The Greek island of Rhodes was a magical place in ’79, when I look now at the holiday brochures I see modern hotels and all the garbage they bring with them, in ’79 you stayed in old hotels that had been in or around the old walled town since the Knights Templar established the place during the 14th century.
Our hotel was actually attached to the outside of the town walls, presumably in medieval times only the dumbest of travellers stayed there for why stay inside the town walls under the protection of the Knights when you can stay outside at the beck and call of those nasty Turks and Moors ?
The Hotel Sylvia wasn’t as old as the old town but it was nevertheless shabby in a non-chic just plain old shabby stylee. Our bathroom was inhabited by hordes of cockroaches and we suspect that this was the reason why Thompson Holidays had declined the hotels offer of full board, maybe someone from Thompsons had visited the kitchens just after the brochures had been printed and realised the folly of feeding their clients food that swarms of roaches had already dined upon – still, it was cheap.
We wandered far and wide across the old town every day, we perambulated her ancient walls, for free, we were not to know that access to the old walls was strictly controlled and you were supposed to pay a guide to take you around but thats what happens when a mediterranean island still insists on embracing the afternoon siesta tradition – crafty young tourists tip-toe past the guides ticket office and show themselves around for free.
One very hot afternoon we perambulated down the Street of the Knights, a narrow stone cobbled street containing a solid terrace of 14th century stone houses, the seven lodges representing the seven nationalities of christian Knights who had made the island a stronghold and a stepping-off place to conquer the Ottoman Empire. Sheltered gateways guarded ancient shady courtyards with tiled fountains – we were the only ones wandering down the street that afternoon, it was hot, dusty and deadly quiet, very atmospheric, spooky even – and there at the top of the hill was the Palace of the Grand Masters still completely intact as if the Knights had only just popped out for some milk, or to kill some more Turks.
The hospital building inside the palace even still had its glazed windows, glazed not with glass but with extremely thin sheets of marble through which shone a milky yellow light – we did all of this touristy touring for free, when the guides were asleep, we were young but we weren’t stupid.
We took a fishing boat trip down the island to the bay of Lindos, its outward journey spoiled by a family of Austrians who’s children ran riot on the small boat when all Burty and I wanted to do was to sleep off a hangover, the anchor was dropped in the bay and we waded ashore straight for a small beach bar where our Thompsons meal vouchers didn’t work and so we had to pay for something for the first time that week, and afterwards, drunk again, we eschewed the mules that were hired to carry tourists to the summit and climbed the hill that overlooked the bay to walk aimlessly around its Acropolis, see nothing of interest and so return to the bar on the beach.
And later that afternoon after wading back out to the boat we found to our delight that the Austrian family had not yet returned and we encouraged, cajoled and then finally bribed the boats captain to leave without them, and he did, and we laughed the laughter of 22 year olds who cared not that a whole family of parents and seven children would have to walk the 30 or so miles back to Rhodes across the mountains that night, just like the Von Trapp family did in “The Sound of Music”, we shared a bottle of ouzo with the boat captain on that voyage back and if he was only half as pissed as we were by the time he sailed into Mandraki harbour then I’m still shocked that he managed to moor the boat safely against a jetty.
That night, like most nights we took our Thompsons food vouchers to a small open air restaurant located in a small square with its obligatory small fountain in the middle, a square of 700 year old dwelling houses steeped in the melting pot of Greco-Turkish-Moorish architecture and decor, opposite and over the square from our dining table was a traditional Turkish bathhouse, we dared each other every night to enter and be pummelled but we never did, instead preferring the delights of Coquille St Jacques, platefuls of huge prawns and cake to follow, there has to be cake, all swilled down with a couple of bottles of Lindos wine, a few ouzos for nightcaps on the verandah of the shabby and not at all chic Hotel Sylvia, or Saliva as we preferred to call it, and then after putting off the moment for long enough, back to the room, stamping feet and making as much noise as possible in order to scare off the cockroaches before drunken slumber drove away all thoughts of where they crawled and what they did while we were asleep.
This is like Alan Whicker isn’t it ?
We paid a kings ransom to the Thompsons Holiday rep who visited our terrible shabby but not at all chic Hotel Saliva only once in order to sell us an over-priced coach trip to The Valley of The Butterflies and we awoke at an unearthly hour to take the tour in the cool of a Rhodes dawn to a place somewhere on the island where butterflies fluttered in numbers too numerous to count, their mutli-coloured wings flashing and darting as the early morning sun began to warm through the mist, we marched up a wooded vale to the promise of a young guide that we would soon see a miracle of butterflies, more butterflies than we had ever seen so far in our lives, butterflies so numerous that we would gasp in awe at their numerosity, butterflies so beautiful that we would finally believe that a god had made this tiny corner of the earth his own and decorated it with, well, with butterflies.
We saw one – all fookin day, just the one butterfly, and it was a plain white one, in fact I think it was a moth actually, it had probably travelled all the way from Manchester in the suitcase of the old codger who walked in front of me smelling of mothballs.
And we had missed our free Thompsons lunch in our choice of twenty restaurants in Rhodes Town, by the time our coach dropped us off at the Hotel Saliva we were all ratty, and hungry, bloody starving, its amazing how hungry you can get when you’ve spent the last ten days eating a three course meal every two hours and then have to go a full morning without food, its a wonder we didn’t pass out right there on the pavement – heres a tip, the Valley of the Butterflies, it doesn’t exist outside of the Thompsons Holiday brochure, its a con, there is a moth I will give you that, its probably still there – The Valley of the Moth (singular), doesn’t have the same ring does it ?
I remember a boat trip in the Greek Isles, that involved a walk, or donkey ride up a mountain, I walked and wished I’d taken a donkey, but the people who took a donkey wished they had walked.
I bet the poor sodding donkey wished they’d all walked too