3.
A Greek Tragedy.
I passed through the Turkish/Greek border the following morning, where I found the normality that I craved. Arriving in Greece felt like going home in a way. I’ve spent a lot of holidays there in the past, so it was probably just the fact that the signs were in Greek and not Turkish that made the difference, as everything else looked the same. Well nearly everything! The roads were well and truly knackered. I went from smooth tarmac on the Turkish side, to a rutted and potholed mess on the Greek side. It really makes a difference when you’re riding a rigid bike. I suppose it was just a sign of the times, as the Greeks had more to worry about than broken roads. A few miles down the road, I saw a couple on a cycle tour going the other way. We chatted for a bit, mostly talking about the dog problem and camping spots. They were happy when I told them that the roads were much better in Turkey. The knackered roads weren’t really a problem for me, as I was using big knobbly tires, but they were on thin road tires and they’d had to get a wheel fixed at a bike repair shop the day before after it was damaged by a massive hole in the road.
I camped that night in a small wood on the outskirts of a Greek town called Alexandrothingy (something like that anyway.) It was quiet and uneventful except for barking dogs in the distance.
I awoke in the morning ill. The dodgy Turkish kebab had finally caught up with me. I’m normally the sort of person who usually shrugs off illnesses, but I couldn’t ignore this, especially when riding a bike. (Use your imagination!) I checked into a campsite with a proper toilet on the other side of Alexandrothingy, where I ended up staying for 3 nights.
I wasn’t 100% better when I set off again, but I couldn’t stay there forever. My body was noticeably weaker now and I struggled for the first time. The roads didn’t help either, not so much the condition of them, I was used to that by then. It was the fact that they’d somehow managed to find enough money to replace some of them and that would’ve been great, but cycling was banned on these new roads. (Although I saw a bloke riding a donkey on one, there weren’t any ‘no donkey’ signs, though!) Instead, I had to follow the back roads which took me everywhere except in the direction I needed to travel. It was late afternoon when I saw a sign pointing down a side road that had camping and national park written on it. It was a bit out of my way, but I headed there anyway with visions of a nice campsite in a wonderful setting in my mind. Unfortunately, reality wasn’t that kind! The campsite turned out to be more like a shanty town comprised of old caravans and lean-tos, it also had a very unhealthy looking, large population of feral dogs. It was getting towards dusk and too late to find an alternative but I couldn’t camp there, so I headed west along a track which led to the national park and ended up camping on a small beach.
It wasn’t a bad location to spend the night. I didn’t bother with my little tent (fortunately, as it turned out!) I faced the sea and positioned myself so that the low cliffs were behind me and to one side and I gathered enough firewood to last through the night and lit a good fire on my open side. Before settling in for the night, I watched the last light of the day slide below the horizon. It really was a beautiful spot.
At home, I’m a heavy sleeper, but out in the wilds, I’m not. I’m always on edge, sleeping with one eye open, just in case....
I awoke at about 2am to build the fire up again. It was a bit chilly, but it was mostly to help me feel more secure at night. In hindsight, I would probably have been better off without a fire.
I awoke again about an hour later, but that time it was different, something wasn’t right. I listened for a few moments: nothing. But why had I woken up? I switched my head torch on and scanned the surrounding area and that’s when I saw them. A set of eyes further down the beach, the dim light of my torch was just enough to make them shine. I thought it was a fox at first but then they were joined by another and another. Dogs!
I had chosen that beach to sleep on as it was away from the rundown campsite with the resident feral dogs which I had passed earlier. Deciding to sleep out was a wise choice as my little tent wouldn’t have offered any protection, but having a fire was probably a mistake and an open invitation for the dogs to pay me a visit.
Fortunately, I was paranoid! Before I’d turned in for the night, I had fixed my knife onto a long stick. It was designed for this and was comforting to have throughout my journey, but none more so than that night. I also had my dog stick.
Every dog encounter that I’d had so far had involved noisy but not very vicious dogs. I’d had to hit a few with my dog stick whilst cycling, but they were only doing what comes naturally to them; chasing. The dog encounter on the beach was a bit bloody different to say the least. It would haunt me for the rest of my journey and still does now!
The first few dogs (3 or 4?) were very vocal when they ran along the beach to my location. Not too vicious, although I had to give them a few whacks when they got too close. By this time, I had retreated up the cliff a little bit, onto a ledge about 4ft up, my dog stick in one hand and my ‘spear’ in the other. I can’t quite remember what my emotions were at the time, but I didn’t panic, so I must have felt in control of the rapidly escalating situation.
The fear came a few seconds later, when I heard more dogs running down the shingle on the beach, they were quieter and seemed focused on eating me, for some reason. I only managed to stop them jumping onto my ledge with the help of my dog stick. (Sjambok whips have a horrible reputation in South Africa where they have been used for oppression and torture, but I wouldn’t be writing this if I hadn’t had one to hand that night.) I don’t know how it happened, but one of the dogs somehow got its jaws around my dog stick and ran off up the beach with it. This escalated things somewhat, as the next dog ended up meeting a pointy stick when it tried to jump onto the ledge, I slashed it down the length of its foreleg and it ran off yelping. It’s hard to describe my emotions from that moment as it was happening so quickly. I love dogs, but not enough to get eaten by one!
The other dogs seemed to shy away a bit after that, with two of them fighting over the possession of my best long t-shirt. (It wasn’t the best after that!) I thought things were calming down until I heard what sounded like a horse galloping down the beach. A huge dark shape appeared in the dim light of the fire, I suppose it was still a dog, but it looked more bear like as it ran towards me, knocking other dogs out of the way in its haste to reach my position. There wasn’t much that I could do, I just pointed my puny looking spear at it and hoped for the best. It was massive and didn’t break its stride as it surged towards my location, the spear entered its lower chest area as it came up the cliff towards my ledge. It just ran onto it, I didn’t thrust with it or anything! The force of the attack pushed me back into the rock face and I was worried that it would fully impale itself just to get to me! (Like wild boar have been known to do.) It was frantically snapping its jaws together just 2 or 3 feet from my face, but then I saw the fight go from its eyes and it dropped back down from the ledge, freeing my spear as it fell. They disappeared as quickly as they arrived, leaving me to spend the rest of the night quivering and shaking on the ledge.
Relief only came with the light of dawn, although I was still nervous. I eventually got down from the ledge when the sun came up and threw everything that the dogs had touched into the sea to help clean them as I was really concerned about them having rabies. Fortunately, I didn’t come into contact with them and I steered well away from any blood.
Throughout the attack, my food bag was next to my bike, near the fire and it was still untouched. What were they after? I’ll never know, but it wasn’t my food. Maybe I was their intended supper?
After cleaning and packing up, I headed back up the beach towards the track. I found my dog stick about a hundred yards along the beach, slightly chewed up but still serviceable. I found the big dog lying dead near to the track and it gave me the opportunity to study it closer. Before I left home, I’d read about the fierce dogs which shepherds use to guard their flocks in the Balkan countries. They had worried me more than the wildlife which I might encounter, but I thought I’d only come across them in the mountains and not on a beach in Greece. They’re bred to kill the bears and wolves which threaten the flocks of sheep, so I was very fortunate not to come to grief that night. Yes it was one, probably a stray. I felt sad (thinking of my little dog at home). I regretted camping where I had, but there was nowhere else. I had just done what needed to be done, although I really wished that it had turned out differently. There were people walking along the track from the shanty campsite and to avoid a confrontation in case the dog turned out to be somebody’s pet, I turned around and headed west along the track through the national park.
It was a really nice place; hilly and unspoilt with waterfalls and small streams meandering through the trees which stretched all the way down to the sea. Old ruins dotted the landscape. This was more like it! Typically though, I didn’t have time to enjoy it; the weather was hotting up and I had a long day ahead of me before I could reach my intended campsite further along the coast.
The roads were small but good, although once again they took me everywhere except in the direction I needed to travel in. I got to my destination at dusk, a small campsite at a tiny coastal village called Fanari. Unfortunately, the campsite had shut down, leaving me with nowhere to stay but more importantly, very little water.
I ended up backtracking a mile or so to a kind of land bridge area, the sea was on one side of the road and a lagoon was on the other. I wasn’t taking any chances after the previous night’s events, so I slept in a roofed ‘Bay Watch’ type shelter about 15ft up. “Get me up here, dogs!”
The following night was also spent camped on a beach approximately 10 miles from the city of Kavala. I was knackered and just couldn’t go any further. There were dogs about, but I was past caring. “Eat me if you want?” (They didn’t!) The following morning, I found a campsite a few minutes ride from the beach. “Oh well, I’ve saved a few quid!”
In the centre of Kavala, I met another cyclist on a long trip. I can’t for the life of me remember his name, he was a Dutch guy who lived in Macedonia, or was he a Macedonian who lived in Holland? I never did figure that out. Anyway, he told me about a campsite on the other side of the town, which sounded like a good idea as I was down to 2 gears on my bike and I really needed to sort it out because it was going to get hilly soon.
The ‘Dutch’ bloke was also camping there and again, at last, it was great to be able to have a decent conversation with somebody who spoke good English. (My last proper face to face conversation had been in Gallipoli!) He had cycled there from the Macedonian capital city of Skopje and was planning to go back via Bulgaria, but he was really concerned about the stray dogs. (They’re worse there apparently!) He also told me about thousands of Syrian refugees walking through Macedonia. I hadn’t heard about this and I listened attentively. As he spoke several languages, he was able to communicate with them properly and he said that they were mostly friendly. (I would slightly disagree with that statement, but that’s for later.)
After fixing my bike, I went food shopping. My diet for the past few days had mostly consisted of plain pasta, as my stomach was still giving me problems but I switched to plain rice and bananas after some advice from people on Facebook.
Talking of which, where would we be without modern technology? I’d probably still be somewhere in northern Greece! My maps were nearly useless, so I had been navigating off Google maps on my phone since Turkey. It was working well, but the battery didn’t last more than a day, so charging it was becoming a bit of a problem. The battery packs which I charged via the solar panel were ok as a back-up, but they had limited capacity. These, along with charging points on campsites, enabled me to know where the heck I was and where I was going.
My GPS tracker was working like a dream, but only for the people watching my progress back home; it didn’t help me whatsoever! It was a great way to stay in touch with Ruthy, though. I pressed the message button every morning to let her know I was ok and every evening so she knew where I was staying the night. It was also reassuring to know that help was only a button press away if anything really bad had happened. I wished that I could have afforded to buy a touch screen GPS device with European mapping before I left home. I looked into it, but they were too expensive. The battery life was about 10 times longer than my phone and they had better mapping, but hey, I managed and it would have just been another thing that would have needed charging.
Most people don’t know about the Macedonian Campaign of World War One, which is quite sad really, as although there were a lot less casualties than on the Western Front, it was no less bloody and the casualty rates were as a percentage, actually higher.
Since leaving the Greek city of Alexandrothingy (Alexandroupolis) I had been roughly following the stabilised front lines which resulted from the Bulgarian Struma offensive of August 1916.
At the start of the war, the Greeks were split and they couldn’t agree about who to side with. The Greek Prime Minister Eleftherios Venizelos wanted to honour an agreement to go to Serbia’s aid if they were attacked by Bulgaria. Unfortunately, the Greek King, Constantine I, was sympathetic to the Germans, he conspired to remove Venizelos from office in October 1915, but despite Greek neutrality in the first half of the war, the Entente, (British, French, Italian, Russian and Serbian) troops used Greek territory to continue the war against the Central Powers. This changed after the Struma offensive when the Greek army were ordered not to offer resistance to the Invading Bulgarian army. In October 1916 a Greek Provisional Government of National Defence headed by Venizelos was set up in Salonika (Thessaloniki) to rival the official government in Athens. Although Greece didn’t officially declare war on the Central Powers until 1917 when King Constantine I abdicated in favour of his son, Alexander. The reunification of Greece then followed, under the leadership of Venizelos.
The Bulgarians captured all of the territory east of the river Struma, including the cities of Kavala, Drama and Serres, thus forcing the Entente to fortify the area around Salonika to prevent this from being taken as well, which became known as the ‘Birdcage’ defences.
I had tried to research these defences before I left home, but I was unable to find out definitively, so instead I made the decision to roughly follow the line of the Bulgarian advance by heading north and west from Kavala, passing through the cities of Drama and Serres, before hopefully going up Tumba Peak; part of the Belasica Mountain range which straddles the borders of Greece, Macedonia and Bulgaria.
Just as I entered the outskirts of Drama, a massive thunderstorm appeared out of nowhere. I took cover in a bus shelter and watched the drama unfold. (Sorry!) Lightning was hitting hills, trees and power lines and the streets were starting to flood. I wisely decided not to risk camping, so when it had finally stopped I found a cheap hotel in the centre before having a look around.
Drama was a really nice city and I was surprised that it was remarkably clean and tidy. I‘ve visited Greece quite a few times before, but on my way through northern Greece, I had really noticed all the signs that the Greek people were struggling to cope with the austerity measures imposed upon them. The most obvious sign for me was the state of the roads; they were mostly knackered, with potholes filled with rubble instead of tarmac. It was also impossible not to notice the amounts of homeless people and beggars, I’d never seen this before in Greece and it was quite a shock. The look on people’s faces also told the tale; they looked downcast and worried. It’s no wonder really, as Greece used to be a cheap and happy place to visit, but prices started to rise when they changed their currency to the Euro. I remember being slightly taken aback during a holiday in the Pelion area of Greece upon learning that most Greeks had to have more than one job to survive. Now Greeks are lucky to even have one job, so how are they managing? From what I saw, on the whole, they’re not...
After Drama and Serres, I spent my last night in Greece camped in some woods on the shores of Lake Kirkini. It’s a stunning place of hills, mountains and wildlife. Lake Kerkini is a very popular location for birdwatchers who flock (sorry) to it from around the world and if the noises and squawks which kept me awake all night are anything to go by, then they’ll have plenty to look at!