One Friday night, I was sitting in a beach bar in Vasiliki, Greece, looking out across the water. The island of Kefalonia was floating on the limit of the horizon. I’d been in Vasiliki for three months, living and working among a seasonal crowd of young, blond-haired and deeply tanned windsurfing instructors. I was going to leave this bubble for the next couple of days, and travel across the water to Kefalonia, where I would ride a lap of the island, camping each night. It had felt like, since arriving in Vasiliki, I’d hardly spent five minutes alone. I couldn’t help but wonder how I would find spending the next 48 hours in my own company.
The next morning, the ferry docked in Fiskardo, on the northern point of the island. I imagine this was once a quaint fishing town, but now, it’s more like a service station for yachts and flotillas. The Venetian-era harbour was packed full of fibreglass monstrosities, to the point that the harbour edge felt like an enclosed alleyway. Uniformed yacht crews scrubbed fenders and docked ribs. They scurried back and forth on errands – most speed-walking; one or two actually running. As I entered the little supermarket, a uniformed young woman left hurriedly. She was balancing a few bars of Cadbury’s and some tins of baked beans on top of a 6 pack of bottled fizzy water – good to know some bobbing billionaire ex patriot is having the true Greek experience.
It took a few minutes to get used to my heavy, swaying bike, but soon enough I began to enjoy the steady climb out of the town. I was lugging along a full camping setup: a roomy three-man tent; everything I needed to cook my meals; a little trowel for digging holes. I even had a few luxuries: my drone, a book, a sunhat. I felt so well prepared that I half expected to look behind and see a caravan of sherpas and camels transporting my walnut writing desk and a four poster bed.
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I was heading south down the western edge of Kefalonia, and soon the scenery opened up and the geography of the island became fantastically clear. My road was cut into the edge of a cliff, hundreds of metres up. Sage grew like a weed under the crash barriers, and its scent was punctuated by the occasional stench of rotting roadkill. Death; decay; fertilisation. It reminded me of the red kites that fly in large numbers over British motorways, once endangered, now overpopulated, fatted by roadkill.
An hour of spectacular coastline later, the road tipped me downhill, and I whizzed towards Divarata. Like many places on Kefalonia, most buildings here are only a few years old – much of the island was rebuilt after an earthquake in the 90s. From height, the simple concrete buildings, uniform red roofs and sparse treeless landscape made the town look like a small plastic model of itself. Even as I got closer, it had a strange, unreal quality about it, as if it were built to test explosives on. Within, the town was overrun with tourist shops selling inflatables; with cafes with sun-bleached signs showing pictures of dishes; and with topless, overweight men drinking beers.
This, I would come to discover, was fairly typical of the coastal towns of Kefalonia. As the day went on, I noticed a theme emerging: I’d spend a bit of time riding on fantastic, quiet roads along epic coastlines; through picturesque farmland; through beautiful wildernesses, then I’d pop out in an unappealing coastal town, with a harbour full of superyachts, a waterfront full of tired cafes, and a smattering of mangy stray cats. On this island, the in-between places are the ones you want to see.
As the afternoon sun reached its hottest, I turned inland and began climbing. I was aiming for a historical landmark that was one of the main reasons for my visit to Kefalonia: a boulder upon which (the tourist board claims) the Romantic poet Lord Byron liked to sit during the four months he spent on this island. From this boulder he would, for hours, turn over in his mind all the things you’d expect of a Romantic poet: nature, revolution, literature. He was here in support of the Greek battle for independence from Ottoman rule – in the months since he’d exiled himself from the United Kingdom, he’d grown tired of his aimless, hedonistic existence in Switzerland and Italy, and was seeking a noble cause to commit himself to. In 1824, he landed in Kefalonia with a boat full of money and supplies. He gave everything he had to the fight, and spent months helping Greece as a financial sponsor, military leader and political advocate. But less than a year after his arrival he died, aged 36, of a fever caught in a squalid soldiers’ camp.
The boulder is in a hilltop village, and a couple of cars honked in encouragement when they saw me grinding up to it, out of the saddle, with sweat dripping from my chin onto my top tube bag. The heat was debilitating. I was wrenching the bike from side to side, using my entire body just to keep on top of the gears. After two kilometres of zig zagging across the road, I arrived in the village. It was small and unremarkable – another post-earthquake concrete rebuild from the late 20th century. With scepticism, I followed the dotted line on my GPS past dilapidated houses and down dirty alleyways. Surely this was the wrong place. Eventually I was led into a small car park, and there, beside a couple of hatchbacks, was the boulder. I was expecting some sense of history – some insight into Byron’s view of the world from this shared view. This car park, in this village, provided nothing of the sort. I leant my bike against a breezeblock wall and walked up to the edge. A tablet was set into the rock, stating, If I am a poet, I owe it to the air of Greece. Byron’s favourite view lay before me. Although, where once there would have been pastoral farms, there was now an airport. What a disappointment. I looked beyond the airport to the sea, which seemed, from this distance, to have escaped the destruction.
Roll on, thou deep and dark blue ocean-roll!
Ten thousand fleets sweep over thee in vain;
Man marks the earth with ruin – his control
Stops with the shore…
I rode north, into the mountains. Clouds gathered and a smattering of rain fell. Remarkably, within a minute of the first raindrop, the ground exhaled a rich, mineral scent. It was like spinach boiling in a pan: succulent, green, saturated. In the distance was a Venetian fortress, and the rain became heavy as I followed the rough, concrete, switch-backed road up to it. The fortress – Agios Georgios – was built in the 12th century as a last outpost of the crumbling Byzantine empire. Its siege-proof design was, in the end, untested: the empire was carved up, and within a century the fortress and island was turned over to a new power. Ultimately, it fell to the Venetians, who developed the fortress into a bustling walled capital city. This hilltop metropolis was home to all nobles and officials of the island, and the political and cultural centre of the Ionian islands. It’s easy to imagine prominent members of this Venetian outpost leaving the hubbub of the city’s market streets behind, climbing spiral stone staircases, and looking out across the water at the islands under their control. Galleys would be gliding in and out of Argostoli harbour, propelled by a synchronised row of white tipped oars on each side that at this distance, must have looked almost like wings.
I rode up to the ticket office as the rain exhausted itself. The fortress was closed. Quite the culture trip this was turning out to be. I sat at the gates and looked down on the land I’d just ridden through. I took a photo, then used the drone to take a picture of myself, which felt a touch tragic.
Onwards through rolling, rural Greece. Olive trees sprouted from sun-scorched ground. Lines of crops curled over hills. Goats tugged at morsels of greenery in the scrubland. The sun lowered in the sky and shadows became elongated. After stopping for dinner in a remote taverna, I pitched my tent on some bushland. Having hopped a fence to get to my spot, I was really hoping to avoid a run in with the farmer, who appeared to be a big fan of hunting – the floor was littered with shotgun shells. My stomach dropped when a knackered old pickup truck drove slowly along the gravel track next to me. After a few minutes tentatively peeking out of my tent, I moved my entire camp deeper into the bushes. Now, I was completely invisible.
Lying in the tent, I felt quite isolated. By myself, on a strange island, hiding on some farmland, lost to the world – no one could have found me, even if they were looking. I resisted the urge to call friends and family to fill the time and break the silence, and instead got out my book (a pocket edition of some Allen Ginsberg poems – the only book that fitted in my bag) and read to myself … aloud. Good to give your tongue a bit of a workout after a day without speaking. I cracked open a warm beer and lay back on my rollmat. The insects had gone to bed and the world was quiet. I could get used to this. An hour or so later I fell asleep, tipsy and with fragments of Ginsberg floating around my head.
…and now you’re really in the total animal soup of time –
The task for the next morning was to climb to the top of Ainos Oros, which towered above the island at 1600m. By 8am I was on the road, enjoying the shade of the mountain. The landscape became dryer and harsher as I climbed. The rocks were sharp and jagged, and the plants were prickly. Goats scoured the land for anything with a scrap of nutritional value, and I noticed that their incessant grazing had sculpted the bushes into odd shapes. I saw a large ram standing on two legs, reaching upwards for a branch, like something from an Orwellian nightmare. He was the height of a man, and in my peripheries looked like a human in costume.
Eventually it was too dry even for the goats, and when the altimeter hit 1000 I was riding in a desert. But as I passed through a gate into the national park that covers the top 500 metres of Ainos Oros, everything changed. Suddenly, I was in the dappled shade of a luscious, alpine forest. The air was thick with the scent of dewey pines. The tarmac, sheltered by the sun, was jet black and perfectly smooth as it twisted its way through the woodland. Fallen trees were carpeted in moss, and rich, green dells punctuated the forest. I got the sense that this is how the landscape should be: green, wooded, luscious. Like this is how it once was before we felled, burned, farmed and set grazing hoards of ravenous goats, determined to eat anything with an ebb of life.
Once at the top, I rode along a gravel track from the radar masts to the summit. The coast was so far below that it was more like being in an aeroplane than on a bike. The view was spectacular, but the height was so great that it lacked the detail and richness of the vistas I’d seen the previous day. I wondered whether Byron would ever have hiked up to this point.
After a spectacular few minutes of descending, my lips were cracking from dehydration, so I slammed on the brakes outside a cafe in Digaleto. This was a typical Kefalonian inland village, with a cafe, a shop, and a smattering of utilitarian concrete houses. A dozen plastic patio chairs were arranged in one large circle, and I took a seat on one of the few vacant seats alongside a group of men, their ages ranging from 30 to 80. From the clutch of familiar words I caught, I think they were guessing whether I was American or English. And, from the way they were laughing, it seems they found my appearance quite funny. I surveyed myself. My dusty, sweat-drenched lycra left very little to the imagination, and my hair had morphed to become exactly the same shape as the inside of my helmet.
That afternoon, I detoured to see Zervati cave in the coastal town of Sami, and weaved through scrappy residential streets to find a rusted iron gate. It led to a set of rocky stairs, which took me to a dank, cold dell, on one side of which was a pool of sapphire water, apparently stagnant, measuring a few feet across. In fact, this was not a stagnant pool, but the entry to a vast underwater cave, measuring around 100 metres in length, that tunnelled from this suburban spot out to the coast. Fresh water flowed from springs in this dell through the tunnel and into the sea. After a quick google, I learnt that scuba divers head into the darkness to explore the fascinating species that live in this mineral-rich environment, and to test their mettle in what must be an incredibly claustrophobic place.
On a nearby rocky coastline, after making lunch, I lay back on my sleeping mat and shut my eyes for a few minutes, and in that half-conscious state that comes before sleep, I imagined myself floating in the darkness of that underwater cave. In the slow way that scuba divers move, I felt the jagged rocky ceiling with both hands. I shined my torch in each direction, but the water was so rich with tiny creatures, plants and floating objects that the light didn’t penetrate more than a few metres. Any dream is hazy in memory, but I can still recall having the sense that my scuba equipment, which grasped my shoulders, squeezed my head and filled my mouth, was trying to suffocate me. And even now, I can clearly see the complete, absolute and unbearable darkness that surrounded me when my torch inexplicably died.
I woke up and took a breath before picking my way along that same rocky coast in search of a good spot to climb into the water. After a few minutes, I came across a current flowing from the rock face, with maybe twenty fish swimming against it, waiting patiently. I knew this must be the exit of the cave, so I climbed down the rock shelf to the water and swam in front of it. The flow from the tunnel was cold. After filling my lungs with air I put my head under and looked for an opening. My vision was blurred, but I could just about make out a pitch black oval against the grey of the rocks. I wanted to be brave enough to put my arm into it, but I was too scared even to reach out and feel its edges, as if it was going to sting me or, worse still, suck me in.
Eventually I left the coast and followed the road up to the cliffs once more. I was struck by the contrast between the coastal tourist economy and the harsh, inland, rural way of life. Time and again, I would leave the world of boat trips and ice cream parlours, and within minutes find myself passing dilapidated farm houses surrounded by rusted barbed fences with shaggy goats’ pelts hanging from the wire. This is the countryside of old men and women, keeled over their canes, who coax small herds of livestock from one dusty paddock to another. A stone farm building marooned amid a vast field of boulders caught my eye. The boulder field had, years ago, been terraced with the intention of catching and retaining soil and moisture. I imagined the peasant farmer slaving under the Mediterranean sun to turn this useless boulder field into fertile terraces. Whether it worked at the time is a mystery, but now, the years have crumbled most of his terraces back into the landscape, and any soil that was once trapped there has been washed into the sea.
I camped in a small cove full of anchored yachts, and the next morning pedalled the short distance around the coast to Fiskardo. A circular route will always play second fiddle to a point to point journey, where the final destination is an exciting new place, and the distance travelled is laid out in one long, elegant stroke on the map. Not only is a circular trip less impressive, since you cover a far smaller geographical range, but it always has a hint of futility about it – all your efforts simply bring you back to where you began. I reflected on this apparent futility as I sat drinking a coffee among the mayhem of Fiskardo harbour, which was just as clogged as it had been two days prior. I passed my mind over the things I’d seen: the epic views; the beautiful coves; the farms and ruins. Summiting that mountain after hours of climbing; peering into the abyss of that underwater tunnel; flying down beautiful sweeping descents. I decided that, with a couple of days in solitude and in nature under my belt, I was playing to a different tempo than the tourists and deck hands that scurried back and forth. The rest of the harbour was in double speed like a Charlie Chaplain film, but I was in real time as I sank, satisfied, into my chair and watched with amusement the argument that ensued when a small fishing boat crashed into a superyacht.
