History is bunk! It's all Greek to me.

I wrote this a long time ago, but as Greece is always in the headlines these days it still seems topical.

Samos is a Greek island not far from Turkey. Kokkari is in Samos.

The Hotel Kokkari Beach is on the outskirts of Kokkari.  Dimitrios the proprietor, is big, dark, swarthy in the mould of Anthony Quinn. You can see him in old films.

Arriving by air at Samos is exciting - after you have landed: terrifying when you are doing it. The runway does just that: runs away into a mountain at one end, into the sea at the other with a mere hundred yards between the two; or so it seems from the air.

The aircraft doesn’t land or take off in very strong wind. It is always fairly strong, which explains some of the pilot's manoeuvres. A very strong wind means an extended holiday or a return trip to Athens by boat - if you can get on it.

What runway?

 Reclaiming your baggage at the airport is akin to mass wrestling. Very small old Greek ladies make formidable opponents. They have sharp pointed elbows designed for in­fighting, which if you are tall can be excruciatingly painful.

Leaving the airport by private coach is interesting. The driver, one other couple and a determined lady courier make up the complement. The driver wants to wait for two other passengers. The lady courier says:

 "If they are here and you can’t see them they will already have caught a taxi".

The driver wants to look for them. The lady courier remonstrates:

"You know the taxi-drivers don’t like you dragging fares out of their taxis to fill your bus - it only 
causes trouble”. We do not wait for the invisible twosome!

The journey to Kokkari is interesting - after you've done it: petrifying while you are doing it. The road disappears into potholes - or possibly bomb craters - every hundred yards. The roadside disappears over the edge of a precipice - all the time.  Everyone drives on the wrong side of the road in the hope they will not meet someone foolish enough to be driving on the correct side.

The coach has seen better days - about thirty years ago. One half of the windscreen is shattered - like the passengers. Surprisingly, there are curtains at the windows. They would be nice to hide behind, but are unaccommodating in this respect because there are more holes than curtain. The lady courier doesn’t talk because, as she admits later, it is difficult to listen and pray at the same time.

Arrival at the hotel is the climax of a fifteen hour journey. We didn’t go to America because it was too far! To be fair, we didn’t know we were going to spend hours in Athens hoping for a connecting flight waiting for the very strong wind to decline to a fairly strong wind.

Bed is what you seek, but you reckon without the welcome of Dimitrios, who is Anthony Quinn. He speaks English to Germans who can’t speak Greek. He speaks French to Englishmen who can’t speak Greek. It seems to work. Dimitrios insists that you take breakfast. You can’t refuse.

You couldn’t have refused in any case, because when you have finished breakfast and are ready for bed, Dimitrios says:

“Five minutes”.

This is your first experience of Greek time that, you discover later, equates to six Greek minutes to one English minute.  Half-an-hour later you find that you have had to wait until someone has vacated a room before you can have it.  In the trade it is termed 100% occupancy!

Half-board means bed, breakfast and dinner: or as Dimitrios explains on day two; bed, breakfast, lunch and dinner on day three because the cook has to go to a wedding on the evening of day two and do you mind not having dinner? He does not insist, but you would be doing him a favour.

Proof of the effective bandit-like charm of Dimitrios is to be found in the tavernas of Kokkari on the evening of day two; all his residents are there, eating out.

Eating in Greek tavernas is interesting if you like Greek salad, which is English salad with goat’s cheese. If you don’t like Greek salad, eating in Greek tavernas is uninteresting, unless of course you like tomatoes stuffed with minced meat; vine leaves stuffed with rice and minced meat; moussaka which is minced meat stuffed with something akin to egg custard - or just plain minced meat.

The wine of Samos is light, pleasant and cheap.  The beer, Amstel or Fix, is light, pleasant and cheap. Tea is a bag dunked in a cup of hot water and is cheap. Nescafe, Nes Cafe or Nes Coffee, as variably described on menus, is a powder that looks like Nescafé, which you sprinkle into a cup of hot water. It too is cheap.

In fact, everything is cheap. You could have a five course dinner with wine for £5 - if you could find a five course dinner. If you could, two of the five courses would be Greek salad.

The determined lady courier is English-type Roedean fast becoming Greek-type Dimitrios. You meet her in the square of Kokkari at six in the evening of day one - after you have slept for eight hours.

Meeting the determined lady courier is a lottery. If you find the taverna where she holds court, she buys you a bottle of wine. She eats yoghourt and honey - all the time. When you find her, purely by chance, on day two at the taverna where you have gone to have a beer and a Greek salad, she is very angry with Yamis the proprietor because he has run out of yoghourt and honey. She makes do with a large vanilla, chocolate and coffee ice-cream with cherries on top.  She is a big girl.

Yamis, by the way, does not look like Anthony Quinn: he’s the only Greek so far who does not.

The big lady courier has already, on the wall-of-death ride from the airport, given us a wadge of stencilled information on Samos. For example, day three is a bus trip round the island. “Not the normal trip offered by tourist agencies that are unreliable, but a special for my clients only”, of whom, she infers, there are more than just the four of us who were on the bus ride from the airport.

However, when we meet the determined lady courier at the taverna, she has some bad news. The round-island trip has been cancelled due to lack of support. It seems like good news to me because the round-island trip lasts all day, which is a lot further than from the airport to the hotel!

But, travel on your own is no problem because there is a road and a bus service. The timetable is included in the wadge of stencilled information, but “ignore the timetable” instructs the lady courier, “all the times have been changed”.   All you need to do, she advises, is stand by the roadside and wait for the bus that is always full and unlikely to stop unless you act in an agitated manner that is the normal and only way to stop a bus on Samos.

The other couple on the bus from the airport, the wife in what seemed to me to be a very advanced stage of pregnancy, took her advice and caught a bus packed with thousands of Greek schoolchildren. I exaggerate here - there were probably only hundreds.

They went up into the mountains to a small village that was the end of the bus route. Having spent some time sightseeing, they returned for the bus, only to discover that the bus on which they had arrived had been the school bus, there being no other services to and from the village. They were stranded.

But the people of Samos are kind and helpful. It was explained, with difficulty, that: “a car will come”.

They assumed this was in response to their plea for someone to call a taxi. As time passed, the villagers came out of their houses, with chairs, to sit and look at the stranded couple. In response to their continued queries about the taxi, they were reassured: “a car will come.”

After a long wait, a type of Land Rover appeared, containing German tourists. The villagers ran into the road en masse, bringing the vehicle to a halt. The couple were pushed onto the vehicle and the Germans instructed by the villagers to take them back to Kokkari.   There was no taxi, but the villagers knew that a car was bound to arrive sometime. Fortunately for our friends, it happened to arrive the same day.

On day six we were going on a boat trip to Turkey organised by the lady courier. She arrived late to collect us and we missed the boat. By way of recompense she took us, in company with the other couple, in her minute Fiat to a seaside village and left us there for the day, promising to pick us up in the evening - a journey not anticipated with much pleasure as the Greek style driving she had adopted on the way filled me with apprehension that there was going to be a premature birth inside the car. Where we would have found space for a baby I don’t know.

Came the end of the day - no lady courier. She had crashed her car into a tree on the road down to the village. There was no way in which it could be made roadworthy again. By this time, being stranded in out-of-the-way villages was becoming second nature to the other couple. By providence, a taxi appeared with a passenger. We and the lady courier were saved. A car had come!

To get away from it all, including the lady courier, we hired mopeds - damn the dangers of which there are many, including warnings of broken limbs, tetanus and somewhat suspect medical services - and went up into the mountains into idyllic surroundings.

Ignore the swirling avalanches of white powdery dust tumbling across the piece of road you have just about passed - they don't have roadwork signs, traffic-lights or watchmen in Samos.  The mopeds are not this year’s models. That you have to dismount, open up to full throttle and then only find enough power to walk up the hills with them, seems of little consequence. It’s downhill coming back.

Up to villages stuck to the mountain sides: villages that are white, shining, spotlessly clean with pastel-coloured flowers and decorations painted on the pavements. Where every other house seems to be a taverna. Where two litres of beer and Greek salad is unbelievably cheap. Where gnarled-looking people and hosts of small children all smile and speak to you. That you cannot understand a word of Greek has nothing to do with being in Paradise.

On another day we took a walk where countless butterflies, disturbed by our progress, filled the air of the beautiful green countryside. We headed for a mountain village but never found it and became hopelessly lost in a maze of scrub and forest high in the mountains. I was forced to climb trees to seek a way out while my patient but apprehensive wife had to call continuously so that I knew where to find her again. I could see the sea down below, far in the distance. Eventually, we scrambled down the mountainside, climbed down the terraced walls of an old olive orchard, across rough scrubland. Scratched, torn and almost exhausted from the searing midday sun, we stumbled across the beach and threw ourselves into the sea. It would have made a smashing adventure film.

The taxi driver who rescued us from the seaside village was a Greek who had spent some years in Australia and who, as a consequence, spoke Australian with a Greek accent. We hired him to take us round the island to marvel at the natural and man-made wonders of Samos, including an aqueduct that had been built by Archimedes, that's what he said but it was Eupalinos who was born a couple of centuries before Archimedes- with help of course. The construction, 3400 feet long, began from either side of a mountain and was completed in the middle, only a foot out of true.

The Turks were in the habit of trying to invade Samos. On one occasion, as a Turkish ship approached the island, the elders gathered the populace in the evening, armed each with a flaming torch, sped them  through one end of the aqueduct and out the other that faced to sea and the Turkish ship. This operation was repeated a number of times until, as the Greek-Australian taxi driver told us, the captain of the Turkish ship cried out:

"Jesus Christ where have all these Greeks come from?"

The fact that all this took place before Christ was born was of little concern to the taxi driver. It did not diminish for one moment the enjoyment at hearing a little bit of the history of Samos.

As someone once said, "history is all bunk”. That a taxi driver from Samos could make it a lot more interesting than anything I ever heard at school was just another holiday bonus.