Greece journal: 2003 part 5

I will meander along the road toward Florina in this post, taking my time to observe the landscape, towns, and people along the way.

My car was a Toyota Yaris, much too small and handy to be sold in the U.S.

At the first toll station out of Athens the toll taker was talking at her colleague, and didn't turn her head to look at me.

“Tha fai ksilo ean tha to kani” ("He will eat wood(he will be beaten) if he does this.") She handed me the ticket out the window, then realized she had to give me change. Still without even looking at me, she handed me the change.

I couldn’t find either the BBC or the American Forces radio on the car radio. I didn’t have a radio in my hotel room so I couldn’t test the stations.

Many hills had trees creeping back onto them. I wondered if they were doing reforestation. The hills weren’t grey and barren. There were trees – s not just low vegetation, but tall trees. It was good to see. Greece used to be heavily forested. I was told that during the various wars and disasters which befell them, they stripped the trees for fuel. Maybe they were coming back.

There might have been a sign which said what the speed limit was, but if there was I didn't see it. If there was, nobody was paying any attention. I was going 110 kph in my little Toyota, and many people passed me on the right and on the left, or across two lines in front of me or whatever, going twice that fast. One cop car sat behind me while I was going 110 kph. He waited for me to pull into the right so that he could pass. Imagine that. The cop car obeyed the traffic rules!

Garbage collection was in what looked like half construction containers, wheeled, heavy metal. There was a special top on them so they could be dumped into the garbage trucks. No open bags on the street, even out in the country.

I was going across the plain between Thebes and Lamia. Great hoses spewed irrigation water on the crops in farm after farm. I was surprised they didn't use drip irrigation. The huge sprinklers, about 30 feet high, sprayed a circumference of maybe 30 yards in every direction. So much of the water is lost to evaporation that way.

The way was spotted with little industries too. A couple of factories made things for cars and the like. I passed a building that had no front or back, just the concrete of the floors, with a large sign “Café.” The cafe had held some energy when the old road, which entered the new highway here at an angle, had been traveled, but now was dead as a doornail.

There was a large lake to the right. There were no houses around it at all. I thought it might be a reservoir or maybe an unused recreation area. The seashore is more popular with Greeks than lakes. This lake has appeared many times in my mind's eye since then -- deserted, surrounded by barren hills, blue cloudly sky above. During a guided meditation at a retreat one weekend we were asked to imagine ourselves approaching a body of water, and this was what came to mind. I have done that meditation many times since, walking through sparse but striking wild flowers in the sere landscape to get to the clear water.

Two trucks passed carrying three deckers of sheep, their tails swishing back and forth slowly and their legs moving back and forth to keep their balance. It was an interesting geometry of view. They were probably on their way to get their throats slit.

Coming down off the mountains the island of Evia appeared across a misty sea. It looked like the water was evaporating and making a band of evaporation vapor right above the water line, which presented itself as a white line. It formed a vague fuzzy white line along the bottom of the mountains of Evia, which are about two miles away to the right. To the left there are these rounded, old hills that abound in Greece. Between the rounded old hills and the beach, which was twenty yards to the right, were olive groves. There were wild gladioli growing everywhere – maybe they had been planted at some point, but they were now growing in fields in the middle of nowhere. What yellow plant was that? Yellow broom? Some sort of broom. Pines covered the mountains.

Beyond Evia the land mass of Greece once again showed itself as hazy, hazy, barely outlined mountains. “Mountain” is perhaps an exaggeration there. They are round old hills with faces of beige and pinky beige, occasionally gouged out for marble. The scars from the gouging are being slowly covered by trees growing back.

Unfinished hotel to my right. Just the cement skeleton. There are many cement skeletons. They just leave them there. Apparently they didn’t think ahead enough, and run out of money.

There were white, or pale yellow, beigy, pinky beigy, sometimes sand colored, sometimes whitewashed houses with orange tile roofs. Sometimes they had a grape arbor by them. The effect was orange and sand color, very similar to Tuscany. Some of them had a fenced-in yard. Some of them didn’t. Some of them were plunked into the middle of a field or an olive grove.

The olive swayed, with the leaves turning their silvery undersides over so as to make a highly textured sight. Olive trees are a grayish, dusky green, not an open green like the pines. There were also fruit trees.

I was next in Agios Konstantinos. There was a big church right on the water, and a marina filled with boats, a lot of hotels and places to stay, and houses up on the hill. It would be a hike to get from the beach on the right up to those houses. they are highly isolated. I don’t know whether they were here before, but now it’s a great resort spot, smack on the sea. The sea is probably benign here, protected as it is by the island of Evia. Sheltered high in the pines there were very square, white, bright, modern buildings which must be very cool and pleasant in the summer time and have a very beautiful view.

Oleander blooms along the road. Poppies and purple flowers stood high. They reminded me of heather, though I don't know if heather grows this far sougth. I know if I got out of the car and just walked along the side, I would find dozens of varieties of wild flowers.

Some cars passed me on the shoulder on the right. One driver gave me a dirty look like, “What kind of stupid woman are you?” Greeks are so very impatient. They will sit all day in their cafeneion flopping their beads and staring, and then they get out on the road or they go somewhere where they are interacting with others and they push and push.

There were colored election posters with photographs of Kostas Simitis for miles on every telephone pole. There must be an election coming up. There have also been ads for the Communist Party on the radio saying that they will pay attention to health issues and social security issues. Social security is a hot issue now. They are overhauling the social security system, disastrously according to one newspaper article I read.

As I progressed up the coast, some mountains went directly into the sea, looking like rounded, fuzzy buffalo foreheads.

The toilets are the water-saving kind that have just a tiny bit of water in the toilet to begin with and flush in short spurts. You have to flush it twice sometimes to get it completely flushed. They are square-shaped, with rounded corners (whatever that is called) a rectangle with rounded corners. When I was last here the hygiene facilities were constantly surprise, from a hole in the ground to primitive toilets with newspaper for toilet paper. This time, they were extremely clean toilets.

This Toyota is a nifty little car which handles very very well. It has a nice display in the middle of the dashboard so you don’t have to hunt around for what it is you are lokoing for. Halfway to Florina I had only used a quarter of a tank.

An old lady in black, wearing a dusty black skirt and blouse, leaned over at the waist to pick wild greens at the side of the road. There were two small children running around her as she did this. She was delivered to the spot by a man in a very small truck. He had brought her out to go picking wild greens for their dinner, just as they used to do in the hills around Athens when the "horta" (wild greens) season was at its peak.

On the right side of the road was a quarry called an “Asvisterion”. I guess they mine asbestos. I am suspicious of all the dust around here.

The road turned inland, and my ears popped. We were going at a very steep grade uphill. The roadi s going to begin to meander after a while because the grades that we will be going up will be so steep.
I saw on the news this morning that a cloud mass bearing a lot of rain is comingin from the west, and as we go up high on the mountains outside Lamia on the way to Larissa I can see cloud cover to the west and I wonder if this is the rain coming in. Everything is very misty, not foggy, just shrouded in mist today.
On the left side of the road, about ten yards from the road on a flat piece of land before it plunges downward, there were about twenty beehives, wooden, painted light blue and yellow.
The face of the hills I am passing through is now red on the left and sand-colored on the right, mostly red though, there are just outcroppings of sand-colored. There are beginning to be bits of vegetation growing in it to hold it in place. The rock looks friable to a very very big hand. It is sort of shale-like, lying in sheets one on top of the other. Now it is brown. Different colored mountains. There is a riot of yellow bushes, bushes with yellow flowers on top. Different kinds of bushes. They are about there feet high. And from a distance give the impression of strong, yellow. Clump after clump or straggle after straggle depending on what kind of yellow plant they are. Here the stronger cars are certainly overtaking me in my little tiny Toyota, made for four very small people. With no trunk to it really. And a very flat front. It’s a little box that moves. But it does the trick.
I am up very high now. I can look at a great distance into the valley below. It is shrouded in mist, so I can’t see exactly as far as I could see if it were clear. But a long way, and I think my, how tidy the battles must have been around here. They’d find a little bit of flat land and have a battle there . All the rest is just hills to be conquered before you arrive at the battlefield. It’s a fact of history. We just passed Thermopylae, for examplt, which is a flat swathe between the sea and some rather steep high mountains. So where else could you fight around there. It’s not like the American revolution where you could go run behind trees and fight a guerilla war. In those days you could have been seen from a very great distance, because somebody is going to be up in the hills watching you. No tree cover. No other kind of cover. Come in by sea and boom.. Or walk over the mountains or through the valley. It’s pretty clearly delineated where you could slaughter each other.
So friable are the rocks in this place where I am starting to go down the mountain, that they have veiled them in wire mesh.
Right after the monastery of Atini Sakis, I think it was called, way up on the top of a mountain, isolated, good place to say your prayers.
Here you have none of the feeling that you have driving through the Swiss mountains in the summertime. Of course the mountains here are not as high, but sometimes they are this size, you have the feeling always that they are prepared for the snow in the wintertime. Up here they may get a little dusting of snow. Mostly what they have to prepare for is this riot of purple and yellow and fuscia and bright red wild flowers and bright red poppies. That’s their invasion. Also, I these mountains there is not a soul. There was a monastery, an occasional single building. The rest of it is completely deserted. I guess you can’t grow anything up here. Not suitable for tourists. Just maybe a retreat would be nice, a retreat house or a spa or something. They are selling cherries and every once in a very long while, every several miles, there is a little roadside stand, where they are selling cherries. There is another hillside covered with bee hives. So since they are selling cherries, I assume there must be some orchards up here. I haven’t found them yet – there they are. What I know about the cherry tree – it’s some kind of fruit tree, not an olive, not a pine, or a cypress, it’s just a fruit tree. So that must be where they grow their cherries.
Small green plants a small crop which is now only small green plants, has been lpanted at regular intervals here.