After my emotional response to the turtle welcome committee in Monemvasia, I realized that I might be a little overtired. While sea turtles are doubtless one of nature’s most beautiful creations, crying at the sight of them is usually a sign that things are getting a little touch-and-go emotionally.
Beyond the sleep deprivation from an overnight passage, cruising can be quite emotionally and physically draining. The highs are really high and the lows are really low. Even when everything is really great, it’s still a lot more work than normal life. And when things are not great, it can be scary, frustrating, hard, demoralizing… and sometimes all of these at the same time.
The following day, as I video-chatted with a former colleague, I found myself saying “It’s funny- the big things are easy and the small things are hard.” I paused after the words were out of my mouth, surprised by the truth of what had unconsciously sprung forth.
“The big things are easy and the small things are hard.” I thought to myself. “That’s exactly it.”
Maybe this thought came to me because earlier that day I’d been struggling not with the massive life changes of leaving my job, leaving my friends and family, moving to Europe, and moving onto a boat. No, I’d been struggling for hours to do the laundry.
We had planned to do laundry in Milos, but after our abrupt choice to catch the wind and depart early, we found ourselves in Monemvasia with no coin-operated laundry and an ever-growing pile of salt-soaked clothes. So we filled our twenty-liter jerry cans with water, carried them the hundred yards or so back to the boat, filled up buckets, and washed, rinsed, wrung, and hung each item by hand. This may not sound hard, but honestly, it took HOURS and by the end I was completely destroyed. My back and upper arms screamed as I hauled jerry cans filled with forty-plus pounds of sloshing water back to the boat; my core tensed and my legs braced to heave the water into buckets; and the tendons in my fingers and lower arms grew exhausted from scrubbing and hand-wringing our many items of clothing.
For me, life aboard a sailboat has meant a substantial increase in daily physical labor. With no dishwasher, washing machine, vacuum (other than our little hand-held vacuum), freezer, microwave, air conditioning unit, or car, we often find ourselves making up for the lack of modern conveniences with the sweat of our brow (very literally in the hot Greek summers).
All shopping is done on foot and all supplies are loaded into our packs and carried back to the boat; we prepare our food and wash all dishes by hand; and the boat is swept, scrubbed, and polished by hand. All this is in addition to the physical demands of boat maintenance, repairs, and actually sailing.
We have learned to play audiobooks and podcasts as we work to make the chores go by more pleasantly, and a side benefit is all the physical labor meant we could eat whatever we wanted and and the weight still simply dropped off our frames (now a fading memory as I write this from carb-saturated Sicily!). We enjoyed the deep sleep that comes from pure physical exhaustion, and the constant demands of our travels and boatwork kept us from fixating too much on the many momentous changes that we- and the whole world- were experiencing in 2020.
When we reached Monemvasia, however, we were both worn a little thin and we decided to spend a few days there catching our breath. And what a place to do so.
Monemvasia used to be an island just off the mainland, a huge hulking chunk of rock reaching up into the sky. Today it’s connected by a thin man-made land bridge to the mainland, but its natural barriers of sea and cliff faces protected the island for many centuries from invaders. Originally part of the Byzantine empire, Monemvasia fended off attacks from Normans, Arabs, and pirates who tried to take over this strategic holding. While the island very briefly fell to the Normans in 1249 after the inhabitants were starved into submission in a three year siege, the island remained Byzantine until the Venetians captured it in the mid-15th century.
The Venetians built another of their now-familiar-to-us mountaintop forts atop the island and held Monemvasia until their empire collapsed and they sold it to the Otttoman Turks in 1715. Monemvasia languished under Turkish rule and rebelled against the Turks and fought for independence and unification with Greece in 1821.
Because of its strong fortifications, much of ancient Monemvasia remains and you can still see the influence of its Byzantine, Venetian, and Turkish past.
Our time in Monemvasia was spent exploring the historic city, catching up on boat chores, and just relaxing. The old town certainly caters to tourists (as our 4 Euro coffees attested) but it’s a more refined, romantic tourism. It reminded me of San Miguel de Allende in Mexico or Albarracín in Spain: a beautifully preserved, elegant town whose economy is doubtless sustained by tourism but is not simply lined with cheesy souvenir stalls.
Monemvasia wormed its way into my heart with its stunning violet-tinted sunsets and charming terracotta-lined alleyways, but it truly secured its place of highest affection on our last evening when we treated ourselves to a romantic dinner on a rooftop terrace. While the food was no better or worse than most Greek tavernas, at the end of our meal, our waiter brought out two small wine glasses and a tall thin bottle of tawny dessert wine.
Now truth be told, Greek wine has not impressed me. I know there are some exciting natural wines being made on the mainland and we had a few decent wines in Crete, but most of the Greek wine found in tavernas is watered-down glorified grape juice served in squat little jelly glasses.
But this wine was something else. Sweet, but not cloying, it tasted of holiday spices, dried fruits, and caramel. I was dazzled.
I immediately went home and started Googling “sweet wine Monemvasia.” After some digging, I realized that this wine is a fairly recent effort to revive the town’s once thriving wine production. And by “once thriving” I mean 700 years ago.
Back in the twelfth century, the Byzantines in Monemvasia made wine from the malvasia grape and when Venice gained control of the region in the fifteenth century, they began exporting this product abroad to England. If you’ve ever read Wolf Hall, you’d recognize “Malmsey” wine (the name given to wine made from malvasia grapes) as that which was frequently quaffed by King Henry VIII. The Venetians and British also facilitated the spread of malvasia grapes to many other locations including Crete, Italy, Spain, and (most interestingly for us!) the Canary Islands.
While we try not to buy tourist souvenirs, I insisted that a bottle of this delicious wine had to join us aboard Gradisca. And I’m so glad I did, because each time I have a sip after dinner, I think about how crazily the world intersects and how lucky we are to be charting a path on our little boat, experiencing first-hand the connections that have knit together these regions of the Mediterranean for centuries.
But Malmsey wine wasn’t the only gift that Monemvasia brought us. It also brought us friends. On our last day, we struck up a conversation with Michael and his wife Lucy, the owners of the beautiful ketch docked next to us, NuShen. We told him about our plans and swapped some stories, and he told us about Malta, where they live, and encouraged us to give Malta a visit. We discussed where we each planned on going next and we showed him the pretty butterfly-shaped double bay at Elafonissos where we intended to anchor the following day.
The next morning, before they set sail, Michael came over to give us specific recommendations for Malta, even pulling out a map to show us precisely where we should anchor. One of the most notable things about the sailing community is that most cruisers are always up for a chat. And it makes sense: cruisers have ample time, and when you’re constantly moving around and always a stranger in a new place, you value the few connections you make. I was sad our paths we’re only going to intersect for such a short time, but then Michael said they had changed their plans and would join us sailing for Elafonissos’s turquoise bay.
It was a good thing they did. Because when we pulled into the bay after a brisk five hour motor-sail, Ángel turned the key to kill the engine and enjoy our tranquil new setting and… nothing.
“Kate, I can’t turn off the engine.”
“What do you mean? Why?”
“I don’t know. I just know I can’t turn it off.”
“Ah. Bravo. Okay, I’ll go get the book.”
I jumped downstairs and grabbed Nigel Calder’s Boatowners’ Mechanical and Electrical Manual (AKA the Bible for all things engine-related) and began reading the troubleshooting section for diesel engines that do not turn off. It quickly became clear that either we had a fuel leak that was causing fuel to still be fed to the engine even when we turned off the fuel source or we had an issue with the fuel-injection solenoid switch.
Terrific. If only I knew what a solenoid was.
“Ángel do we have some kind of switch? Something called a solenoid? Something that turns the engine off?”
“Yes I think so but I am not sure where it is”
“And what if it’s a leak? I don’t know. How do we know?”
I was about to grab the engine manual to look for anything having to do with whatever a solenoid was when Ángel said,
“I’m going to radio Michael and ask him about this.”
This was a classic example of Katy versus Ángel problem-solving. I immediately turn to books, research, YouTube, whatever I can do on my own so I don’t have to ask other people questions. I don’t like asking favors and I don’t like not knowing the answer to things. Ángel, on the other hand, likes collective problem solving. I’m not saying he won’t crack open a book, because he definitely will and he’s watched way more YouTube tutorials than I have, but he also is very comfortable asking for help and turning to more experienced sailors to get their advice on how to solve complex problems.
And lucky he did. Because our new friend Michael paddle-boarded over from NuShen and pretty much immediately diagnosed the problem as a malfunctioning fuel-injector solenoid and showed us where on our engine the solenoid was. It even had a little zip tie on it, probably put there by the prior owner to mark where to pull to manually shut off the engine. We pulled the zip tie and suddenly the engine shuddered to a stop.
I challenge anyone to identify a moment of such intense pleasure as the moment on a sailboat when you shut off your engine and the grinding growl gives way to the sounds of lapping waves.
We thanked Michael, and I tried to ply him with a drink to repay him for helping us out, while Ángel started peppering him with more questions about the engine, the batteries, and all sorts of other issues. Michael was infinitely patient, indulging Ángel’s relentless barrage with the good humor of both a passionate sailor and just an all-around stellar human being.
This whole experience was a great lesson for me. Yes, maybe I could have eventually diagnosed the problem with books and YouTube and engine diagrams, but it would have taken probably several hours with the noisy, hot engine running and both of us, overheating and frantic, trying to sleuth our way toward the answer. By asking Michael, we reached the answer more quickly, safely, and solidified a friendship in the process. But most importantly, I learned that asking for help in the cruising world is de rigeur.
We eventually released Michael back to his family, and we went for a glorious swim and spent the evening happily enjoying the sunset.
When night fell, we collapsed into bed, but we were soon awakened when the cutlery drawer slammed open and then crashed back into place. Out of nowhere, Gradisca was heaving from side to side as drawers and cupboards spilled out their contents. We blearily walked through the boat, securing doors and drawers, and then as suddenly as the rocking had started, it stopped. After this pattern happened a few more times, I popped my head out and saw on the horizon the lights of a large cargo ship. We’re still not sure, but after some investigation, we concluded the erratic swell was actually caused by the passing of tankers and cargo ships whose traffic channel was not too far from our little anchorage.
The following morning I let Ángel sleep in to catch up from our not-so-restful night. I, however, was fueled by something stronger than the allure of a comfy bed: the overwhelming desire for pancakes.
You can take the girl out of America, as they say…
These are the moments that make it all worth it. Sure we had engine troubles and a rolly night, but eating banana coconut fig pancakes surrounded by the sparkling turquoise of Greece’s exquisite bays… there really is nothing like it.
Relaxed and sated with carbohydrates, we sailed to our next anchorage in the tiny town of Gerolimenas. We chose to go around the Peloponnesian peninsula rather than through the Corinth Canal in search of small, forgotten towns like this one, and we were both delighted as we pulled into the bay and saw no signs of tourists and no other sailboats besides our friends on NuShen.
We spent the afternoon hiking up a nearby trail which rewarded us with a beautiful vista down to the bay below.
As we walked around the town, I saw Ángel visibly relax. He said the town’s tranquil, low-key vibe reminded him of the small seaside towns in Spain and Portugal where his family would vacation when he was a child. In the evening, Michael and Lucy invited us to their boat for a sundowner and we met their two sons- one just under ten and the other a teenager. I’m always a bit in awe of kids who grow up sailing, and the ease that the two boys displayed on the boat made me envious in the same way as when I see little kids prattling away in Spanish.
We left Gerolimenas around 6:30 a.m. to make sure we would have enough time to arrive in Pylos by early afternoon. We had read that the harbor fills up with cruisers and local boats and we wanted to beat the typical late afternoon rush hour of boats coming in after a day of sailing.
Our sail to Pylos was pretty dull and mostly under motor. The wind was very light and what wind there was was squarely on the nose. Even as we tried to alter our course to tack back and forth across the wind, it remained elusive and would dry up when we were positioned for it to come across the beam and then would pick back up directly in our faces. We finally just surrendered to fate and cranked the motor and rode into Pylos.
As we neared the harbor, our VHF crackled and NuShen greeted us, telling us they had a spot next to them saved for us. We pulled up and quickly realized that, yet again, Michael was going to save our bacon. The laid moorings were too short for Gradisca and so he had a line prepared attached to his bow that we could secure to our bow. As Ángel backed into the spot, he laughed and called out,
“Full service again, I see.”
I laughed too and realized that it felt good to be laughing when mooring. What a change from our earlier white-knuckled tension. Ángel eased the boat in nicely, we tied up, and I tried to be casual while internally doing little dances of celebration.
Pylos is a sedate, pretty little town, set nicely into a natural bay that is so encircled it is almost closed in, and boats can only enter through a very narrow entrance.
As we had moved northward toward the Ionian islands, the landscape had really started to change. Pine forests crowned the hilltops and the land was greener and more lush than anything we’d seen in the Aegean.
In town, we found a lovely little plaza, some excellent produce shops and bakeries, and (most welcome!) an excellent boat chandlery staffed by a friendly proprietor who let us take a 45 Euro item back to our boat without paying so we could ensure it was the right size and also sent us home with two dark green bottles of his family’s pressed olive oil. His inexplicable faith that we would come back to pay for the part reminded us of something that our friend Leonidas had said in Crete: the worst thing that a Greek can do is cheat someone. It’s not just a stereotype. Honor and pride are very important here: they impact how people interact, do business, take offense (or don’t), and what their expectations are. And it turned out to be a savvy business move, because we were so touched by his kind gesture that we ended up buying many more items for the boat than we had originally intended and were gifted more olive oil in the process.
On Monday, we rode into Kalamata, homeland of the famous purple olives, and, as we learned, the first town to rise up against the Turks in the Greek War of Independence in 1821.
There were hardly any tourists in Kalamata; perhaps in non-COVID years, it would be an afternoon stop on a Peloponnese bus tour but not this year. We spent the morning walking through the deserted streets, both grateful that we weren’t pushing through throngs of tour bus groups, but also saddened by the rows of closed shops and restaurants whose business had vanished.
Our footsteps rang in the alleyways, echoing off the empty walls. Greeks reasonably eschew walking around in the blazing summer sun. During the summer, life happens on the beach or at night. But we had only the day to explore so we decided to make the best of it by enjoying a leisurely meal in the shade and then hiding out in the air-conditioned archaeological museum and the quiet cool of Orthodox churches.
On our bus ride back, endless rows of olive groves stretched to the horizon and the sky melted into a soft pink. We stopped in small towns filled with stray cats, old men playing cards, and a sense that time had frozen a few decades ago. I thought of the empty streets of Kalamata and our friend in the boat chandlery and I wondered what the future holds for Greece. With so much uncertainty not just around tourism and COVID, but around the country’s financial viability and its place in the European Union, what will happen to these kind, proud people and to their beautiful country? My affection for Greece had crept up on me slowly over the months: the direct and forthright people, the dramatic landscapes, the simple, savory food, and the sense that everywhere you walk, you’re part of a longer, bigger, connected history. I sent a little wish into the dusk that things would turn out well for this place we had grown to love.
When we returned to Pylos, we arrived to a further surprise: Michael had come on board while we were gone and replaced the missing pin in our lifeline. The line, which had been slack, was now taut and tensioned. We thanked our lucky stars again for the kindness and generosity of sailors and especially for Michael and his family. We hope to repay their kindness someday, but in the meantime, we learned so much from him not just about engines, batteries, and boat repair, but also how to make time for others and to bring more kindness into the world.
And thus it was with a tinge of sadness that we left Pylos and our friends aboard NuShen early on the morning of September 2. They were staying a few more days in Pylos to prepare for their return trip home to Malta and we were continuing north to Katakolo, our last stop before the Ionian islands.
We motor-sailed in the morning and when the midday winds picked up, we had a lovely sail toward Katakolo. As we neared the port, we saw several huge cruise ships anchored outside. We gave them a wide berth, but it was still eerie to see their enormous, still forms floating like giant white islands.
When we docked in Katakolo, we unsuccessfully radioed the harbormaster and then waited to see if anyone would come by to take down our information for port fees, but no one ever came. This was now our third unattended (possibly abandoned?) marina in Greece- first Monemvasia, then Pylos, and now Katakolo. We never figured out for certain why Greece has so many unattended marinas, but it is odd when comparable marinas in Croatia, Italy, France, or Spain would have all been at least 20 and maybe as much as 50 or 100 Euros per night.
We had heard that Greece had received EU funding to build marinas and was obligated to pay back the loans once the marinas become profitable so they are now languishing to avoid triggering repayment, but we heard it second or third hand and we had no idea if this was true or just another example of the Greek stereotypes typical in EU politics. It is just as possible that Greece has made a conscious choice to remain a more affordable cruising ground and chooses not to charge marina fees in order to stimulate more tourism. But for whatever reason, we had stumbled yet again on a free Greek marina, this one complete with free water and electricity, and so we decided to stay for a few days in Katakolo.
Katakolo is not itself a beautiful town. Its continued existence is due almost entirely to the cruise liners that anchor in its large commercial port and drop off thousands of tourists who are loaded into tour buses and taken about an hour away to ancient Olympia where they can tour the site of Greece’s Olympic Games and are then carted back for dinner and shopping in Katakolo.
But in 2020, these cruise ships loom, empty and immobile, outside the port, and the giant parking lot that in any other year would be full of idling tour buses is a giant, dusty expanse. The town’s many large cafes and tourist shops, meant to accommodate sudden influxes of hundreds or thousands of tourists at once, sit quiet and empty and some appear permanently closed. This year’s tiny trickle of sailboat and catamaran cruisers cannot begin to compensate for the floods of people brought by these giant cruise liners, and the local economy is visibly devastated.
Katakolo and Ancient Olympia, for me, encapsulated the sense I got throughout all of Greece: a powerful mix of pride and melancholy. I have yet to find another country so proud of its heritage as Greece, and yet since the classical age over 1,500 years ago, Greece has struggled to ever regain its once glorious heights. Its calamitous history of invasions, earthquakes, war, poverty, and strife continued up to the modern era. Most recently, Greece was devastated by the Second World War and subsequent civil war in ways I’m only beginning to understand.
Greece was pulled into the Second World War when Mussolini invaded Greece on completely pretextual terms and the tiny nation of fewer than ten million people beat back the Italian invading forces at great cost. But Italy turned to its ally, Germany, and the German forces quickly routed the Greek guerilla forces and the country was occupied by Italian, German, and Bulgarian forces throughout the rest of the war.
The impact of the invasion and occupation on Greece was catastrophic: almost one quarter of buildings in Greece were destroyed; one-third of Greece’s 3,000 villages were destroyed; and three-quarters of transportation was destroyed. The mass starvation, illness, and poverty of the occupation years, in addition to the casualties sustained defending Greece from Italian and then German invasion, left over 500,000 Greeks dead including almost the entire Jewish population of the country. In the past few years, the current Greek government has renewed calls to Germany for reparations, which it calculates in today’s value to be around 300 billion Euros. I have no idea whether or how best to repay Greece for this suffering but traveling through the countryside, I could see why such calls would find political support.
As we rode the train from Katakolo to Olympia, we rumbled past the ruined frames of falling-down farmhouses, stopping in several dilapidated towns whose cheap, post-war buildings were streaked with rust stains, peeling paint, and graffiti. We whipped past decaying plazas, dry grass poking up through cracked concrete, and a few old men sitting at a plastic table with cups of long-ago finished Greek coffee, only the dark dregs left behind. Impassive, black-clad old women stared out from doorways and windows, and I tried to imagine what they must be thinking about this latest hardship to hit their country. Compared to the brutal starvation and violence they had lived through, perhaps this wasn’t so bad. But the bleak financial outlook for Greece and its relegation to being the playground of Brits and Northern Europeans must be a source of pain.
When our train slowed to a stop at our destination, we immediately saw how the Midas touch of tourism had transformed Olympia into a much richer town than any of its neighbors. The downtown was comprised of a shiny stream of cafes and souvenir shops and the buildings were all much newer and nicer than any we had passed. As we walked down to Ancient Olympia, I worried that we would find some sort of Disneyworld with tourist shops nestled in amidst the ruins, but my worries were soon put to rest.
The ruins of Olympia have been wonderfully preserved and we spent an incredible day walking through the training grounds, temples, ceremonial sites, and ancient stadia where the Olympic Games were held almost three thousand years ago.
We downloaded and listened to an incredible free audio guide that walked us through the history of the ruins. The tour helped us to imagine what Olympia would have been like in ancient times and we quickly realized that our quiet, peaceful experience walking through shady trees and lines of white columns bore little resemblance to what an attendee would have experienced in ancient times. In fact, buses full of tourists and the competing voices of tour guides would have been closer to what the Greeks experienced back then.
Like now, the Olympics were held every 4 years beginning in 776 BC until 393 AD. But unlike now, the Greek world would declare a period of peace in the year leading up to the games so that the athletes could travel safely from all over the Greek-speaking world to participate. When the athletes arrived, they swore an oath to compete fairly and were housed together in the training grounds. Then the hordes of spectators began to arrive, and they bore witness to what must have been an absolutely mind-blowing spectacle.
Tens of thousands of people would camp in the countryside- Olympia was not built to accommodate such droves since most of the time it wasn’t anything more than a country town- and then they packed together in the intense August heat to buy and sell, participate in religious ceremonies and feasts, and (of course!) to witness the athletes compete in the games themselves. Sure there was rampant disease, withering heat, filth (imagine a pre-Porta-Potty world of ten thousand people…) and overcrowding, but it must have been a once-in-a-lifetime experience for the spectators to see Greeks from all over the empire gathered in one place. Rival city states showed off their wealth and power by building competing elaborate shrines and victors from past games were permitted to commission a statue of themselves and place it in the grounds so the stadium grounds would have been filled with brightly colored temples, statues, offerings, and people as far as the eye could see. The athletes provided the final element of spectacle, competing in footraces, chariot races, discus, javelin throw, wrestling, and many of the other events that still survive today.
On the train ride back, I marveled at how close I felt to this ancient world as I walked around Olympia. Thousands of years later, we still hold Olympic Games for many of the same reasons that inspired Greeks thousands of years ago: spectacle, pride, nationalism, and the awe of witnessing feats of human performance that change our belief in what is possible.
I again felt grateful that we had decided to take the long way and to sail around the Pelopponese. I understood better why Greeks feel such pride and connection to their ancient past and also such a sense of loss. I thought of Leonidas and his deep love for Cretan music. I could never understand any of the lyrics, but the songs left this same sense of longing and melancholy, even when he told me that they were love songs.
When you come from such a brash, new, relentlessly optimistic country as America, it can be hard to understand people who come from a country with thousands of years of history, much of which has been beautiful and much of which has been painful. It’s easy to see their nostalgia as a melodramatic Mediterranean stereotype. But it’s not. Living with the legacy of so many millennia of history is a feeling I never had had growing up in Silicon Valley and I’m only beginning to glimpse now.
This has been the greatest gift for me of our sailing trip: the time for me to look back and to understand more about where the ideas, norms, institutions and values of today come from. I feel like the bits of a jigsaw puzzle that have been piled up at random in my brain over the thirty-three years of my life are starting to sort themselves into some sort of order.
But as often happens when sailing, as soon as you grow accustomed to a place, it is time to move on. We made plans to leave the following morning for Zakinthos, our first of the long-awaited Ionian islands, but I promised myself to never forget the sense of wonder and connectedness that I felt in Olympia, in Kalamata, in Monemvasia. And since food and drink are, for me, some of the strongest purveyors of memory, we loaded the boat with Kalamata olives, sweet wine and orange blossom honey from Monemvasia, dried currants from Katakolo, and olive oil from Pylos. Now almost two months later, these are cherished dwindling reminders of our two weeks on the Greek mainland, but every time I take a sip of Malvasia and taste the warm caramel and spices, I am transported back to a warm evening overlooking the darkening Greek sea.
6 comments
Laundry hint from mom: find yourself an old lady collapsible wheeled grocery cart to carry your water cans and haul things around. I have seen them all over europe.
A very Mom tip indeed (also a good idea!). When we come back from Spain, we will track one down.
How did you take the spectaCular video over monemvAsia? Was that with your drone camera?
All credit goes to Angel and the little drone. We should break it out more often but we keep forgetting!
I value the blog article. Much thanks again. Really Cool. Lauryn Boonie Annmarie
ALWAYS enjoying your blog,!!!! Keep well!