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Albanian Morning was nippy. I felt weird. Dizzy. Off balance. Out of sync. Off kilter. A headwind battered us and traffic honked constantly. We continued along the old coastal national road towards Corinth. During the day it warmed up when the cold wind wasn't blowing directly. It wasn't as warm as I had expected. We decided we should hightail it south to Crete. Hopefully it would be warmer there. The only problem was we had to catch the ferry from Piraeus, near Athens. Athens was not my idea of bicycle heaven. I had no hidden desire to have near misses with Greek drivers and shout "Ella!" We met a displaced Australian. He had been in Greece for years and appeared to hate every minute of it. He was trying to sell his deceased mother's home. He said that when he succeeded he was planning on returning to Australia. "All Greece has going for it is a bunch of old rocks!" Oh the opinionated Aussie and American. They sounded very similar. Andy gave us his address and invited us to visit him in Australia. "I hope I'm home by then," he ruefully said. As we neared Corinth the road we were following suddenly became very busy with small towns stretching along the coast. With no beaches in sight we pulled into an orange grove for the night. There were also lime trees and a cross between the two. We were just finishing supper when we heard sheep bells. Turning to investigate, I saw a huge mop of curly black hair duck beneath the bottoms of the orange trees. A perplexed and surprised look met mine as the burly shepherd gazed underneath the orange grove. Carrying a staff, he, his wife and their two hundred sheep quickly made their way towards us. I greeted him and tried to ask if it was okay to camp in their orange grove for the night. The big Greek seemed unconcerned with my question. He was too busy smiling and telling us to eat his oranges. We would have but I had found twenty oranges along the roadside earlier. He tried to communicate with us, asking us if we were Albanian. I'm not sure if he understood we were Canadian or not. We had arrived on bicycles; Albania was the closed country; so we must be Albanian. He indicated again that we could help ourselves to the oranges and asked something about water, as well as a few other questions that neither Sharon nor I understood. Then the stocky man loudly pronounced "Good, good" and wandered off with his sheep. |
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