Gavdos lies like the dark hump of a hippopotamus rising out of the sea in the dead centre of the view from my apartment here. To get there from my part of the south coast of Crete, it takes an hour and a half by the flashy new high-speed boat. You can also take the big ferry. It takes twice as long, and now, for reasons nobody knows, runs at strange times only a couple or three times a week: late at night to get there, or early in the morning to leave. They both cost about the same: €20 or so.
And it all depends on the weather. All the Gaviots, from the city kids running beach tavernas, to the postman, Babis, are tuned to ‘Bofor’ numbers. If it’s Beaufort 6 (‘Bofor exxi’) it’s trouble, you’re locked onto the island, and your supplies of luxuries like bottled water and, due to the extreme lack of water all year, fruit and vegetables, don’t come. Not to mention the building materials you might need.
I took the speed boat there on Friday, and a little crowd of us were gently broiling in the mid-morning heat, the captain was on board but none of us could go up the gangplank till a little car with a load of plywood and lengths of support-timber strapped tightly to its roof rack screeched to a halt in front of us. We stood, ever so incredibly patiently, while its load was, with great care, untied and at a stately pace, plonked beneath the feet of we passengers, ultimately allowed on board. A line of Birkenstock footprints decorated the plywood five minutes into the journey.
We all jumped off the boat when it docked at the little port, with its gigantic haulage crane a permanent fixture, and its still brand-new heap of giant concrete jacks scattered to make the curve of the harbour. My friend sparked her dusty old Hyundai to life and we toiled up the hill from the port, then dipped down to the vast expanse of Sarakiniko beach and parked under a juniper bush where a tiny, abandoned green bikini dangled from the nearest branch. I dropped my bags on the chair by the bed under the window and then we sat down with a bunch of people on the terrace outside, idling the late morning hours away with chats over Greek coffee, beer and fags. What a view: golden sand stretching across our line of vision, turquoise sea only slightly ruffled by the breeze and, far in the distance, my lovely mountains, the Lefka Ori. A much better view this way around.
First social call: lunch with friends on the terrace of their stone-built house overlooking our Sarakiniko beach and beyond, to that stretch of the Libyan Sea I’d just crossed. A neighbour arrived and laid out large tupperware dishes of bacalao cooked in tomato sauce.Then a range of other dishes appeared from within the darkness of the kitchen: artichokes and beans, boureki (eggs and vegetables in a thin pastry casing), and a large bowl of horiatiki. The base of the boureki was completely burnt, but each piece was eaten and the base carefully rejected by everyone. We chatted about how beautiful the view was; my friend, who comes from Northern Greece, reported on the trouble over Macedonia – to be ‘resolved’ by naming the bit over the border from Greece ‘Northern Macedonia’. Once we’d had enough to eat, the goats, thin from surviving on the tiniest amounts of green shoots, due to the complete lack of rain all winter, had a bonanza as our hosts chucked all the leftovers over the wire fence for them.
We cleared away and soon everything was locked up, the tiny roll-on cases were ready to go and off we went, down to the boat, the same one I’d come in on, so they could leave on it at 5pm.
Not content with two trips to the harbour that day: once for me, second to deposit the Athenians, we had to take another journey there in the dark, to meet the ferry. We needed a final supply of venzeena (petrol), two deliveries having lasted my friend up to this final fortnight in her three-month stay here.It gets delivered in big plastic containers. (There’s no petrol station on the island.) We’ve stopped at the mini-market for a funnel, but we also need some kind of hose, to get the petrol from the big, heavy carton into the fuel tank of the car. This mini-market burned down last October, along with the takings for the year. But they’ve built it again, with astonishing valour.
Down at the dimly-lit harbour, all are gathered peering into the dark sea, all a little tense, to receive the guests for their rooms, to collect supplies, to gossip. More mini-buses and a couple of small coaches arrive, revving, searching for a place to park or lurk before the ferry brings the business they’re after.
Now the huge bulk of the brightly-lit ferry looms up and opens its massive jaws. Out roll cars, people, and one gigantic lorry with a tattered belly, the kind that is used to collect up rubble and debris from building-sites, roars clanking across the plates and onto the harbour’s edge. With millimetres to spare, it edges past the tiny gap in the stopper created by somebody’s thoughtlessly parked pick-up truck, and roars off up the steep hill. I wonder if, at last, this vehicle has been ordered up so as to collect the rubbish that spills out of every road-side garbage container, the wrecked cars parked nonchalantly at the side of the road every few kilometres and left there to rot. The ‘skoupithia’ that blights the whole of the pretty, wooded, sandstone-cliffed island.
Within minutes, the port is almost empty. What seemed like the greatest disorder has suddenly organised itself into those arriving from the boat, those collecting and all of them zooming off back into the island.
The ferry gently pulses on the waves, empty of cars and trucks and only the sailors left, tying off ropes and organising their overnight docking.
Two men appear, one of whom turns out to be the jovial policeman, the man with the easiest job in the world, gently nudging the law from time to time, while not disturbing it too much, on this island of less than 50 souls with its annual influx of dope-smoking nudists and campers, and the more serious-minded kind of German or French hiker or sun-lover. They set to work with the white canister, one holding it aloft while the other feeds a small length of hosepipe into the petrol tank. We could never have done it without them. Ten litres or so of petrol is very heavy.
Now we’re hungry and a little enlivened, so, once back at Sarakiniko, we stop off at the mini market taverna and have some delicious courgette fritters (no kalitsounies – they will appear tomorrow night) and share a bottle of beer. Then it’s off to our cabin and we settle into our separate beds, the shutters tightly closed. A more or less sleepless night, it’s so hot and so strange to sleep with another person so near. But my friend shares her space and her life so kindly, and there’s no botheration being with her at all. She is spectacularly tolerant.
The next day is full of sightseeing. We drive round the mouth of Sarakiniko bay to the headland where there is a small iconostasis to Saint Nicholaos, patron saint of sailors, a barely six foot column of whitewashed concrete with a simple cross on the top which, when you get up to it, has a kind of cubby hole with images of the saint, a lamp and an incense burner, with another niche beneath full of supplies of incense and oil. My friend has brought her own. We’ve picked our way carefully over the blasted undergrowth, so burnt by the relentless sun, it’s as if there’s been a fire that’s destroyed it. She’s got a very stiff knee, and my ankle isn’t all it should be. But we get there safely over the pricking, rolling stones and through the thorns and the occasional blue flowers, struggling bravely to blossom. Against the gusting breeze, she lights the lamp, hoping it will last a week at least, and, in the burner, she flares the charcoal then, when it’s settled, places her special crumbs of incense.
After a cafedaki at another friend’s taverna perched on top of a little cove near Agios Ioannides, the wind getting cooler and the clouds gathering, we leave and take ourselves off the beaten track, back into the beating sun, on the road towards the helicopter landing, passing steep, cracked cliffs of sandstone punctuated by tough cypress and firs, then veer off on another track and park the car. On foot, we make our way out towards the coast further along from Agios Ioannides, to an ancient Byzantine era church, Agios Nikolaos. It’s falling down inside, plaster is coming off in lumps and there is a huge crack along the centre of the curved ceiling. The iconostasis is neglected, a dirty cloth lying anyhow on the table at the side. My friend sets to, lighting some night lights she’s collected from the taverna, and placing them on a table with a paper cloth before some images of the saint. She’s come in honour and memory of Nico, a member of the mini-market family who was killed in a motor bike accident in October 2012 (the month after my father died). He was still a young man. She goes outside to his grave, a high marble chamber with a picture of him, and his dates, also his father’s dates on the headstone. She lights the lamp there and I leave her to think and grieve, while I sweep up some of the rubble on the floor of the church to try and make it a bit more presentable. We put the nightlights in a little circle on the sandy floor of the ornate stand, designed to let you bury those lovely slender beeswax candles in its depth, and we clear away some of the old melted wax to one side. The church is the family’s, the land there belongs to them and they used to live up there before they moved down to live at the taverna. The Church refuses to restore the chapel because it is archeologically significant, and there are no funds to do it correctly. Everything slips and slides around rules and the way they stop things being done, the way you need to ignore them to get ahead, the risks you take by doing that.
Then we lock up and make our way back up the track to our car. It’s hot and sunny now. Next stop is Vassilis’ place. Vassilis lets my friend use his car when she’s in residence on the island. He runs the island’s radio station, but he’s in the process of closing it down. He’s rearranged the space in his home, adapted the radio studio into an AirBnB place, and built an extension which he now lives in.
He’s very welcoming when we arrive and we greet and shake hands. He’s surprised when he hears I’m English (very flattered about that – my Greek is obviously sounding quite convincing, at least in the initial stages). We view the AirBnB accommodation, which is comfortable and well-equipped. The view is not to the sea, but to the arid countryside leading up to Kastri. We go back and sit on his terrace, which is nearly enclosed. He just has to add windows. He has a fabulous view over the fields and the bent-over trees out to the blue sea beyond, the coast from which we have just travelled. He’s almost in the village at the centre of the island, Kastri.
After a gentle conversation over delicious home-grown apricots, we agree all three to go on to GoGo’s little grotto of a restaurant, in Kastri, for lunch. He will come on his motorbike and meet us there.
So we travel on a few kilometres into Kastri, to GoGo’s little haven. You step inside and it’s full of flowers, dark and intimate, with each chair painted a different colour, blue, orange, yellow. She’s making a big dish of something that is being covered in a creamy material from a big yoghurt pot and in the middle of having her hair done. We sit and catch up with emails while the hair dryer shrieks in the house. The restaurant is an enclosed terrace, part of the garden really. GoGo is a small, energetic woman in her sixties, maybe seventies, with long, carefully-tended blonde on white hair and bright sparkly eyes. She smokes little cigars and cheekily remembers Zia, but not me, and jokes about how she always remembers men, never the women. We all laugh. We eat delicious artichokes and peas, tzatsiki and vegetable moussaka, and share a bottle of beer. Vassilis, who’s turned up on his bike during this, thoughtfully rushes off and gets another beer when we polish off the first bottle.
So we take our leave, figuring out how to spend the rest of the day. We take individual swimming expeditions on Sarakiniko. It’s bracing, with the wind whipping up the waves, but the water is lovely and warm.
Time for a little smackerel of something later, and we head off to the mini market taverna where freshly-made kalitsounies, served by the wry waiter with the over-confidential, quick way of speaking, appear, carefully shared out. Some with horta and misithra, some plain misithra, some plain horta. Beyond delicious. My friend promises to make some when she comes to stay with me on her way back to mainland Greece, and stock up the freezer. You need flour, vinegar or raki and something else, I forget which, for the pastry.
And so to bed – shutters open and a good night’s sleep.
Sunday – what do we do? Coffee at Kiki’s, who’s opened a mini market across the road from the Phoenix-like one, then a chat with Mexicano at his tumbledown taverna along the beach and on to the next one, where, once the pergola supports have been re-engineered, following its collapse under a tree that gave way because its roots were so dry, we eat some softly delicious meatballs in tomato sauce and a special avocado and pomegranate and walnut salad and drink a little more white wine. I was winding down so utterly that I could feel the coil of me growing lax and floppy.
Then it was some more down time at home, until it was time to observe the sunset up at Faros. Despite the clouds and only just getting there in time, there were fairy-tale castles cast by the shadows of the sinking sun, spreading across the whole of the horizon. Always amazing.
Then off to the Russians’ house, where they were dining with old friends from Georgia and Poland, much clinking of glasses, and a stunning sighting of a ‘Queen of the Night’ cactus flower, with its spiky outer petals and mellow cream interior blossom, scented like a powdery gardenia. Existential musings and toasts the Queen of England. Quite the cosmopolitan centre of things, in a stone-built cave of a home, right on the edge of Europe, next stop Libya.
7.30 start for the boat on Monday morning. It was a fresh early summer morning down at the harbour, and the ferry was hugely there, a small line of people at the ticket booth, islanders astonished to see my friend, and a little troubled to think she might be going. But it was only me. Someone was collared to take our farewell photo, and, clutching my small jamjar of Greek coffee that she had carefully made for me, I boarded the ferry and ran up the stairs to the deck to wave goodbye.
We soon set sail and powered out of the harbour and round the coast, Sarakiniko spreading into our view as we breasted the island and headed out to the open sea, across to the welcoming coast of Crete
Izzy Brown 
Izzy – a wonderful, atmospheric piece. Beautifully written.
you didn’t leave anything out Izzy, you devoured every moment!