Travelling in Greece in the summer of 1981 without a mobile, or a credit card

Travelling in Cephalonia

Now I never did Greece in the 70s.

That was when many of my friends travelled the islands.

Back then it was all pretty much an adventure, starting with the night flight to Athens and then in the early morning the taxi to the Piraeus followed by the ferry and a series of island hopping journeys.

But even in the 1980s when I first began going there was still an element of hit and miss.

The roads and the rail network were yet to benefit from EU money and of course many of the places we washed up in were remote and still fairly basic.

Added to this there was our own lack of knowledge and fore thought like the year we booked two islands on either side of the mainland, opted to do our own transfers and discovered both the delights and the nightmare of a ferry from one island to one Greek port followed by a taxi drive across Greece to another port, another ferry and the second island.

Asos

In the meantime we lost our companions who had all the paperwork for our new accommodation and managed to arrive ahead of them at the island with only a vague idea of where the resort was.

Today our friends would be a mobile call away but 25 years ago that little communication revolution had yet to arrive.

And so once again I am reflecting on the extent to which things have changed.  In Asos on Cephalonia there are two telephone kiosks for those who do not want to use a mobile.

They take telephone cards and are quick and efficient, although I have to say at present the one in the village square is broken.

Back in the 1980s everything was different for once you had found the kiosk you might have to wait in line joining a handful of other tourists and locals wanting to phone off the island.

Nor was this restricted to Greece.  Later in the 1990s in Spain you still had to book an international call, wait to be called by the official, and watch as the minutes shot by and hoping that for some vague and unspecified reason the line would not go dead in mid sentence.

The telephone card

And phones are not the only mark of how things have changed.

Back in Asos there is no bank, post office or cash dispenser, but little over 20 minutes away in the port of Fiscardo I counted several holes in the wall and of course in the capital there are plenty.

All of which means the days of travellers cheques are for all but the cautious traveller a thing of the past.

But how different back in the 1970s when an acquaintance  who had been back packing across Crete one summer ran out of money and opted for the simple expedient of staying over on the island and working on a local farm till the following year.

The farmer’s family treated him very much as their own, and thirty years later they still had his photograph on the kitchen wall.  It was faded and he looked a lot younger but it was him framed by an olive tree and a vine.

There is of course a danger at this point of sliding into romantic tosh.  As a parent with children who did their “travelling year” I would have been mortified at such a turn of events.  But then that is what adventures are about and such concerns have to be put into perspective.

The phone in Asos which didn't work

My own uncle was just 19 when he embarked on a journey which took him by wartime convoy from Liverpool to South Africa and through the Suez Canal to the Fall of Greece in 1940 and back via Egypt to Basra and eventually to the Far East.

And in a little less dramatic way when it was my turn to leave home to pursue a degree course in Manchester in the September of 1969, I left London with just a small suitcase travelling alone and arriving at Piccadilly with only a vague idea of where I was going to stay and how to get to the college the following day.

But enough of such hard worn stories, things move on and usually for the better.

Location; Asos

Pictures; from the collection of Andrew Simpson

35,000 feet flying home from Greece and remembering Dad and Glenton Tours

Crossing the Alps

From 35,000 feet the geography of Europe is plain to see.

We are heading north from Greece following the coast of Italy from Bari up towards Venice and the Dolomite Mountains.

The land below is a patchwork of yellow and green fields with small hamlets and numerous rivers glinting sliver in the sun.

All of course in direct contrast to the landscape of the Greek islands at the height of the summer with their mix of sparse vegetation and burnt brown earth.

Below us the land is more fertile; the fields are greener and the villages larger and closer together. And in a few minutes the countryside around Venice gives way to the mountains.  But these are not the rugged empty mountains of Greece but all together different.

Dotted across them half hidden are a succession of lakes and there is the hint of snow on the highest summits.

On route for Asos

This remains a wonderful way to see our continent, but there are limitations, so while you can see vast stretches in a matter of minutes, it is from a great height and dependent on a lack of cloud which so often obscures the view.

All of which makes me reflect on that more gentle way of seeing Europe in the 1950s and 60s. which for  most this was the coach tour.

And my dad spent his whole working life in the holiday trade taking people of modest means on sightseeing tours of Britain and mainland Europe.

In the age before cheap air travel this was the holiday for those who didn’t want sun and sand or a week at a Butlin’s.

These were all inclusive trips which offered “Your own reserved seat in a special Glenton touring coach, a tour of your choice, hotel accommodation including dinner and breakfast, gratuities to hotel staff, services of an experienced chauffeur-courier and a specially written guide book.”*

The tours lasted for anything between 7 and 15 days.

For £45 Tour C7 in 1965 offered nine days to the Swiss and Italian Lakes, leaving London on the Saturday, staying in Brussels on the Sunday night and travelling on to Lake Lucerne on the Monday, then later in the week to Lake Maggiore and then in to Switzerland and back via Burgundy to London.

Of course it is easy today to sneer at an experience where everything was provided and if you failed to look out of the window you might miss a country, but in an age before the internet with television still in its infancy this was a relatively cheap way to see places which would otherwise just be a picture in a book.

And this was value for money given that the national average wage in 1965 was £26.

There are still plenty of travel companies offering this sort of holiday but back in the late 1940’s and ‘50s this was an experience just opening up for thousands who were beginning to enjoy the first taste of consumer prosperity.

They are as much an indication of that new Britain as the washing machine, television and motor car.

Asos

All of which may seem a long way from a flight across our continent in the early August of this year but I think not.

For despite the countless times I have travelled south to Italy and Greece I never tire of what I see passing below me in just the same way that fifty-nine years earlier Miss J P Bass recorded her pleasure at seeing the Swiss Alps in the summer of 1954 with Glenton Tours

*Glenton Tours Brochure 1955

Pictures; the Greek Islands, the Italian Dolomites and a page of the 1965 Glenton coach cruises Britain and the Continent brochure from the collection of Andrew Simpson

On a grey morning in Asos wondering about the tourist trade

We awoke to heavy leaden skies and by 10 am there seemed no promise of a better day.

By the beach the sun beds were all still stacked and only a few hardy souls had ventured out to watch the wave’s crash across the shore.

Back in the village square, the umbrellas in the restaurants were all down and no one was taking breakfast.

The few brief moments when the clouds vanished to reveal a blue sky were short lived.

And for the first time I pondered on how the holiday business in Asos on Cephalonia was bearing up.

By common consent there seemed to be fewer tourists on the island.

But memory is not always a good guide to these things and the owner of the restaurant in the village square assured us that “lots of people were coming here instead of staying in their own country.”

And I believe him, after all he recognised us as the family who made him pasta with garlic and olive oil.

It is a story long in the telling but suffice to say that Rosa who is from Naples took pity on him when he complained his mother could never quite make it right.

And judging by the full tables around us business is good which of course it has to be because a lot of Greeks invest much in the tourist months.

You see it all round you, from the local farmers bringing in fresh produce everyday for the restaurants to the women who clean the holiday homes and those who travel from the mainland just for the season working the long hours through the day and late into the night.

But when you actually weigh it up there are in fact very few enterprises here on Assos.  Apart from the two mini markets there are just four restaurants, an overpriced cocktail bar two beech bars and two tourist shops.

And there is a concentration of control for the two mini markets are owned by one family, one of the bars and a restaurant by two brothers while the Wi-Fi cafe and harbour restaurant by another couple.

Now it is not always easy to determine whether they are the owners or merely working the business for someone else.

Either way there is no questioning how hard they work.  The mini markets are open by 9 in the morning and will not close till 10 pm, while all the bars and restaurants will be serving all day and late into the evening.

Nor are we talking about shift work for it’s the same staff who will be serving breakfast at 10 and finishing off the night with the last of the diners.

Of course this is not something that tends to cross your mind.  Most of us get friendly with a waiter, joke about the weather ask superficial questions about their lives and if pushed brush away their long hours of labour with the thought that when the season closes these waiters, shop keepers and cleaners can relax.

But I wonder, particularly in the light of the current state of the Greek economy.

Which is almost where I began because the concerns over the state of the tourist business on the island had been prompted by the grey sky and unpromising morning.

We took coffee at the beech bar watching the sea and waiting for the sun to burn the clouds away and sure enough by mid day the water had settled, the sky was blue and the relentless sunshine was back.

And along with the sun were the coach parties.  They arrive regularly in the morning in their air conditioned buses; spend upwards of an hour and half taking pictures and sampling the bars.

It is easy to become sniffy about this intrusion into the peace of the resort.

There are a lot of them, they clog the road past the house and make a lot of noise, but they also spend money, and that for traders and residents is an important consideration.  Moreover the grey clouds had not put them off.

Pictures; from the collection of Andrew Simpson. 2013

In Assos with the tourists and the ghosts

Asos in Cephalonia is a small classic Greek fishing village.

It sits in a secluded cove protected from the open sea with a cluster of bars, restaurants and holiday homes on three sides and a Venetian fort which dominates the fourth side sitting on a tall mountain.

And despite being an hour’s drive north from the airport it is a popular destination.

But it is the adventurous that make the journey along a twisting road which clings to the side of the mountains and affords spectacular views down steep ravines to the sea below.

Along with these who have opted to stay there is a steady stream of visitors who drive in sample the beech and bars and move on.

That said there is now also a brisk trade in the coach tourists who are ferried in air conditioned coaches which park just outside the village.

Every day this week groups of them have passed the house with a tour guide who carries a bat with a painted number and ushers her charges down to the bay spending no more than half an hour in the place.

All of which is in direct contrast to the winter months when there are no more  than a hundred people here making it a very quiet and empty place.

And as if to underline this other side of Asos there are the deserted houses which have long since been abandoned and are slowly falling down.

We are surrounded by them.  A few still have doors and shutters as if someone has a plan to return.

But the glass from the windows has long gone, all are open to the sky and the wooden beams are rotten so that floors sag and in many cases have already collapsed.

And as ever nature has moved in with bushes and even trees growing where once people sat, ate and passed the time of day.

Next door beside the old oven with its bell shaped chimney a huge bush with bright red flowers attracts a daily swarm of bees.

How long these houses have been empty may be determined by the extent of the decay and above all by the size of the trees growing in them.

In some cases these trees are tall with broad trunks and are as much a permanent feature as the crumbling walls.

A few of the houses have the date they were built, the one beside us dates from 1914 and another 1923.

They were tall houses spread out over three floors with a large single room downstairs, three or four rooms on the first story and a large attic space under the rafters.

But there is no clue to who owned them.  I asked the local shopkeeper and she shrugged and so with no firm information I fall back on speculation.

Some might have been the second homes of people from the capital, but that is unlikely.  So I guess they were the homes of locals who just moved away in the years before tourism took over.

This would date their abandonment to the 1970s if not earlier.

None of which explains why they have not been redeveloped.  They are on a prime site just beyond the beech, which must be all the more attractive now that the area around the bay has all been taken up with smart new holiday homes, so surely we must be next.

A few have for sale messages painted on the walls but in the years we have been here none have been sold.

But maybe their time will soon be here, otherwise I fear that a few more wet and windy winters and they will have vanished.

Pictures; from the collection of Andrew Simpson 2016

On eating Italian pasta on a Greek island

I often wonder what these small Greek villages are like in winter when the tourists have gone.

Now my friend George who lives in Symi says that it's quieter with a bit of rain.

But I rather think in the case of Asos it will be much quieter.

It is at the end of an hour long drive from the airport and we found it almost by accident on one of our adventures.

It is a small place and even at the height of the season the number here was comfortable, and so we spent a pleasant few hours and choose to return the following year.

And as these things go we took Tina’s mum, who flew into Manchester from Milan and then with us in tow flew out the following day to the island.

Now I have written about Rosa’s cooking on plenty of occasions* but even we were amused when after a conversation with the owner of a local tavernae we went to Rosa cooked him a meal.

He told us that his mum never cooked pasta like he had had in Italy, so one lunch time Rosa cooked him a plate and we sat eating a Greek meal while he ate her pasta.

Location' Asos





Pictures; from the collection of Andrew Simpson

* Rosa's cooking, http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/Rosa%27s%20cooking

On arriving in Asos

The first time we came across Asos it was at the end of a long drive over Greek roads through the heart of the island ending with a descent down some spectacular mountains.  

It was a place we have come back to and will again.

There is history here but essentially the post is here because on a cold grey August Bank Holiday the rain continues to fall like stair rods.








Pictures; from the collection of Andrew Simpson