Avoiding the British abroad
Invaders of southern Italy, one of whom I'm glad I met
Welcome to the pages of my Travel Journal, featuring meandering portrayals of life on the road. This one comes to you from the south of Italy. For quicker reads, you might prefer my series of Sketches.
Greeks love bumping into fellow Greeks when travelling abroad, or so I’m told. When you’re here among them, you can see why – but maybe that’s just my rose-tinted spectacles talking. Personally, I avoid fellow Brits like the plague when travelling (usually when on home soil too) and the feeling tends to be mutual. So when a British-registered Dacia pulled up behind me as I queued for the ferry to Greece from the southern tip of Italy, more than a thousand miles from the white cliffs of Dover as the crow flies, a little cloud came over me. Can there be no escape? Over the eight-hour crossing I learned to regret my misgivings, but it was a process.
There was no avoiding him. Parked beside the Grimaldi Lines ship in the midday sun, I needed to take Alfie out for fresh air and a drink, and as soon as I emerged the Dacia’s jolly driver stepped out, intent on saying hello. Clearly he felt better about Brits than I did.In my defence, the last ones I’d seen, in Italy’s ancient town of Matera, had been particularly awful.
You have to go looking for the best bits of Matera. Otherwise you’ll be deterred by its sombre acres of residential blocks (some of which have an almost Soviet commitment to dreariness) or drive straight past it, unaware of the intriguing maze of civilisation that lies within. Known locally as the Sassi, the historic centre of Matera is one of the oldest continually-inhabited places on Earth. It’s an intriguing network of ancient little houses and caves cut into the rock, punctuated by some stunning churches. Book a tour of the underground caves to get a real sense of how people lived here, mining the rocks underground and using the excavated chambers to store food and water. It’s a fascinating place that seems to have had a logic and rhythm of its own, even though the whispers of history have been largely commoditised for an audience of tourists today. The Sassi went through a rough patch in the 20th Century, and you don’t have to go far to find traces of dereliction; the impoverished inhabitants were “cleared” in the 1950s (what a nasty euphemism) and overall there’s a moderately gentrified chique about the place today.
Not everyone comes to Matera to seep into these layers of history, and that’s ok. You could spend a week sampling its hundreds of little restaurants and wine bars, most of which have plenty of empty tables at this time of year. And so, the tourists come.
Even out of the corner of my eye, something told me they were English. Two rough diamonds (or polished turds perhaps) around 50, gelled to some kind of perfection, clad in jewellery and designer jeans, one swooping along in a long woollen coat. Rather a swanky garment actually, but something told me it cost more than my car. They trailed a brace of tottering, shiny-handbagged wives who seemed more allied to each other than their marauding menfolk. Barging ahead, the husbands now marched between the outside tables of a restaurant and, without slowing down for the door, leapt through it announcing “Badjerno!” at whoever was inside. Their swagger spoke of entitlement and appropriation, and I winced.
Obviously confidence needn’t be unattractive, even the naive sort. I write now from a coffee shop in Sparta, where a pair of American guys are sitting at a nearby table. I’m trying not to listen but their twang cuts through the background hum of Greek – not because they’re being intrusive, but because their talk is the only conversation in the room that I fully understand. “All you need if you want to do shit like that are two things – a passport and money. I had both, so I thought, f*ck, let’s do it...” They speak with an archetypal American confidence, something which an older British generation might describe as brash, but whatever ingredient it is that turns some people off the American brand of noisiness, I don’t seem to have it. Something tells me it’s a fear of style rather than substance.
Back to my friend with the Dacia. He said he was on his way to Thessaloniki where his sailing boat lay waiting for him, and where his wife would fly out to meet him. But he seemed more down-to-earth than that glamorous story suggested.
Later, as I settled into the lounge, he re-appeared. “Fancy some company? Just for half an hour.” I mustered a positive-sounding “Sure!” and made a mental note of the time. But by offering a limit he had shown that he respected my time and my privacy, and some part of me noticed.
It was his fourth yacht in 15 years of sailing – a French 46-footer that he’d been able to buy after he and his wife lost three parents in two years: a father-in-law and mother-in-law in quick succession. He looked away wistfully as the conversation grew quieter. “It’s ok. It was best that way. He was 86 and didn't want to live any more when she’d gone.”
It took a while for our talk to gain momentum again, but as the clock went around, I didn’t care. We talked about off-grid living, his 1000 Watts of solar panels and his 700-litre water tank, how a two-person crew arranges their shifts when sailing across open ocean, and what you can do to patch a hole in your boat and save yourself from sinking. (He sounded less pessimistic about the prospect than I expected.) His boat had already crossed the Atlantic four times with previous owners, and it seemed only a matter of time before he’d be doing himself. I told him I had a vague dream of living on a boat and sailing around the world, but for him the vision was real, and the dream was a plan. “I think I’ll need ten years, then I can take a route around Japan. That’s what I'd like. But you have to time it with the typhoon seasons, and it might only be six years...”
Later he offered me the use of the shower in his cabin, and I emerged to find him and Alfie on the bed together. It was very slightly weirdly intimate.
So thank you, bloke whose name I never learned, and who almost certainly will never read this. You’re a good sort: kind and curious, unassuming and calmly devoted to your craft. May your circumnavigation come true.