Traffic on the hill, runaway vehicle disturbs an otherwise tranquil morning coffee on the terrace. Who needs this kind of stress to start 2016?

Driverless what’s more

Escape artist… A good omen for the year’s beginning

Seaplane vs. Seabird

Sometimes evidence to the fluctuating rumours and rhubarbs of our village appear truthful. Dimitri, owner of the Kodeylania taverna had said he was going into competition with Seabird, one of our popular water taxis, and decided to hasten the ten minute trip with a Seaplane. Bravo Mr. Vlachodimitri, we needed a new effiecient form of transport.

As is often the case of events like this, some reports instantly claim a tragedy of awful preportions, other sources may play the whole thing down. Tsunamis and earthquakes can have initial casualty numbers way below what they actually turn out to be. There have been a “flood” of clips and photos posted of the port and debris from the torrent. Thankfully nothing epic or fatal happened, apart from a few poor animals and comparitively minor building damage. Another snap or video here would superfluous…. perhaps in a few days when the sun is out and our harbour looks spruce again. Which it was less than a week later, now a visitor wouldn’t even know it had happened, a community that bound together and got it done in no time. Bravo pethia!

Flash deluge

Hollywood made a movie about it, an event that shocked the world. At the time of its occurrence the Achille Lauro cruise ship hijacking made world headlines, a drama mainly remembered for a poor fellow in a wheelchair being tipped overboard. History can be a fickle thing; another nautical calamity in the late eighties occurred just a few miles down the Saronic Gulf and has gone largely ignored in the annals of terrorism.

A Familiar Sight – 1980’s

I was reminded of the incident by a photograph posted on Facebook recently by the Hydra Once upon a Time group of a cruise ship named The City of Hydra that used to visit the Rock daily. I’m pretty sure the circa 1970s date is a bit early, but it and its sister ship, The City of Poros, were a regular sight in Hydra harbour. The Hermes, another three-island-one-day cruise ship of that time (the one which dumped me permanently on the Rock), moored for an hour each afternoon, and the “Cities” took morning shifts.

This particular day was pertinent because an English tourist off the boat was sitting at an adjacent table to us at the Liako, our breakfast club. I remember because when The City of Poros tooted to signify imminent departure, the lady leaned across to us and said she had overheard us speaking English and supposed we were local residents. She then offered us her chunky Sunday Times newspaper, a novel gift in those days as none of us had television or any form of news input apart from the weekly thin Athens News. That evening we started to hear rumours of an almost unbelievable attack on the selfsame cruise ship.

Until a couple of hours later

There is no point in going into the gory details and specifics of the assault, suffice to say that nine innocent people were slaughtered and almost a hundred tourists hospitalized. The executive officer was made to kneel, it was reported, and executed with a shot pointblank to the back of his head. A bungled car bomb and an escape in a high-speed boat all formed part of the sad antics that day. There is no real point to this blurb, other than as a reminder that insane acts of violence often get comparatively swept under the carpet for reasons we couldn’t fathom. Perhaps to protect tourism?

* * *

A small, quirky twist to this tale is that soon after this tragic attack, security screening and detectors were installed at the Flying Dolphin departure points in Marina Zea. One pushed one’s bag on roller conveyors through an airport type X-ray screening device. Only in Greece; come fall. the usual paraphernalia of islander big-city shopping was shunted through security, including, when hunting season began, shotguns, rifles, and ammunition. With alarms blaring identification of lethal weaponry, the mustachioed gents in camouflage were waved past as normal.