To Greece and back …
My first visit to Zakynthos ~ or Zante ~ was on honeymoon with SE. We spent a fortnight one the island, spending many evenings at the local restaurant/bar, whose name I don't wish to give for reasons that will become apparent later. For now we'll just call it the "N-bar".
We got on well with the two brothers who owned, it, and their Irish helper, Ivan. So much did we hit it off with them, that on subsequent years when we returned ~ usually as anniversary holidays ~ we arranged our accommodation through them, using the same local company for car hires, etc. It made you feel really special when arriving at the airport alongside everyone else on package tours, but rather than waiting for the hot, sweaty and usually interminably long bus ride to your accommodation, Spiros would be waiting there with our first hire car of the holiday to give us a lift to our accommodation, which was usually just down the road from the N-Bar.
SE and I had great times there, which is why we returned there every year after the honeymoon (with one exception). So, when SE and I split, and I had no job to go back to, Zante was where I went looking for a new start.
After several farewells in Croydon, I pointed my camper van to Kettering to do the same there with family and friends, before heading for the ferry to Calais. I drove through France, heading roughly for the south coast and Montpelier. The route took me down the coast to Rouen, Orleans, Bourges, Clermont-Ferrand, through some beautiful countryside while trying my best to avoid more heavily-populated areas.
The south coast route would take me past Marseilles, Cannes, Cagnes-sur-Mer, Nice and Monaco, before heading into Italy and around the Gulf of Genoa. I had no set path to take ~ I simply looked the direction I needed to head the next day and went for it. Around the edge of the Alps, around six foot of snow fell in less than an hour, making driving conditions fairly hazardous. The camper was good and heavy, so although slow progress was made, it was safe enough ... for me at least.
While I was crawling between 15-20mph, I was being overtaken by a weird mix of cars mostly from the Sixties ~ Ford Escorts, Capris, Cortinas, plus a load more I didn't recognise, but were around the same age. They all had big circles on their doors with large numbers, and I could only guess this was some sort of Monte Carlo Rally re-run.
One of the motors slammed into the side of a mountain (there were sheer drops to the right of the road and sheer cliffs going up to the left) and a couple of others stopped to help shift him out, before they all simply headed off again. I basically just put them down as complete loonies! They had to be to drive at those speeds on that road in those conditions.
I saw at one point that my route took me near to Pisa, so decided to head in there in the hope of seeing the leaning tower. However, the road system was a complete one-way mess, and by the time I was heading out of the town I'd seen nothing more than other traffic.
I avoided Rome and headed through the central road system, past Perugia and Terni, then towards the east coast and Foggia ~ through what is known locally as "bandit country" ~ to my final Italian destination, the seaport of Brindisi. For safety's sake, I parked up near the port and waited there until the ferry arrived.
The ferry was an overnight affair to Patras in mainland Greece. Not the best accommodation you could ever wish for ~ it was nothing like the passenger ferries we are used to. This was more of a freight liner with a few cabins for passengers. I don't think I left my cabin from boarding to disembarking. But once at Pastras, it was only a short drive to Kyllini and the ferry to Zakynthos.
By this time it was late January, but as I headed south, the temperature rose and became quite acceptable to me ~ though me in a t-shirt or fleece drew some strange looks from locals who were bundled up like anyone elderly in England would be in mid-Winter.
I arrived on the island via the main port in the capital town with the same name as the island, then drove straight to Planos and Tsilivi. And, of course, at that time of year there were next to none of the British people I knew there ... they'd all gone back to the UK for the winter.
I called friends who ran That Bar ~ they were back in the UK, but told me where they kept their spare key and invited me to stay there while I looked for somewhere else, provided I feed their dog (unsure what the poor mutt was doing for food before I turned up!).
That dog nearly got me shot one morning ~ I woke to a commotion outside and made my way (still partly dressed) down the concrete side steps to be confronted with a local farmer with a shotgun pointing straight at me. From what I could understand from his gesticulations (I hadn't got a clue what he was saying) the dog had been chasing the strange trike-type machine he was driving and had scared his children. They're not that forgiving over there and have a far less love of canines than in England. I think it was only because I was speaking to him in English to try and calm the situation that he backed down and finally went away.
The police don't take kindly to locals intimidating the English there, as they are only too aware their tourist industry relies heavily upon them.
After a few days I managed to get in touch with the brothers from N-Bar and they found me some accommodation on a remote hillside farm ~ a small bungalow the farmer had built but rarely got to let due to its location. The rate was suitable for me to stay there for the summer, and although it was fairly primitive, it was suitable enough for my needs.
One or two bars in each of the small towns remained open during the winter and they became my destinations over the next month or so while I got myself settled and decided what I was going to do with myself. One held a regular pool tournament twice a week ~ 2 Drachma entry (same price as a bottle of Amstel or Heineken) and winner takes all. I only lost the tournament once in all the times I went there, but not wishing to diminish the enthusiasm of the competitors, I used my winnings each time to buy every entrant a beer ... so I never made anything from them, but hopefully made a few good contacts.
One day, England were playing Albania in a qualifier for something or other. I gave a lift to one of the English seasonal workers (who stayed over in Winter to do olive picking) and a bar owner to a bar in another town who had the match on ~ Al Sandro's. We were three of around ten English there, amongst around 80-odd Albanians. There were many on the island, as the Greeks used them for building work in the same way the English used to use the Irish. To say the atmosphere was a little heated would be an underestimation, and as I was at the back of the room ~ shouting and cheering for England ~ my two compatriots became more and more worried. They asked me to keep the noise down, as we were all being nudged and pushed by every Albanian that went past us.
If they weren't relying on me for their lift home, I'm sure they would have disappeared long before the end. England won (2-1 if I remember rightly) and although they were begging me to leave, I insisted on standing by the doorway as the Albies filtered out, with some jostling on their way. Then the two enormous Albanians approached the door to leave ~ shaking my hand on the way, saying they were pleased to have at least scored against England ... to them it was a good result. What I had omitted to mention to my two buddies was that I had met these two Albanians previously ~ they ran the two main work gangs on the island, and there was no way they would let there workers cause me any damage. I got as bit of grief from them on the way back for not telling them I wasn't simply a lunatic who wanted to get himself killed. However, I'm not sure if I could have honestly confirmed that.
I got a few offers to go into business with some of the bar owners, but still wasn't sure what I wanted to do. Eventually the N-Bar brothers offered to let me use one side of their restaurant (which they usually used as a small side bar area) and make it into a bar of my own. The idea appealed to me, so I spent a good deal of my money setting it up ~ building the bar area, buying furniture, fittings, fridges, etc., and all the stock I'd need to start up. They also talked me into getting a pool table, which I was unsure of, but went along with.
However, almost as soon as I had started trading, they began seeking to renege on the deal. First they tried to get me to lose the pool table, which I couldn't do, having secured it on a fixed time deal. Then they started bad-mouthing me to their customers, to get them to avoid using the bar before or after they'd been in the restaurant ... which they said was the reason they wanted me there ~ to boost their trade. But I refused to budge, having spent a lot of money setting it up. (I was told by some others ~ both English and Greek ~ that they had done the same thing to some other people in the past ~ one of which was the chap Ivan, who still worked with them.)
What I considered to be our friendship soon began to wane when they realised they couldn't get rid of me that easily. One night a group of young lads were waiting for me when my bar closed ~ not with the best of intent. It was obvious someone had put them up to giving me a good hiding ... or perhaps paid for them to do so. However, as it turns out they were all Albanian and, recognising me as knowing their gangmasters, did nothing other than offer to repay the compliment to those who had set them on me. I refused their offer ~ I didn't want to make things any worse than they were already getting.
I made many friends there though, including an elderly couple who ran the best little restaurant on the edge of the town on the back road to the main town. They made the best food in the town, but had too small a place to make any real money out of it. But they offered discounts to all the bar owners and workers, which made it an even better place to eat. One the narrow road down to the beach from my bar was another run by an old Greek anarchist, who had some really strange visitors. We would get together now and then to play cribbage and drink ~ though I stayed off the bourbon he used to drink like it was going out of fashion ... the walls and all other areas of his bar being festooned with his empties, as decorations.
There was another English couple who had a bar on one of the other roads out of the town, but their bar was a little too far away from mine to make it a regular watering hole. And another English fella, Bill, whose missus had left him with her kids and disappeared off the island. A few other friends helped him to raise them, but he drank far too much to ever make a go of his bar and it finally closed halfway through the season. Others I met worked either for tour companies or helped out in Greek-run bars. One of them, a Brummie called Frank, had more than a few problems, but seemed to relate to me well, and I was often called upon by others to placate him and bring him down from one of his "black moods".
Another Tsilivi bar (which the brothers had warned me to stay away from) was run by a lovely family from Sunderland. I wish I'd met them sooner, and only had a short time to get to know them before the end of the season.
There was also the Croc Bar in Zante town ~ so named because the Mancurian owner kept two young crocodiles and an alligator in a pen in the main bar! This was where I had met the Albanian gang leaders and their workforce, as they used the bar out of season as their local.
Tsilivi began to get a bad reputation due to groups of young Greeks and Albanians wandering around the bars looking for young English girls who may have managed to slip their parents' leash for the night and got themselves drunk. They saw them as easy prey and there were many complaints of them being taken advantage of, or worse. So, I got together with some other bar owners ~ both Greek and English ~ to organise a network of bars where anyone who was being harassed could drop in for safety. That bar owner would then despatch someone to find their parents and get them home safely, or arrange for a taxi to take them back to their hotels.
Despite all those good contacts, the harassment from the brothers got worse. One day, when a friend was visiting me from London for a short break following cancer surgery, I took her for a drive round the island in the camper. We reached a coastal hilltop when one of the wheels from my camper van suddenly came off! When the garage guy arrived he said the wheel nuts had obviously been loosened to such an extent they could have come off at any time. Luckily we were on an uphill stretch and the camper didn't perform that well on hills, or else it could have been a much different outcome. No-one could have touched the wheels while it was parked outside my bar, so the only place it could have been done was outside my digs ... which only the brothers knew about.
As the season came to a close, I realised there was no way the bar would be an option to keep open during the winter, so I ran down my stock and sold off in bulk what was left. Then, quietly one night I packed all my stuff into the camper van and headed for the port. I got the brothers back the only way I could ... I left them to settle my VAT bills!
I still didn't feel safe until I had made it to the Italian mainland, by the reverse of the route I took over there. I had a passenger this time ~ I took a friend and dropped him off at Venice airport so he could get a flight home. From there I tried to make it back via the Alps, with the intention of taking in Switzerland and Germany on the way back, but there was no way my little camper could make it up even the larger, motorway-type mountain road, so I turned around and headed back towards the Gulf of Genoa once more.
It was amusing coming back via Monaco and Monte Carlo ~ where the local police wouldn't even let me stop my camper at the side of the road to take a picture ... obviously not posh enough for them! But I did take pleasure in driving through their main centres, just to make a point ~ some of the time with an excellent police escort!
While in Tsilivi, a couple of friends, who played in a band and did a lot of background music on CDs for local bars, produced a couple for me ~ a compilation of my favourite songs and tunes from the Music To Watch Girls Go By collections. While driving through Italy ~ particularly on those windy, twisting roads that have featured in many Bond and other films ~ I loved playing those tracks, especially The Girl With The Sun In Her Hair by John Barry. Still brings a tear to my eyes when I hear it now ...
Going back through France I was stopped on one road by two motorcycle cops. They got me to pull into a service station where the one who was around five foot nine went through my belongings with a fine toothcomb, as the one who was around six foot five stood and watched. I had nothing to hide, so chatted with them as they did their duty. The taller one wasn't that communicative though ~ his only words, in response to my inquiry, was that his friend did the searching while he watched! It was the smaller one whose English was good, and, having found no contraband on me, we chatted for an hour or so about Greece, France, motorbikes, etc.
So, I was on my way back to Blighty. My money had all but run out ... I never made anything running the bar, though might have if I hadn't drank a lot of the profits! My grand adventure was over, my head was a little clearer, and it was time to face reality and get back to normal living, whatever that was! I hadn't died, despite many near misses, which made me think there may be some reason I was alive ... perhaps even some purpose I was meant for that I hadn't quite grasped yet. Who knows?