5 May - Sitting like a tramp outside Bologna Centrale - we were an hour late getting in but I still have three hours to wait for the next stage - the train down the leg of Italy to the port of Bari. It's raining and I have no desire to wander around Bologna, even if I didn't have bags to carry, having ended the night mildly seasick from being thrown-about in the train (though I did get some sleep. But Italian conductors are a banging, crashing sort of people and I kept getting woken up.) If they don't like me sitting here on my bags, they ought to have a waiting room. There appear to be two sets of platforms, the East and the West, some of which have matching numbers so I'll have to be sure to get the right one. Not so sure about this long-distance travelling - ok sometimes, not so good at others. Should perhaps have stopped a day here and there, to get some sleep.

...Have come to a nearby cafe for a coffee. There was no need for speaking, except to say 'cappuccino' and it seems I can sit here for as long as I can nurse this coffee. It's damp outside and not at all inviting and I can't say I'm much interested in Bologna if it means cramming it into a couple of hours. There's a guy across the table who hasn't even got anything to eat or drink, he's just reading the paper. When I sat down at the other side of his table he looked a bit surly and reluctant and continued to read his paper, holding it up in front of his face. As I'm still feeling mildly queasy after the long train journey, and with another in store, that was fine with me. So far I've killed half and hour. The Bari train is supposed to stop here at 9.50 so I've still got two and a half hours to wait (it's 7.30 now) and it's about a five hour journey - we get into Bari about half-past three. And the ferry doesn't go till the evening.

Now moved to another table so I'm a bit more private again. This is obviously a cafe
that caters mostly for the young professionals who are either just arriving from somewhere or on their way somewhere else, or just on their way to work in Bologna. There's an atmosphere of hurry and disinterest that you get in places where the clientele is pressed for time. It's half-past six at home. Perhaps we do travel in order to appreciate home. I know that if I'd woken in my own bed this morning with the birds waiting outside for their morning raisins and everything companionable, I'd have rolled over to sleep again, luxuriating in the deep satisfaction of having nothing I had to do, knowing I was surrounded with familiar things. But then, when I did get up, I might have thought that I was getting into such a rut and doing nothing much while all around me the world was rushing-about...with financial things as they are, will more of us be content to stay at home and enjoy the pleasures of the familiar? Frances Mayes, in ’Under the Tuscan Sun’, says this is exactly what she enjoys when she's at home in Bramasole, in Cortona - the interests of the community lie in the newest produce in the market, what’s good that day, how grandpa is, whether the baby’s been born yet, not the horrors and events of the outside world that she has to do battle with every morning when she's in San Francisco. Of course travelling’s different; you’re not part of any of it, just an outside observer. But there’s a certain spareness in that, too.

Later - Feeling a little more solid. Waited till the train was listed on the board, having established from a nice lady at the ticket-counter that 1. I didn’t need to convalidare (stamp) my biglietto (ticket) at the machine on the platform, and 2. the final destination listed would be ‘Lecce’ not Bari, She also told me that it would go from the ‘Centrale’ binario (platform) and not the ‘Est’ one. Another hour to wait, but now I’m on the right platform and there are seats here so I can wait in comfort. Lots of building work going on all around both inside and outside the station - rather like St Pancras in London. One huge crane just on the other side of the platform, shifting enormous beams. I am just people-watching. Some of the women, with what I think of as ‘Roman’ faces, strong nose and chin, are really beautiful to look at, though not an accepted ‘type’ considered beautiful nowadays. But they look so strong and serene, most of them. If they allow their faces to become discontented, they look like witches.

Now I’m feeling less fragile I’m glad again to be doing this, if only to be able to say I’ve done it. Venice is only a couple of hours from here; one day I’ll go there by train perhaps, but maybe not the sleeper, too uncomfortable and a pity to miss the journey. I missed a lot last night going from Paris to Bologna in the middle of the night - what countries did we pass through that I didn’t even get to see? I could stop and sleep in Paris - or stop a few days there - and go on during daylight. It may end up being decided for me if they stop running the sleepers in any case.

A man - a beggar, not an official - has just asked me for one Euro and I told him I had no change. He tried me in Italian first so I must look moderately convincing. I haven’t dug out my waterproof; though it’s raining it’s really only a fine mist.

Attenzione: E severamente vietato ol trepassare la linea gialla in attesta dei treni.
Attention: It is severely forbidden to go beyond the yellow line while waiting for trains.

I copied the stops (ferme) for our train. After it leaves Bologna, it stops at Rimini (10.45), Pesaro (11.05), Ancona (11.38), Pescara (12.49), Termoli (13.41), Foggia (14.29), Barletta (15.02), Bari (15.35), and then Brindisi (16.37) and Lecce (17.04). Though the last two don’t concern me, unless I get a sudden desire to change all my plans and take a ferry from Brindisi for Corfu or something. But I won’t.

I find Italian easier to listen to than French, somehow it is easier to work out what they’re saying and it just feels gentler.

The trains are like American ones, with fold-down steps and high doors. Grubby and battered-looking, I love it. The early Bari train has just arrived, but it must be the “stopping” train cos it gets to Bari at 16.40 and ours, which leaves twenty minutes later, gets there an hour earlier.

Later - on the train - Just stopped at Ancona twenty minutes late. Italians seem to consider this simply part of life and I’ve heard no-one moaning about it. I keep falling asleep which is annoying but in fact so far the Adriatic coast is disappointing - very flat and somehow grubby-looking, a huddly-muddly mix of industry and rows of holiday cottages one after the other - some stretches are nothing but miles of building-site. And contrasted with the clarity and purity of Greek waters the Adriatic looks grey, sad, over-used. There was a lady waiting next to me at Bologna who was reading Nathaniel Hawthorn - couldn’t see what but possibly The Scarlet Letter. I do hope not, what a dreary, moralising book to be reading in Italy! Her ticket, I could see from the corner of my nosey eye, was for Pesaro, and (though I didn’t see her get off when we arrived there) I would guess that’s the station you get off at for Urbino since one of the exit doors from the platform there said “Billeoti per Urbino”. I could believe her to be in pursuit of Fine Art; she had the look of an ex-nun, plain of face and overly placid of countenance and manner, with sensible shoes and a waterproof jacket and no doubt all she would need for three or four days in her sensible-sized rucksack.

Now we are more inland, still quite flat but with distant hills. I should have brought a little map of Italy with me, I could guess at the hill-towns. Still the landscape is the strangest mix of Ugly Modern Industry and breathtaking ancient clusters of terracotta-roofed buildings. What is the thick lush green growing on the vast fields beside the track? It could be lucerne (alfalfa) perhaps? Or young wheat? It's all very tidy/untidy; different priorities from us Northern folk. It's certainly not France, not even Southern France - it's got a streak of the casual, indifferent that France never has. Their ugliness, where you find it, is more the result of over-intensity; shopping centres and urban sprawl.

Just passed some pretty, old-fashioned looking four-storey buildings with French windows and balconies, then more ugly 60s style of the same size, right beside them. Suddenly again simply narrow beach and waves, the beach so narrow at points that I can’t see it from my seat and we appear to be riding over the sea itself. Close to shore, sand-coloured water - only out at the horizon does one see a hint of the blue to come.

1PM - We continue South, it gets warmer. On the stretches where bathing huts or umbrellas haven’t yet encroached, I’m put in mind of the beaches of my childhood, on Chesapeake Bay in America. It must be BOILING here in the Summer. Low, grassy stretches leading to the sea, with palms here and there.






Later again, just after 6, on the deck of the Superfast ferry at Bari, sitting in the stiff breeze, but it’s not cold and I think I might stay out here at least while we leave port and will try to get out here again as we go past the Ionian islands later. But as I came in and showed my ticket, a nice leetle porter said “Not very fool today” and guided me to the room with the reclining chairs, for which I would have had to pay extra in normal circumstances (my ticket is just a ‘deck’ ticket). I’ve left my bag down there - not of course my rucksack with all my papers and valuables - and come outside. I was quite looking forward to camping on deck and was all decided how I’d keep warm and so forth, But it looks as if the excess kindness of the Italian staff is going to thwart that plan. I wonder if their kindness would extend to them letting me have a cabin - doubt it. In fact, though I’m not madly worried about being seasick, I think I’d be better out here anyway in the fresh air. Just to be on the safe side I’m not planning to eat anything until I find out just how rough it’s likely to be. Possibly not until I’m back on dry (Greek) land. It’s actually quite a chair-wind (as the Greeks say) out here, if not a table-wind, but I’ve got my windcheater on, my heavy cotton sweater under it and my nice big scarf wrapped twice around my neck. Just watching the big trucks being manoeuvred into their places on the deck.



It seemed a LONG way to Bari, and we got in an hour late, and then I walked to the port from the station. Quite a complicated route, you had to walk through a lot of twisty little tiny streets around what looks like a fortress or some sort of castle, and I kept having to ask various elderly gentlemen and ladies the way. ”Porta?” usually was enough, and I’d get a pointing finger in reply, and thus I found the way without too many wrong turns. It was a swelteringly hot walk and I was very aware of how heavy my bag felt, but it was a nice feeling when I got there and found the ferry office where there was a cool and quiet waiting room.

The next stage after this ferry is deciding whether to get a bus or the train to Athens and Piraeus. The bus is much quicker, I think, but the train is reputed to be far more interesting and picturesque. I've always had a yearning to travel about in mainland Greece on their little trains, getting off where the fancy took me at some dusty little station - but with the unrest in Athens there may be difficulties, as with the trains there is no direct service through to Athens, you have to get off and change on the outskirts of the city. One of the ferry staff told me their 'Superfast' bus goes direct to Athens and then on to Piraeus so I wouldn't have to worry about changing anywhere, but I haven't made up my mind yet. There is also the question of cost - the bus is bound to be cheaper. From the newsreel showing in the 'lounge' it looks as if things are still pretty lively in Athens, heaving crowds of protestors, petrol bombs, the police using water cannon.

Have dug out my binoculars and stood on the sunny side of the deck watching another ferry leave port, also planes leaving, there must be an airport nearby. There's still an hour till we leave Bari and the ferry doesn't look very full. I thought nice thoughts of my Dad, an old sea dog from early years, up on the bridge on a warm evening, his reserved and sardonic look hiding a deep kindness and generosity. It's golden out on the sunny side of the boat but I can't work it out, the sun seems to be setting in the east. I must go find my compass.

Later - nearly ten pm - Just been to have a meal, only a salad and yoghurt, as the sea is so smooth we might still be on shore. The cafe is nice - it's serve-yourself and little booths which are just private enough not to feel overlooked. The staff keep it all so neat, as soon as someone gets up to go, they are there clearing the table. They seem to be a mix of Italian and Greek, all wearing double-breasted white coats and dark trousers and looking very tidy. I got back to my seat to find some man reading a book in one of the three seats I appropriated earlier for a sleeping-space...he gave me a territorial look but I pointed to my bag in the corner and he had to let me in. But unless --- ah, they've just turned off the main lights and he's cleared off. I can see fine to write under the blue lights they leave on. In a minute I'll settle down for some sleep, though I had a goodish nap before. The Italian couple in front of me have come prepared with roll-up mattresses and blankets, and there's a young family further forward who have taken up an entire block of seats and are sorting out which young son sleeps where. I couldn't find my compass.

6 May - Woken at 4.30 by the main lights coming on and an announcement that we were about to arrive at Igoumenitsa and all passengers should report to the lounge for disembarking. Nothing about those who intend to continue to Patras and I wonder if this is for passport control? No one I am near seems to speak any English (all the announcements are given in Greek, Italian and English. Sometimes if it's for the lorry drivers it's also in something that sounds like Albanian) so I'm just watching to see who stays put. The two recumbent forms that were already asleep when we left Bari haven't stirred but they may be dead bodies for all I know. In any case I don't want to miss the bit where we go past the Ionian islands - Ithaca, etc...having been there I want to see if I can recognise it. Anyway lying on these sloping couches makes me so stiff I can hardly move.

Now the two Italians in front of me have curled back up under their blankets. But the main lights have been left on and I'm unlikely to get any more sleep. The crossing has been unbelievably smooth, except for a stretch in the middle of the night when the boat was really heaving and wallowing and every so often would judder. I woke just enough to be glad I wasn't sitting up or camped out on deck. I went out briefly after it got dark and before I settled down for the night and it was really blowing - I came back in very grateful I'd been allowed to access the 'lounge' for my crossing. Is it that windy in Summer, when it must be much too crowded to allow that? And do the deck passengers all survive, I wonder, or is it a sort of net and gross arrangement?

Most people are sitting up now and looking rather groggy. I ought to go wash my face and so on but I feel too lazy and anyway the disembarking passengers must need access to the 'conveniences'. There will be acres of time before we get to Patras.

Interesting watching people in couples, in families. A good-looking young couple have just peeped out one of the portholes, moving the curtain. He was in front, dressed in striped shirt and trousers, tall and well-built. She followed, wearing tight black trousers and a cutaway black top that showed her lovely arms and shoulders. She leaned behind him, looking over his shoulder out of the window, one very feminine hand resting gently on the small of his back. In that gesture I saw (perhaps I imagine it) her sense of belonging to/with him, her reliance on her beauty to keep him interested and as a sort of bargaining chip to compel his fidelity. But even she, so strong and lovely, inspired from him - handsome, surly, sleepy-looking - no more than the thinnest of tolerance; he turned away from the window and virtually pushed past her without acknowledgement to go back to his bags. Perhaps he is just not a Morning Person....

7 am - Went out on deck hoping for blue seas ("Somewhere between Calabria and Corfu the blue really begins" - one of my favourite Lawrence Durrell openings, to Prospero's Cell) but all is damp mist still, though so warm I only needed one layer. I think it was Ithaca we were passing. I stood and watched for a bit, then undid my left shoe and threw into the sea a little pebble that's been bothering me since Paris at least. Not likely it was a Cornish pebble, but perhaps French. I'm feeling slit-eyed with fatigue but the two Russian girls I met in the loo looked worse I thought.

Looks like more rioting in Athens on the telly. A fire at any rate. It looks as if it's raining there. I hope the hotel I'm booked into for the 18th will still be there and it won't be too dangerous to stay there. The chap who told me about the ferry's bus said it goes all the way to Piraeus so if I take that I needn't worry about changing. Have I already said this? It's pre-eminent in my mind of course. Watching the news pictures, I'm guessing it was a fire and that at least one person has died, so perhaps not riots. All the shots seem to be of just one building.

Later - yoghurt and coffee, enough to be going on with, and a pain au chocolat for later. In the end I asked one of the Greek staff and he said it was a bomb in a bank and four people were killed. This decided me finally to get a ticket for the bus which goes to Piraeus first and then Athens, so I can avoid Athens altogether on this leg of the trip. I'll worry about the return bit when I get to it. Things may well quiet down in the nearly two weeks I'll be on Naxos.

My fellow passengers have all woken up now - a very mixed bag. Lots of rather harsh-looking bleach-blonde Russian women with hard voices. Russian sounds such a thuggish language on their lips. Italian lads who seem to feel obliged to make a lot of noise. Middle-aged Italians who are sometimes travelling with grown-up children , the women look serious and reserved, the men often hangdog or furtive, the children sometimes placid, occasionally fidgets (like the "little" boy of about fourteen who just couldn't settle last night and it was like having a mouse in the place: rustle, rustle) Two Italian families with a clutch of lively, squeaky-voiced children each; the usual collection of two or three young men of indeterminate nationality travelling together, pretty young women in a variety of groupings, older women trying still to look young.

I stood by the rail and watched the Ionian islands slip by, took pictures, got a nice foreign lady to take my picture (and I took hers for her) and only moved from the rail when a couple of the aforementioned Russian women came and stood breathing (and coughing) right down my neck. They obviously have a different 'personal space' to my reserved English one.






Twenty to eleven now. I've turned my phone off cos the battery is low and I don't know if there's anywhere I could charge it on board. Noise level's rising.
Announcement asked us all to assemble in the lounges and when I'd sat down in a nook I found a power point! So I am charging my phone as I wait. We dock in thirty minutes and it's two and a half hours to Piraeus - I should be there by three and checked-in in time maybe to visit Athens but I'll play that by ear.

On the bus: smooth change, Patras quite pretty port, bit ramshackly. Too bumpy to write.

2.30 Bus was my first mistake. Though the road goes all along the Gulf of Corinth and the scenery's wonderful, the windows have some sort of one-way cover so that all that can be seen from the outside is giant lettering saying "Superfast Ferries" and from within you look out through a sort of mesh which reflects the opposite side of the road in the bits you can't see through. Very confusing and tiring for the eyes. Then the driver put on a video of some film called "Collosseum", a sort of dramatised documentary, which would have been interesting enough except I couldn't hear it properly, partly cos the Italian girl in front of me NEVER stopped talking to her partner, who must have been deaf judging by the decibel level. We're not finished with the surprises yet - I could see in the driver's mirror that he was getting sleepy - he kept raising his eyebrows and stroking his face - and just now he announced "feefteen minutes break" and pulled in at.....a McDonalds. YUK. I've refused to cross the threshold and am perched on a barrier in the shade under a palm tree. We're about to go again. Passed Kiato a bit earlier, where on the train you change for Athens.

Evening - Now at last in the hotel. As the bus got nearer and nearer to Piraeus and the surroundings more and more like one of Dante's circles of Hell, I was glad I hadn't been expecting Ancient Greece, and sat back just looking at the chunks of land on the approach to Athens that have never been touched, thinking "That rock formation was probably like that in Theseus' time, in Plato's time," etc. Piraeus, where I've not of course been before, got more and more hectic and hellish till the driver stopped right next to a Blue Star Ferry office and told us that buses weren't being allowed into Athens that afternoon and those wanting Athens would have to take the local bus. (On the way past Corinth I got a good long look at Acrocorinth and as we went over the Corinth canal I smiled, thinking "I've been here before." Someone, seeing a sign for Loutraki, said to his partner, "We could go to Loutraki" and I thought "I've been to Loutraki" Slight smug mode.) Anyway when we arrived and got off I showed my little Google map of where the hotel was in Piraeus to the driver and he did his best to work out which way I should go, but finally pointed me in the direction of the Blue Star Office and said they spoke much better English than he did (I said a sincere thank you to him as in fact he wasn't at all bad in English and judging by the speed with which he spoke Greek he must be wildly fluent in that.) In the ferry office the adorable girl behind the counter sorted out my tickets for the crossing tomorrow and then had a look at my map. She and another girl puzzled over it for a while and I said "It's not a very good map of Piraeus I'm afraid. They're hard to find in England." and she grinned and said "They're hard to find in Piraeus." But they gave me a pretty good idea which way to go and I set off at once with my yes-it-really-is-too-heavy bag over my shoulder. The dock area's no Dickensian, picturesque maelstrom, more like the seamier part of Washington DC in the worst part of the early 60's - jumbles of signs, mad traffic, dirt, grime, broken things, and on top of the usual, piles of garbage on every other corner cos the bin men have been on strike. As I navigated (the men at the kiosks they call 'periptero' are good people to ask directions from) I turned in the wrong direction and was wandering further off course when a shopkeeper came out to help me and turned me around in the right direction, back towards the harbour. As I went down the street it got increasingly squalid, with the rubbish piles, broken pavements, empty shops, grimy shopfronts, men standing on streetcorners just loitering - I began to think that the Hotel Ideal might not be all that ideal, might in fact be the brothel I had joked it might be, back in England. Then all at once there was ekaton saranda dio (142 in Greek) and it was a jewel shining in a dungheap. Immaculate outside and in, a haven after my long slog around the grubby streets. The girl behind the counter, Maria, took me and my exhaustion in her stride, we had a nice long friendly chat and she insisted I use the elevator up to floor three ("You are tired") and o a shower and a change of clothes was never so welcome. Everything's spotless and the room's four times the size of the one I had in London, simple and perfect. I didn't bother to put on fresh clothes after my shower, just my pajamas, tired enough at 6 pm to go to bed. Ate the pain au chocolat for my dinner, and will now play patience until my hair is dry and then go to sleep. My feet are hurting.

But what about that!! Made it so far!! Very chuffed.

(So odd, was wondering why the bed seemed to be rocking a bit and then realised that I haven't shed my sea legs yet. It was sixteen hours on the ferry after all, and then the bus which wasn't all that smooth.)