Greg and Mandy's Travels

Wandered up and down the long Singapore Changi concourses watching the sun rise, and waiting for our last flight – a small Silk Air Airbus to Darwin – arriving back in the great south land just after lunch.

It’s been a great trip.

We visited 15 different countries in 60 days, and got over 50 stamps in our passport, exchanged 12 different currencies, slept in 22 different beds, did 24 tours and one cruise. We travelled in planes, trains, trams, buses, ferries, yachts, cars, taxis, funiculars and an underground trolley. We walked over 927,000 steps, a total of 602 km (about the same distance as Melbourne to Canberra), at a rate of just over 10.5 km per day.…

Well, what can we say about Turkey? Probably a few things that are safer to say now that we’ve actually left. Turkey, like many countries with ancient cultures, is a bit of a contradiction. It’s really an older civilisation trying to come to grips with being in the modern world.

Up until the end of WWI, it was a world power as the islamic Ottoman Empire, with a corresponding sense of entitlement. At the start of the 20th century, the Sultan had realised that they were declining both as a regional power and as a cultural force, and started to try to bring the empire into the new century.…

The Bosphorus Strait is one of the most strategic bits of water in the world. Together with the Dardanelles a little way south, they control access from the Black Sea to the Aegean Sea which connects to the Mediterranean and the rest of the world. Whoever has controlled the Strait has controlled trade and held the fate of countries in their hands.

It was one of the reasons that Constantine moved the capital of the Roman Empire from Rome to his new capital Constantinople. Over successive centuries it became a prized, strategic possession. When you think that the mighty Russian empire only has a couple of warm water ports (the other one is Vladivostok way over near Japan), having a route from the Black Sea in the event of a crisis is a game changer, and so right up until the Cold War it’s been at the forefront of worldwide military strategy.…

I learned a few things today.

Firstly, I learned that whilst anybody can build a mosque in Turkey, they can have at most one minaret (that’s the tower that they used to climb to call the faithful to prayer, but now prefer to have speakers mounted on to save their legs). If a mosque has four or more minarets then they have been constructed by a Sultan. Every Sultan worth his saffron (did you know that saffron is more expensive than gold?) would commission his own mosque as his own tribute to himself, and it would bear his name. 

So there is actually no such thing as the Blue Mosque, although that’s what the people call it.…

We made it. The planes were still flying, though we got a bit buffeted. The incoming flight from Athens was running a bit late, so we left about 20 minutes after our scheduled time which cut our transfer time at Athens airport down to 40 minutes. Given that we were transferring from a domestic flight to an international flight, and therefore had to work out our gate, change terminals, go through passport control and security checks, and make it to the bus in time was a tad stressful.

However we ran the length of the airport, and the gate staff sighed when we turned up.…

Rats. It’s our last day. Up early to hit the bakery for a last coffee and pastry, and to watch the dawn break over the harbour. Lovely morning, but of course it’s predicted to go down hill from here. Greece has been magnificent. The warmest, friendliest and most patient of any of the nations we have visited on this trip. Genuine smiles, lovely food, reasonable prices. What’s not to love.

I had visions of sailing into Santorini harbour late afternoon as the sun set, having a final drink to celebrate our mastery of sailing, and pledging eternal fealty to our fellow crew, but that was nowhere near what transpired.…

It’s like somebody stepped on an ant’s nest. The forecast of a force 10 gale tomorrow is still current, and is likely to last for a few days, so every boat of every size is madly trying to get where they want to be so they don’t get trapped where they don’t. It’s likely to be very widespread, so pretty much all of Italy and Greece is locked down.

G Adventures has 6 boats in the area. Two have been grounded in Athens, two in Mykonos, and two in Ios. (Ok, I know that technically ships are not grounded, well until after the storm anyway, but I can’t think of the correct nautical term).…

Have I told you why buildings on the Greek Islands are traditionally white with blue trim? Thought not. In days of yore there were no antiseptics, and the best thing on hand to kill bugs (not that they knew about germs and bacteria then anyway) was lime. And there came upon the land a pestilence now known as cholera, and the decree went out that all houses needed to be lime washed to avoid the cholera spreading And lo, this decree was enforced with vigour, so all buildings ended up white, whether the occupants were happy about it or not. When it turned out to be an effective treatment, all buildings remained white, even though, of course, they are now all painted instead of limed.…

I don’t know which excited our skipper more – the fact that the north wind had died right away overnight, or the option to visit Pana Koufonissi today, one of the smallest of the Greek Island in the group known as the Cyclades, and an island he’d never been to before. Of more concern on the horizon is that there is a force 10 storm predicted in the area next week, and warnings have been sent to all skippers to make for a safe port. As a comparison, yesterday’s blow was only a force 6, but we all agreed that this was in the future, and we might well be finished before it arrives (if it ever does).…

The two G Adventure boats in the harbour decided to join forces for a day tour around the island, and hired 5 cars. Started with coffee of course, picked up the cars, then headed off towards the south of the island to Demeter’s Temple, an ancient temple built around 500B.C. devoted to the God of farming and soil fertility, which was of course partially knocked down and rebuilt into a church by the Greek Orthodox folk, and then partially knocked down and rebuilt into a mosque by the Ottomans, and then restored to a church, and finally restored to a temple (well as much as it could be) by the university from about 1994.…