: What do you have?

Waiter: Keftezes (Meatballs) and salad.

Me: Meatballs it is!!!

As our magical trip comes to an end, my luggage is bursting with aromatic herb mixtures that I just know will transform my kebabs into traditional souvlaki, and my pedestrian tomato and cucumber salads into authentic Greek ones. But I won’t miss hill starts at every turn or hairpin bends in first gear. And I’m kind of disappointed the only whistling I’m likely to hear at circular quay will be the Manly ferry.