Attentive readers (you know who you are) will already be aware of the complexities of Greek bureaucracy as it applies to cruising yachts. There is a theoretical requirement (unmeetable in practice) to visit the port police and clear in and out of every port visited within two hours of arrival or departure. This is honoured more in the breach than the observance, but it becomes more complex when you intend to sail out of Greek waters.
It's bad enough going to another EU country, but to leave for a non EU country sets alarm bells ringing in the bureaucratic brain. If said non EU country happens to be The Old Enemy, namely Turkey, it immediately arouses deep suspicion in what passes for the official neocortex that there is some reprehensible motive behind such a visit. The fact that the Turkish coast is often within spitting distance of the Port Police office seems irrelevant. Or possibly even contributory.
Most marinas have come to some form of accommodation between the ludicrous demands of officialdom and the economic realities of trying to make a living out of the waterborne community. All the paperwork, if done at all, can be done in one go, usually by the marina staff. Kos has the (mostly deserved) reputation of being one of the best in Greece. As a result, Bob tripped with light heart and heavy document case to the marina office to deal with the paperwork and clear in.
At first, all went according to plan. Transit logs were stamped, passports perused, crew lists photocopied to within an inch of their lives and florid signatures inscribed on any blank areas of paper that had so far escaped unblemished. Just as he thought it was all done and he was about to leave, the charming Port Policewoman added as an aside "Oh and you have to pay a tax." This was a new one on Bob. "Oh - what's that for?" he asked. She looked a bit confused by this, and said that she didn't really know but thought it might be something to do with light dues.
"OK", says Bob with some trepidation - "How much?"
"88 cents" (= about 72 pence).
Bob proffered a 1 euro coin, expecting on previous experience to be sent to the nearest knocking shop to try to get some change. "Oh no - you can't pay it here" he was told "You have to pay it at the local tax office." Upon enquiry it turns out that the tax office was local in the same sense that Alpha Centauri is referred to by astronomers as local. It may be the nearest star but it's still 3 ½ bleedin' light years away.
The exact whereabouts of this tax office appeared to be covered by the Official Secrets Act. The Port Policewoman said something about go out the main gate, turn right and go on until faint from hunger and then ask someone else. The guy in the marina office was trying to impress a rather attractive new recruit. He smiled knowingly at her and bemusedly at the map - it didn't help that he held it upside down. Then he very confidently said "Ah yes - it's here" and, with a dramatic flourish, drew a circle on the map. The trouble was that this circle covered an area only fractionally smaller than Greater Manchester. Bob pressed him for more accuracy and got an embarrassed muttering of "somewhere behind Goody's bar" before he hustled the recruit into the stationery cupboard to explain the intricacies of the photocopier.
Bowing to the inevitable, we set off in search of the elusive tax office. We found Goody's bar about 5 miles away in the centre of Kos town. Alongside it, rather than behind it, was a large, imposing building with high gates, intimidating steps, a huge, sod off, Greek flag and a sign saying 'Tax Office' in Greek.
Bob bounded up the steps, approached the young man behind the desk and intimated that he'd like to pay some tax. Offering to pay a tax without the application of thumbscrews and the threat of defenestration was obviously a novelty to the young man who was temporarily flummoxed, but recovered admirably. "What tax?" he asked. Bob produced the 'instruction to pay a tax' piece of paper that the port police had given him. Unfortunately it had been printed on the back of what appeared to be a summons for some major infraction of international maritime law. The Greeks have managed to engineer a system that combines the most complicated red tape imaginable with a chronic shortage of paper.
Once this had been clarified, luckily before the expected telephone call and subsequent arrest, he said that what we wanted was not his establishment, but the LOCAL tax office. "Where, exactly, was the LOCAL tax office" we asked? "Behind Goody's bar" he said, as if to a particularly thick and inattentive teenager. We risked official wrath and disdain by asking for more explicit instructions and were told to go out, right, then left, then left again and it's down an alley.
It was, indeed, down an alley. It wasn't marked or signposted. In fact it was one of the few buildings there that didn't have a bloody great Greek flag outside it. What gave it away was a combination of its rather dingy appearance and the constant flow of people in and out carrying sheaves of paper and wearing that expression, equal parts anger, irritation and resignation, common to those dealing with tax offices the world over.
Bob climbed the dingy staircase and found himself in a large room, cluttered throughout with shoulder high piles of cardboard boxes, all of which were stuffed to overflowing with files, folders and loose papers. They blocked access to the numerous booths, each of which had a long queue at it and none of which had any indication of what they dealt with. There were boxes stuffed under desks and piled up in front of the fire exits. Loose papers that had escaped the overstuffed boxes were trampled underfoot like autumn leaves. "That's where all the paper's gone" thought Bob. "There are probably hundreds of rooms like this in every Greek village, town and city. The entire country's one big fire hazard."
The question now was which queue to join, only to wait for half an hour to be told that you were in the wrong queue and will now have to join the end of that really long one over there. However, we've seen the technique in action at Greek post offices. Bob looked for the queue which had someone at the front holding the rest of the queue up whilst he laboriously filled in some form or other. He then nipped in front of everyone waving his piece of paper and asked the guy if he should join this queue. Obviously, the guy pointed him to the longest queue in the room, which he meekly joined.
Upon reaching the front he waved his piece of paper at the woman behind the glass and made 'I want to pay' noises. She looked at him and said 'Passport!' It was, of course, on the boat. Bob's Greek wasn't up to bureaucratic wrangling and his nemesis wasn't going to admit to speaking any language other than Greek but he refused to be dismissed and let the rest of the queue through. He was rewarded by a very helpful and probably self interested Greek gentleman from further back who came forward and translated, only to be rewarded by the dragon behind the glass with a scowl that could curdle milk at twenty paces.
After he'd argued with her for 5 minutes it turned out that a passport wasn't required at all, she only wanted it to see how Bob's name was spelled. The fact that it was PRINTED IN CAPITAL LETTERS on the piece of paper he'd given here had somehow passed her by. With consummate bad grace she completed a form, stamped it in several places, signed it in two places got Bob to sign it in three places and gave him the top copy.
Bob got out his 88 cents and offered it.
"Not here - Pay over there" she said in English, pointing at the longest queue in the room.
It only took another 20 minutes after that.
So - 88 cent tax paid. Now all we had to do was clear out through passport control, immigration, customs, health authorities and port police and we could go to Turkey.
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The trip to Kalymnos was uneventful, apart from what we suspect to have been a sonic boom which made Liz jump out of her skin. Bob dozed on contentedly. We entered a very protected anchorage in Emborius and picked up a buoy that had been laid by one of the local tavernas. This, of course, obliged us to go and eat there in the evening, but such are the trials of the cruising life.
We were last here on a package holiday in 1998, when it was hitting 45 degrees during the day and 35 degrees at night. It's not much cooler now.
One thing we have noticed in the Aegean is the relative dearth of Brits. There are plenty of Red Ensigns, but the boats are all owned/crewed by other nationalities, mainly Greek. It turns out it's a tax dodge. With Gordon Brown banging on about tax havens the words 'mote', 'beam' and 'eye' spring to mind.
Other than that there are plenty of Dutch, Germans, French, Austrians and Norwegians with a scattering of Swedes and other nationalities, but very few Brits. This isn't much of a problem as all of these nationalities converse with the others in English, but it's not quite as relaxed as conversing all together in the same native tongue.
There was, however, a Brit boat with a Brit crew in the anchorage and they went ashore and took a table in the taverna. We arrived later and sat a couple of tables down. We had thought of acknowledging them and striking up a conversation on the way in, but decided to get a drink first. It was just as well we did.
One of the three had managed to work his was through 2 litres of wine before the meal had even started. He was one of the most unpleasant, arrogant, pompous, inconsiderate, boastful, loud, obnoxious, overbearing, boorish, argumentative, xenophobic saloon bar bores we've ever been unfortunate enough to come across. We just sat in the corner avoiding eye contact and trying to look foreign. Luckily he was so self-obsessed he didn't even give us a second glance, let alone try to engage us in conversation.
We left the next morning for Kos. This is very close to Turkey and there are patriotic symbols all along the coast. On the Greek side this usually takes the form of huge Greek flags (100 + metres across) made up of blue and white stones strategically placed on hillsides facing directly towards Turkey. The Turks counter this by erecting bloody great flagpoles all over the place and flying Turkish flags the size of marquees from them. The symbolic equivalent of the playground 'Nyah nyah na na na!" . As Bertrand Russell so aptly put it "Nationalism is just tribalism with flags."
Kos is a brilliant marina in a lovely town on a fascinating island. This was just as well as we were stuck here for 5 days due to a slight technical hitch.
Bob was performing his thrice daily obeisance to the ammeter when he remarked "Blimey that solar panel's pushing in a lot of amps." Then he had a thought and reckoned it was too much current even for a 135 watt panel. So he disconnected it. Still loads of amps going in. Strange. So he disconnected everything that could put current in or draw it out. Still loads of amps going in. So he isolated both battery banks. Still loads of amps going in.
He was getting quite excited by this time, reckoning he'd inadvertently found a way to circumvent the laws of thermodynamics and conservation of energy. A glittering future of limitless clean energy on tap beckoned for mankind, not to mention fame and fortune for Bob.
He left everything disconnected and went to sleep to have a think about it. He couldn't sleep. But he could think about it.
On further investigation he found that one of the five series pairs of batteries was a trifle warm. Well, hot actually. Bloody hot. These were rapidly disconnected and extracted. On reconnecting the rest of the batteries and bridging the gap where he'd removed the hot batteries he found the problem had gone away, as had his chances of revolutionising energy technology. It turned out that one of the pair had sulphated, causing a short. This resulted in the other one discharging into the shorted battery, producing heat, a second knackered battery and spurious readings on the ammeter.
All that was needed now were two new deep cycle, 90 AH wet batteries which fitted into the available space. Bob went, more with hope than confidence, to the local chandlery who said they could have them by the next morning. Which, much to our amazement, they did, and quite reasonable at 135 euros each. Having hacked off a few flanges round the edges of both batteries he managed to fit them in and all was now well.
All that was left to do now was to explore the island of Kos and to work our way through the labyrinthine Greek bureaucracy so that we could clear out of Greece in order to be able to clear into Turkey.
The former was relatively easy and painless. The latter will be described in tedious detail in the next entry.
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The forecast winds were from the South, so we decided to head North-east to Samos. Naturally we had light Northeasterlies on the nose and had to motorsail all the way. We anchored in Pythagorias on the South coast, named after its famous son. Nice little town, but not a right angle in sight.
Pythagorias used to be the capital of the 6th Century B.C. tyrant Polykrates (roughly translates as 'Big Boss'). He decided to make his mark by instigating great public works (a harbour and a 1040 metre aqueduct bored through the mountain) and persecuting Pythagoras, who responded by disappearing off into a cave on the West of the island.
Samos is one of the bigger islands in the Eastern Med, so we hired a car to take a look around.
At Potami on the North coast was a walk along a gorge with a river running through it - cool, shaded and wooded - absolutely exquisite. At the head of this a steep and ramshackle set of wooden steps climbed to a treetop restaurant with views over the woods and out to sea. No disabled access here.
The next target was a deserted village and a church in a cave up in the mountains. Liz likes mountains. Here we came up against the Greek tradition of misleading signposts. This, we suspect, is designed to confuse invading Turkish troops and usually follows a pattern.
Firstly, the existence of some not to be missed site is marked on a map or guide book. As you approach in the car a sign is usually found at a multiple junction, cunningly placed so that it could, depending on the exact angle you view it, feasibly point in any of the 5 possible directions leading from said junction. Positioning a sign in precisely this way is very difficult and requires 3D geometric skills of the highest order. There's probably an entire department in the University of Athens dedicated to it.
Having overcome this first hurdle by employing all available Y chromosome spatial cognition abilities and finding the correct road you come across tactic 2. This involves placing the second sign just after the relevant junction and adding a frisson of a challenge by planting a large bush in front of it.
Level three of the game follows with a long stretch of road with no signs to your desired destination at all. This stretch of road is specifically chosen for having most of its junctions such that it is impossible to determine which road is the main road and which are the subsidiaries. If you manage to overcome all of this they reward you with a sign saying "Churchy villagey thing this way - 5 Km". Soon after that they play their trump card and the road just peters out into a narrow, rutted, boulder-strewn track bordered by precipitous drops.
Not to be outdone we, or more precisely Liz, determined that we should press on on foot. Bob concurred with his usual good grace.
It got hotter and stickier. We became sweatier and more dust covered. The swarms of flies became thicker and more irritating. After 3 kilometres (as measured by the pedometers) we came across another sign: "Churchy villagey thing this way - 5 Km". Were we disheartened? Well, Liz wasn't. Onward and upward we went.
Then Bob played his trump card. Whilst panting his way up a particularly steep, dusty, fly infested section he managed to inhale a rather large flying insect, which promptly lodged itself in the back of his throat. Understandably, it did not wish to disappear further into the hot, damp maw gaping before it, and so it sank its mandibles into where his tonsils would have been had he had any, and hung on for grim death. Which is what it got when he hawked, coughed, chewed and spat it out.
It came out mangled but, unfortunately, sans mandibles, which remained firmly embedded. Further hawking and coughing managed to loosen them a little but not completely dislodge them. It also managed to produce quite copious quantities of blood.
We'd been unable to determine what sort of insect it had been, as it was distinctly mangled by the time it came out, so we didn't know whether it had a sting or not. Both of us at this stage thought of the possibility that it might trigger a swelling of the tissues in the throat and compromise breathing. Neither of us, of course, mentioned this to the other.
So we abandoned the expedition and started to make our way back to the car. The things he'll do to get out of one of Liz's expeditions.
We tramped the track back to the car, with Liz surreptitiously checking Bob out every time he slowed or coughed out more blood. She had all sorts of horror scenarios running through here mind. Trying to get help from up a mountain in a pine forest in the middle of nowhere, especially in Greek would not have been easy. Bob didn't tell here that that particular problem wouldn't arise as he'd surreptitiously checked his mobile and there wasn't a signal there anyway.
Luckily there was no swelling and the bleeding had all but stopped by the time we got back to the car. We called it a day and went back to the boat.
Onwards to Kalymnos and Kos in the next, unedifying, instalment.
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