Athens to Chios
Chios,
Northeast Aegean Islands,
Greece
Saturday, May 10, 2008
A 40-minute flight to Chios, a hilly island bristling with scrub trees and dotted with isolated villages. From the east shore, it's only about 10k to Turkey whose dusky brown hills rise from the sea along the near horizon.
Cab to the Erytha Hotel 5-6k north of Chios Town and am greeted by name at the enormous white desk at the end of a large, modern and empty lobby. We are offered orange juice while my passport is photocopied, etc and shown to our rooms. Mine is on the lower level, though still some 30 feet above the shore. Small, spare, adequate in every way except perhaps for the powerful scent of a sewage system gone terribly wrong. Much as I hate to complain about anything, I decide 5-days might be too short to get used to it and too long to enjoy and I request a different room. In the bar, Bella says hers has none of the atmosphere mine did and my next room a flight up is fine on all accounts, too. I make the same mistake I make everywhere I travel and against my father's best advice, I order a martini "with only a drop of vermouth, please, with a twist of lemon instead of an olive" and am served the usual few drops of gin drowning in a sea of Martini & Rossi with a slice of lemon on the same toothpick as the olive. It's no one's fault but mine.
It's a short walk to the next village along a sidewalk not so much crowded as nearly blocked by the trunks of leafy trees, entailing much ducking and swerving to navigate successfully. Down near the end of a narrow street that ends at the water we find a taverna where we enjoy fried aubergines, tomato and cucumber salad and plates of delicious mousaka, washed down with a carafe of a very light homemade retsina. Cats howl and chase across the street. A very dirty, small fluffy dog sits at my feet and watches each bite of my meal disappear into my mouth. The lights on the shore of Turkey sparkle across the water.
This morning, after a buffet breakfast at the Hotel, we cab into Chios Town and wander through the warren of narrow streets amid the clatter of traffic and angry whine of motorcycles. The original town was mostly destroyed by an earthquake in 1881 and it looks like it might further profit from another. It's an ugly little port of mainly characterless concrete buildings hunched along the crescent of the harbor. What little charm it once might have had has been buried in cracked concrete and seaside kitsch. The crumbling medieval fortress still stands, it's walls in many places serving as wall and foundation of sad little nondescript houses in the former Turkish and Jewish sector.
But it has an Internet cafe, where I'm sitting and tapping this as clouds close in over the harbor and a chill descends. I'm sure I'll be back here over the next few days as the hotel has no public Internet access (much of the hotel is under renovation) and while the general manager has graciously offered us the use of the computer in his office, I'd feel a little guilty pouring out prose in there at his desk while he waits patiently outside.
