BEAUTIFUL TINOS

The last few nights in the van before we arrive in Tinos become increasingly challenging. Three weeks on the road and our air mattress (the one that didn’t explode) has gone a bit awry, ballooning up on one side. We take turns sleeping on ‘the hump’ but it’s not very satisfactory and I’m longing for a decent night’s sleep in a real bed. Flora and Hector have decided they prefer the air bed, hump and all, to sleeping in their own bunk bed. Four in a bed does not make for a restful night.

Our ferry to Tinos, the Theologos, takes about four hours in blissfully calm seas.
The ferrymen of Caledonian MacBrayne would have a fit the way the drivers start their engines and begin moving forwards before the ferry has docked. But this is still very orderly compared to our experience of catching a ferry in Montenegro. Everyone barges on like sheep going into a fank until the ferryman plonks a STOP sign in front of the vehicles. Of course, if you happen to be driving a BMW or Mercedes 4x4 and wearing designer shades, the traffic parts before you like the Red Sea in front of Moses.

When we disembark from the Tinos ferry, Petros and Annette are waiting to show us the way to our apartment at Porto. The main road wiggles down to the beach and there is our apartment, much closer to the sea than we had thought. ‘It’s very white,’ says Max. And so it is, inside and out. The kids are tired but we all feel ridiculously happy. We take what we need for the night out of the van and sleep better than we have for weeks. We can hear the sea, but we don’t see how close it is until the morning. It’s right there, little more than a stone’s throw away.

 

The beach at Porto is long and the bay is perfect for swimming. The locals are wearing puffer jackets and warm coats but our kids are in the sea, enjoying the sunshine. The lady in the mini-market up the road is worried we’re all going to catch our deaths.

Sam goes to have a shower and we hear a yelp of pain from the bathroom. We’ve all been getting little electric shocks from the taps but the shower is the best shocker of all. When we put the water heater on, the lights flicker and dim. Some go off altogether. Our landlord, Argiris, comes down and within ten minutes of arriving, he has an electrician here. The problem isn’t inside the apartment, it’s coming from the main cable into the house. An hour or so later, a man from the local electricity company shins up a pole outside the apartment and starts working on the spaghetti wiring. In no time at all, it’s fixed. Greece might be suffering severe economic problems, but I don’t think we could have got a hydro man out that quickly at home. Argiris is a man who clearly gets things done.

Petros, Annette and their daughter Katerina (married to Argiris) make sure we have everything we need. An oven arrives. A big fridge freezer. A washing machine. Dishes. We have the run of the downstairs apartment as well as this one. We feel extremely fortunate.

A couple of days after we arrive, Michael and Max begin to worry about school – or rather, the lack of it. We’ve had a few attempts at lessons, but it’s proving very difficult to give the big boys the attention they need while Flora and Hector are around. I am also feeling under pressure to finish my own work – editing a book on Harris Tweed for the photographer Ian Lawson. And Sam is keen to get down to Petros’ marble studio and make a start.

Sam and Annette visit the local school to make enquiries, and after traipsing around a few different offices, an arrangement is made to send Michael and Max to school here in Tinos. They start on Wednesday, 9^th November, and will catch the bus from the mini-market on the main road into town every day. The school day begins at 8am and finishes at 1.30pm. So far, the boys have managed to learn the Greek alphabet and count to twenty. All their lessons will be in Greek. Well, as they say, there’s no better way to learn a language than by total immersion.

The boys can’t help but compare their Greek headmaster to Mr Garvie back in Dornoch. Mr Garvie wears a suit and tie. The new headmaster wears a t-shirt and tracksuit. The new headmaster has a drinks cabinet and an ashtray in his office. Unlike Mr Garvie. As far as we know. The school is lovely – marble columns and plants everywhere and the children are friendly.

We discover there is a nursery about 10 minutes drive away from our apartment. I spend a morning there with Flora and Hector and they love it. A minibus stops at the shop in Porto every weekday morning to collect the nursery children and take them home again. Sam and I decide to enrol both Flora and Hector. Already, they can say ‘hello’ and ‘goodbye’ in Greek after one morning’s attendance at the nursery.

It would be fair to say that Tinos is a very windy place. The wind has been blowing pretty hard since we arrived and it’s forecast to keep blowing for some time. My parents arrive in Athens on Thursday evening and we have our fingers crossed for a bit of nice sailing weather for their crossing to Tinos on Friday morning.

STARRY ALBANIAN SKIES, Athens, 1 November

The border guards at Montenegro see us coming. A mile off. Our van, despite being fitted out with bunk beds, a sink, a cooker and a family of six, is apparently not a camper. It is a commercial vehicle. We try and argue our case, but the guard smiles knowingly and points to our vehicle registration document. Commercial vehicle. N1 classification. It says so, right there. We have to pay him 80 euros for a sticker with N1 printed on it so that everyone we meet on the road through Montenegro will know that contrary to all appearances, we are not a camper van but a commercial vehicle masquerading as a camper van. We kick ourselves for not updating the vehicle documents before we left home then move on to the next guard.

He sees us coming here too. Taking our passports and our vehicle documents, he tells us our insurance is invalid for Montenegro. Sam argues the case, but the guard is intractable and insists we must buy insurance from a company conveniently situated across the road from the checkpoint. If we don’t buy the insurance, he won’t let us through. We are in a quandary, but in the end we fork out. We feel like innocents abroad and determine not to spend another cent in Montenegro.

Just as we are leaving the border, I see one of the guards begin a vehicle inspection. As he bends over to take a look in the back of the car, the driver tucks something into the breast pocket of the guard’s jacket. The car is waved on. That’s how it’s done, then.

The Montenegran coast is stunning and a bit bling: lots of nightclubs and casinos; beachside apartment blocks; men sitting or standing outside cafés. When we arrive at the Albanian border, we pass through without any problems. Our destination is a Dutch-owned campsite about an hour’s drive away.

The first sign that Albania is different to every other country we have passed through comes with the road sweepers. No gully sooker machine here. There are women in headscarves with large brooms sweeping leaves off a new stretch of dual carriageway in the dark.

We arrive at the campsite at 10pm to find the metal gates of the campsite closed. A young boy runs out of the main building and welcomes us in Dutch-accented English before directing us to a suitable pitch. We can’t help but notice he is accompanied by a man carrying a shotgun.

I am suddenly conscious of how starry the Albanian sky is. Parked up on the edge of the campsite, I look out into the blackness. There are no streetlights but a lot of barking dogs. Walking across to the toilet block, I pass the night watchman sitting on a plastic chair and smoking a cigarette, his shotgun across his knees. The boys don’t want to sleep in the tent, and Sam ends up getting turfed out of the van. Again.

The morning dawns bright and warm and as soon as we’ve had breakfast, we make our way along country roads to the main highway. Here are a few of the things we saw on and adjacent to the Albanian motorway: horses and carts; cows tethered in the central reservation; cyclists coming the wrong way along the dual carriageway; countless old Mercedes’ full of people; children riding donkeys and eating crisps at the same time; haystacks; butchers slaughtering and selling meat on the verge; boys herding turkeys; a perplexing number of new or half-built petrol stations; men pushing wheelbarrows; and people. All along the main highway into Greece there are Albanian people walking, carrying suitcases, leading animals, climbing over crash barriers, selling fruit, hubcaps and plastic bottles of engine oil.

Every so often, a fast bit of tarmac ends without warning and we are driving on gravel. Nowhere do we see a supermarket. The potholes in the road are cavernous. A bread shop sells a few stale white loaves and a lot of bags of flour. This is a country in transition. Albania has applied for EU membership but I can’t imagine how this squares with the roadside butchers and the people who use the highway like a country road. We feel anxious for the donkey riders and the shepherds dodging the speeding traffic. Once this road is finished, it will be lethal.

Not long after discussing this, we come across an accident. There is blood smeared across the road and a lot of people standing about. We think a cow has been killed but we can’t be sure. A couple of hours later, we see an enormous wild pig hit by a lorry. There are dead dogs every few kilometres. The highway feels like a big, brutal thing seared into the landscape.

After queuing for an hour or so, we cross the border into northern Greece and spend the night in the mountains. We visit Meteora where there are monasteries and nunneries perched on the top of cliffs. My vertigo sees me lying on the floor of the van as we wind our way up the mountain, trying not to look. Sam takes Michael, Max and babies to the edge of the cliff while I lurk behind the van feeling pathetic.

By evening, we are in Athens, enjoying the hospitality of Ruth and Emilios Bourantinos. This evening, we catch the ferry to Tinos. It feels very strange to think of actually arriving. 

VENICE FERRY (NO FERRY), Dubrovnik

On Sunday, we rendezvous with Tommy in Isola and make for Venice. It takes us a long time to locate the campsite on the industrial outskirts of the city and it’s dark by the time we park up. The inside of the van looks like the aftermath of a school jumble sale with bits of biscuit, toys, cartons of juice and items of clothing everywhere.

Michael is becoming an expert at putting up the tent. Sam connects the compressor to the boys’ airbed and goes off to find out about ferries into Venice. Trying to create order out of chaos inside the van, the rest of us forget about the inflating airbed until an explosion from the tent signals its demise. Bummer.

Next morning we catch a ferry into Venice from just outside the campsite. We like the ferry docking areas that look just like floating bus stops at the entrances to the city but Max finds Venice itself disconcerting - the waterways, the tall buildings rising out of the sea, the professional beggars. All the most expensive designer shops are here, close to the church of San Marco and the Doge’s Palace. There is so much to see: the impressive courtrooms; a painting of the known world in Marco Polo’s time showing his travels across East Asia; Bosch’s terrifying vision of hell; the jail where Casanova was imprisoned. Flora and I whizz through it all at top speed because she needs the loo and the only toilet open is on the ground floor where the lengthy tour of the palace begins and ends. It feels rude to race through such important historical artefacts with barely a second glance, but I guess history is always like this, someone in the crowd not paying attention because they’re desperate for the loo.

Later that evening, we get ourselves organised for the ferry journey to Greece. It’s been a long day, the rain has started up and we decide not to rake through our food boxes for something tasty to eat but buy some takeaway pizza instead. This is Italy, after all.

It’s Tuesday morning, 11am and the man at the ferry port is shaking his head and making dismissive gestures with his hands. Our ferry, due to leave Venice in two hours, is apparently still in Greece. Sam asks when they expect it to arrive. The port official shrugs. ‘In Greece,’ he says, ‘they have many problems.’ So we take it he doesn’t know. After a few phone calls, we are given a full refund of the £515 fare. The dockers are on strike. I am reminded of those signs you see in the Highlands at places where a bridge or causeway has replaced a ferry: Strome Ferry (No ferry); Meikle Ferry (No ferry). Venice Ferry (No ferry).

There’s a possibility we may be able to get a boat on Wednesday evening, but it’s not certain. We study the stained map on the side door of the van. Could we forget about the ferry and drive all the way to Greece? It would mean driving back along the coast of Slovenia and Croatia, skirting Bosnia, passing through Montenegro and Albania before arriving in northern Greece sometime at the beginning of next week. But Venice is wet and very expensive. It doesn’t take us long to make a decision and then we’re back on the road.

Stopping for occasional toilet breaks and simple meals consisting of bread, cheese and sausage, we motor on through Croatia. At 1am, Sam stops the van and we lift Flora and Hector out of their car seats and into the upper bunk bed. We are too tired and it is too late to pitch the tent. Max is already asleep across the front seats of the van. I end up sleeping on the floor amongst the van debris. It is eerily quiet.

We wake up in what must be our most bizarre camping spot to date. We are in a deserted club resort on a small peninsula. When Max wakes up, he thinks it is the creepiest place ever and the ideal setting for a zombie movie so we give the boys the task of scripting a zombie movie for their schoolwork. The beach is huge and empty and dotted with sun umbrellas. On the door of the nightclub we see a sign we’ve never seen before: no handguns.

We decide to stay another night, even though the wind has got up and the rain is really coming down. We spend a few hours in the afternoon checking out the local firebrigade:

Just as we are getting ready to go to bed, a car pulls up next to us and a torch flashes in the darkness around us. Sam goes out, but the occupant of the car doesn’t approach us. After a while, a second car pulls up. Maybe it is our imagination or too many zombie fantasies, but the out-of-season resort feels suddenly threatening and we feel vulnerable. Sam hops back in the van. ‘Everyone sitting tight?’ We’re on the move again and the rain is torrential. Flora says, ‘I don’t like this Greece, I want to go home.’ We spend the night in a service station in the Croatian mountains and it feels a whole lot safer than the zombie resort.

On Thursday, we run out of motorway and the road through the mountains to Dubrovnik narrows and winds through beautiful villages and valleys. Sam stops the van and picks pomegranates for us off trees at the side of the road. Clementines, limes, hazlenuts, figs and pomegranates grow in profusion.

In this particular photo, Sam's head appears to have been replaced by a sack of satsumas.

Dubrovnik is by far the cleanest and possibly the most attractive city I have ever visited. But in this part of the Balkans, close to the border with Bosnia and Montenegro, the evidence of war is still visible on the walls of buildings near the centre. I realise I am hugely ignorant of the circumstances of the Balkans conflict and turn to the Kindle for a bit of help. I download a good book written by an American journalist during the Kosovo crisis and find myself once again questioning national identity.

We find a family-run camp site nestled between the mountains and the sea just outside Dubrovnik. Friday dawns blue and hot and we spend the day on the beach.

‘I like this Greece,’ says Flora. The campsite owner tells us that some British travellers have been turned away at the border to Montenegro for not having a green card. I’ve heard about green cards for motorists but they are not compulsory and we don’t have one. But we do have all our vehicle documents with us. He also tells us, contrary to what we have been hearing from other sources, that Albania is a very welcoming country and we shouldn’t have any trouble driving through it. He gives us the details for a campsite. I’ll be sad to leave Dubrovnik. I would return here without a moment’s hesitation.

JUST LIKE HOME, ONLY DIFFERENT Croatia, Saturday 22^nd October

Now we know why windsurfers and kite surfers love this peninsula.

Thursday afternoon, I’ve not long finished my last blog post and the sea turns a funny murky green. The sky in the east goes dark and we think it best to unhook the van from the electric supply.

We’re used to the occasional thunderstorm in Lairg and have weathered a few good-going gales, but it feels different inside a van on the edge of an unfamiliar bit of coast. The pine trees next to us grow at odd angles, like the ones in Harris. This should have given us a good indication of what the weather can be like here.

The first fat raindrops bounce off the van and I think, ‘Oh good, the rain will bring the wind down.’ But it doesn’t. During the afternoon, everything intensifies, lightning flashes and thunder booms overhead. The hillside above the van runs with water, loose rocks and pine cones rearranged into long channels.

Flora, Hector and I fall asleep reading stories in the big bed which is actually quite a small bed if you are taller than 5ft 4. I’m not, but Sam is. The upshot of this is that Sam sleeps diagonally across the bed and so to be entirely comfortable, I would need to be about 3ft 2. The noise of the rain on the van is deafening. Sam finishes another Icelandic crime novel on his Kindle. I text Tommy to see how the boys are getting on and he replies with a message saying it snowed for a couple of hours in Lublijana that morning so busking has been postponed for the time being.

It’s so windy we’re reluctant to open the side door. When we do, the effect is like being in a wind tunnel: my hair stands on end and loose bits of paper and baby wipes get sucked into the vortex. Rain is finding its way into the van. Our map of Europe, glued to the inside of the side door, is wet through and looks a hundred years old.

We make sock puppets to entertain Flo and Hector. We drink some wine out of melamine cups decorated with cartoon animals. We marvel at the tenacity of the Austrians and Germans camped out on the tip of the peninsula in caravans and campers, buffeted by the full force of the gale. We marvel again when they take to the water the minute the rain stops and the thunder passes. Hardy lot, the Germans. And contrary to what I might have expected, they’re not young-uns. They’re middle-aged windsurfers, in their fifties or older. We feel like land-lubbing wimps. Sam says he would like to be a beach bum and do a bit of kite surfing but we fear he has missed the boat because he didn’t buy a pair of man-sandals in Germany.

Friday is sunny again, but still windy. Sam spends all day working on the brakes. By the time it gets dark, the work is done, the van is back together again. We eat a weird mix of couscous, cabbage and soya mince for supper. Happy.

THE BEST LAID PLANS - Croatia, Thursday 20^th October 2011

‘It was like waiting for a train. Really tedious.’ So said Max of our last day at home in Lairg, packing up house and van. He passes the time by taking pictures of household objects:

But for me and Sam, it would be fair to say that our last day is anything but tedious.

The original plan was to leave home on Saturday 8^th October. But on Wednesday the 5th, with the van still to get an MOT and a radical interior refit, the slippage factor has set in.  

Bev and Nicky Beavitt turn the van situation around for us on Saturday and Dickie, our new tenant, helps sort out the stable and clear the workshop. Mark Armstrong comes up to collect the workshop keys and leaves some groovy tunes for the road. At 10pm on Sunday evening, no-one is more surprised than us to discover we are actually packed and ready to go. The kids look relieved and nervous, strapped into their new van seats. We smile foolishly at one another and say, ‘We’ve done it. Now we can relax.’

In gusty dreich weather just south of Glasgow at 3.30am, after a few scheduled and unscheduled stops involving baby bike seats and a pink potty, the handlebar of one of the bikes on the back of the van breaks the rear window. Three hours later we madk it to Sam’s folks’ place near Castle Douglas and find ourselves drinking whisky and Crabbies at breakfast time, slightly delirious from lack of sleep and the beginnings of a nasty cold. Not to mention the early morning drams.

We delay our departure for a couple days to fix the rear window and wait until the kids get over their hacking coughs and raging temperatures which have incubated nicely in the van on the way down the A9. But it is great to catch up with the extended Barlow/ Harvey clan and to see Mary and Al as well.

On Thursday evening, we board the ferry to Holland at Harwich. A few years ago, CalMac introduced the possibility of purchasing a ‘café latte’ on board their ships sailing to the Hebrides. This was considered, by me at least, a marvellous innovation. So we are slightly bowled over by Stena Line and the surfeit of on board facilities including casino, cinema, teen computer room, play room etc. Michael entertains the stewards with card tricks and manages to wangle some free Ben & Jerry’s ice cream for himself.

We drive into Amsterdam, not quite sure what to do with ourselves but impressed by bicycle culture, particularly the barrow-like attachments on the front of bikes capable of carrying two or three toddlers at a time.

Flora is still running a temperature and not eating much. She is too ill for sight-seeing but not ill enough to warrant searching for a doctor. We buy some bread and wafers and drive on until, with the help of Uncle Alistair’s handy European campsite directory, we find ourselves a spot in a pine forest a few kilometres off the motorway. The campsite also happens to be adjacent to a training area for the Dutch military. In the directory, mention is made of ‘occasional gunfire’.

Loud bursts of artillery rattle away throughout the night. Hector and Flora are too frightened to play outside the van. The temperature drops to below freezing and the boys’ tent is nicely rimed with frost. We put the optimistic sandals and flip-flops away and get out the boots and big jumpers. 

By 10.30am on Saturday morning, we are back on the road and soon on the German autobahn. The German countryside looks less meticulously managed than the Dutch. We like the unapologetic contemporary structures, the big industrial landscapes. We stop at a campsite near Nassau, an eccentric place the kids love, equipped with zip wires across the river, a homemade play park and giant chess. But it is cold. Really cold. The boys sleep fully-clothed in hats, two sleeping bags and a blanket. I can hear them coughing in the tent next to the van until they eventually fall asleep. I experience a fleeting moment of maternal guilt about making them sleep outside in sub-zero temperatures before snuggling down under the duvet.

We’d been making good progress down the autobahn the following morning until an ominous rumbling starts up. After a minute or two, the rumbling ‘develops’ as Nicky would say, and one of the back tyres blows. Spectacularly. We slough off the road into a handy layby and Sam gets the jack out. I am disappointed we are able to pull right off the motorway and therefore do not need to erect our handy (and compulsory) red triangle which I had ordered months before for this very occurrence.

‘Shall I put up the red triangle?’ I asked Sam.

‘Not necessary,’ he said, from beneath the vehicle.

‘Oh. Are you sure?’

‘Yup. We’re off the autobahn.’

‘Oh alright then.’

We make a detour into a German town to find a tyre shop, forgetting it is Sunday and all those kind of places are shut. We decide to chance it on the spare and head for the Austrian Alps, spending the night in a layby where it is even colder than on previous nights. We let the boys sleep in the van, everyone packed in like sardines, waking up on Monday morning with cold noses and a cracking view of the Alps.

Everyone loves the tunnels through the Alps and on into Slovenia. Slovenia is beautiful in the autumn sunshine and everything is going well until 20km north of Lublijana we hear the ominous rumbling again. It quickly turns into urgent knocking. Weirdly, although it sounds exactly the same, it isn’t a flat this time. After a couple of hours with the van jacked up in a supermarket car park in the town of Kranj, Sam decides the handbrake shoes have rattled loose and that in addition to buying new tyres, he will have to find parts in Lublijana to rebuild the handbrake.

It is late afternoon by the time we find Tommy and Adja’s apartment in the centre of Lublijana. Michael and Max are thrilled at the prospect of a WiFi connection and a few nights in a warm bed away from the van. The rest of us slope off in the rumbly van to find a campsite on the outskirts of the city.

By Tuesday evening, we feel very familiar with the industrial zones of Lublijana. We have new tyres and some parts for the handbrake. Flora, Hector and I have seen a lot of communist-era housing estates. We have hesitated on the edge of many zebra crossings while I switch my traffic-brain from left to right. We call in at Tommy’s with a big bag of dirty laundry, having decided not to pay the ten euro washing and drying fee at the campsite that morning.

Sam wants to find a place where he can fix the van. A bit of hard ground, an electric hook-up. He decides the best place to find this is next to a beach in Croatia. Why not, I say. Yes, they probably have firm ground and electric next to Croatian beaches. At 8pm, we say goodbye to Michael and Max for a few days, and begin driving to the Croatian border.

Stupice campsite in Croatia is perfect. Set in pine trees on the Isterian peninsula, the sea is blue and the air is warm. It is off-season and very quiet. There are windsurfers and kite-surfers here. We have an electric hook-up. We have water and hot showers a-plenty. We have cycle paths. Bafflingly, we have a WiFi connection. A few days rest and relaxation and some motor mechanics beckon. We need to get the handbrake fixed before we get on the Venice-Patras ferry next week. The Adriatic looks pretty choppy today.