Dirty Old Town

Navpaktos was so charming we stayed another night which enabled us to host our two sets of neighbours for a few drinks. It was fun to meet some other cruisers and see how people came to be parked next to us. 

Anna and Robin are retired poms and seasoned cruisers who do 3 months a year in Greece, sailing a 30 ft ex-charter boat they bought for a song and refurbished 7 years ago. One had the sense of a tightly controlled budget for everything except laughter: this they both dispensed freely.    

Dick and Brigitte are a Dutch pair sailing a 26 ft traditional Dutch steel fishing smack (complete with leeboards) who arrived from Holland (with Inja the dog - to Sholto's delight) via 18 months in the canals and the Black Sea. Their budget looked even tighter, but of course as we gearheads hate to admit, everyone was in the same place, waking up to the same view, and having the same great experiences. The size of the boat and associated accoutrements are really minor details in the washup, although if we swapped the dog for two kids one suspects their quality of life would have taken a hit.

After a bleary goodbye the next day we had a couple of long days motoring eastwards up the Gulf of Corinth, including anchoring in the Alkionidhes off a small island resembling nothing more than Alice Springs or Cooper Pedy, complete with shimmering heat, deserted adobe farmhouse, baking red sand, and stunted eucalypts. An unlikely reminder of home and a timely one to get some additional sun protection sorted out for the boat. Maybe those poms know something after all. 

We set off early toward the Corinth Canal, the gateway to the Agean.  It is a bit like a mini Suez, hewn from the limestone, with sheer walls rising up to 50 m above the boat. At the eastern end we bumped into an Aussie family going the other way - Steve, Karen and their two kids on a 42 ft catamaran. We hastily exchanged notes on schooling, places to go and the trials of life aboard - great to hear an Aussie accent again before we set off on the last leg towards Athens, cradle of western civilisation. 

 

We are now staying in the dirty, feotid, airless Zeas Marina, surrounded by superyachts and floating turds (at times indistinguishable), but centrally located next to the main port of Athens.

Athens is 3 million people living in a kind of Refern by the sea. The town planning seems to permit any type of building as long as it is between 4 and 5 stories tall, no exceptions, right up to the city limits. This is at times charming, except the effect is spoiled: whatever the Greeks were wasting their public purse on to land in the financial morass they appear to be in, it certainly wasn't garbage disposal.  A cheap shot, but yes it seems not much advanced since Homer had a whinge about the bins not getting collected.

Kicking cans aside, yesterday we set off to the Parthenon and associated wonders. It really is a marvel that these buildings were planned and executed by a civilisation not that much advanced from the stone age. That is until you contemplate that it was probably all done by slaves in appalling conditions while Athenians slapped each other on the back and contemplated their next bloodthirsty foray to gather even more slaves. This is not an aspect of ancient life one reads about in the guide books, it seems we are to imagine a peace loving hippie commune given to passionate rhetoric about philosophy, equal rights and stone columns. 

Tomorrow we will collect our new boom tent and set sail (read - motor) again, for a short tour of the Pelopponese, before returning in a weeks time to collect our new internet-bought dinghy and motor. Along the way I might swap the front dunny pipes over, bodgy up a wire for the dead battery drill, allowing me to complete installing the lee cloths, put up the clothes hooks, finally order the Epirb, attempt to fix the air con, and re-install the man overboard alarm.  Ahh home improvements, some people just cant help themselves.