Beside the Seaside

« In Which I Try Something New | Home | In Which I Get To Tell My 'Arrested In Bulgaria For Spying' Anecdote »

In Which Autumn Is Sprung

October 4, 2008 by Mike

Volos

Route: Volos - round Mount Pelion - Volos

I was going to just say, in today's entry, "Why am I doing this trip? Pretty much, I'd say, for days like this." And nothing more.

(I've done it before, lucky me. In fact, a couple of times.) But today that felt like cheating.

I uncoupled and left the panniers behind in my grubby little hotel room in the city of Volos and, slimmer, lighter and smoother, the bike responded beautifully for what was an outstanding day's motorcycling. It's like riding naked. Probably.

Volos sits on its own little gulf, as every Greek town and city seems to do. An industrial and shipping centre, it's one of Greece's largest cities, not that I'd heard of it before I started perusing the map. That's what happens to a city with no decent football team. It gets ignored.

This is where Jason & the Argomauts began and ended their journey -- insidethesea rather than besidetheseaside. Everything in town -- roads, restaurants, hotels, bars, sweet shops -- is either called 'Jason' or 'Argo'.

It's also the gateway to the peninsula of Mt Pelion. And after Cilento and Gargano in Italy, not to mention my new home in the Mani, this is the yet another fanTAStic peninsula I've stumbled upon unawares, only to be bowled over by the great beauty, and the lack of other people. Just a lot of goats, strolling up and down vertical cliff faces. It's like nobody else had noticed the peninsula's here.. but how could they miss such beauty?

I laughed as I rode -- for the beauty of the place and for the purity of the air that I was gulping in. The smell was of.. air. Not the smell of the city, for sure. Not pine or plant or good greenery, either. It just smelled of.. air. So good it made me almost light-headed. Or was my head spinning to think of what we breath in the rest of the time?

At the very tip of this enchanted land, beneath a remote mountainous stronghold called Trikeri, squat and empty and distant, sits a little fishing village, Aghia Kiriaki: no more than a handful of houses huddled together between hillside and turquoise sea. The road is new. For thousands of years these communities were reached only by sea. Not surprisingly, Kiriaki has that 'end of the road' feeling and the two tavernas on the quayside attract people from far beyond Volos to sample their celebrated seafood. Crunchy grilled octopus; pickled anchovy; salted herring; smoked mackerel; raw shellfish. Yakk.

I had the sausages and fries (they were horrible) before catching 40 winks alongside the bike.

Pelion was the mythical home of the centaurs, so it was something of a homecoming for a close friend of mine. I wouldn't call him a bosom pal: more a friend I stand shoulder-to-shoulder with; one who I have no secrets from, certainly; who has shared the highs and lows.. and peak tanning hours.. of the last couple of years.

And did you spot, in the background of the above picture, a small spit of land with a couple of white buildings on it? I was transfixed, took loads of pictures, and decided to win the Lottery in order to be able to move to this magical spot. You're invited to the housewarming -- so please keep those fingers crossed that my numbers come up before whoever is renovating the place puts stone-cladding on.. oh, and before money loses all value around the world.

I have long suspected that the views behind me are better than the view ahead. That I should have done this trip clockwise with the sea on my left-hand side, the better to enjoy chasing the setting sun to the west every evening. And it's true that the view of sun-slanted sea in my rear-view mirrors sometimes has me swooning while ahead, at such moments, I always seem to notice chemical plants or rubbish tips or some dull conforming monotony.

As if I shouldn't be satisfied with what I have -- which is, after all, the whole wide world.

There must be some 21st century hang-up still floating around in my system -- a relic of the rat-race; my innate London-ness -- about the grass being greener; about wanting moremoreMORE.

Today I was able to put this theory to the test, as Aghia Kiriaki lies 40 kilometres down a dead-end road that I had to retrace back beyond Argolasti before cutting across the peninsula to the east coast. There was the unusual -- for me -- sensation of recognising places I was riding through. A curve round a bay. A sharp bend at the top of a shoulder of hillside. The spot where I saw a goat army crossing the road. The magical house. It was beautiful but, happy to report, no more beautiful than it had been in the other direction. My last two-and-a-bit years have not been wholly in vain.

I was looking out for a hauntingly gentle stretch of pebbly beach that I had earmarked on the way out for a post-prandial swim. It looked just as good from the other direction. The sea was irresistible; I skinny-dipped and sunned myself dry on a rock in the late afternoon sun. Endless summer.

Or so I thought.

Because a very strange thing happened while I wasn't paying attention. Autumn arrived.

(To those of you for whom winter is already fast closing in, I apologise. But, rainstorms notwithstanding, Greece has felt pretty summery to this northern European, at least.)

I'm hoping that Mount Pelion is some kind of freak of nature. After all, it didn't feel autumnal this morning. For all I know, this area might be famous to every Greek schoolchild and feature in all their Geography textbooks for being out of time with the rest of Greece. Perhaps the centaurs or the Olympian gods being playful with me because of the tattoo. The cynic in me notes that I rode this morning down the west coast of the peninsula while this afternoon, after my swim, I traversed high Mount Pelion and rode up the east coast, exposed to totally different sun, wind and atmosphere -- past Lambinou and Tsangarada and the wonderfully-named Milopotamos. It's a village, not a cartoon character.

Whatever the reason: this morning I basked in summer sun and this late afternoon I rode through autumnal forests full of reds and browns and myriad greens. The flora on this side of the mountain is quite different: not the scrubby brush and olive groves of the western slopes; here the trees are tall and close and proud. There's plenty of space for a centaur or two to hide, and the occasional room with a view, where people have built houses far from the madding crowd.

I know nothing about plants and trees: Dutch elm, Norwegian pine, French horn -- I couldn't pick them out in a identity parade. But I do know what apples look like. There were pick-up trucks on the roads all afternoon, half of them full of waving, laughing labourers on their way from orchard to orchard, half of them moving crates of apples off the mountain. Harvest time -- err, is that another sign of autumn?

And I know a conker when I see one.. even more recognisable when thousands of them carpet the road as horse chestnut tree after horse chestnut tree sheds its load along the little lanes of this fair land.

I slowed right down -- partly because I didn't fancy sliding off the bike on the uncertain surface, partly because it all looked -- and smelt -- so fresh and pure. A different purity from the morning -- autumnal -- but just as good for the soul.

Comments

By Sandy from Leeds | October 26, 2008 7:57 AM

Dear Mike

Surely this was also the day when you were in the zone, out of this world beside yourself, outside yourself, besidetheseaside. Wow.
I am riding pillion with you around Pilion.

Best wishes
Sandy from Leeds

Beside the Seaside

In Which Autumn Is Sprung

Comments

Leave your comment

Latest comments