All Rhodes Leads to Turkey

POSITION: 36°26’55″N 28°13’37″E

I had a psychic reading once. Just before I drove from London to Ulan Baatar, Mongolia, in a decade-old Suzuki Swift (a Geo Metro to you Yanks). My seer told me I would be successful, but to pay particular attention to the paperwork. It would cause a delay if I didn’t get it right. Sure enough, my buddy Tom and I got stuck at the Romanian border because I wasn’t named on the title of the car and didn’t have notarized permission from its legal owner. (It’s a longer, more riveting story that you can read here: redthreadadventures).

What I didn’t know at the time was how much of adventuring is dealing with paperwork and bureaucracy. It’s a bunch! Particularly if you haven’t got all your (metaphorical) ducks in a folder. Such was the case when we planned to spend a couple of days in Rhodes, then scoot across to Marmaris and begin exploring Turkey. Understandably, the Turks wanted an original copy of Aleta’s registration. That took the US Postal Service 10 days to ship via express mail. They were nimbly abetted by their counterparts in the Hellenic postal service, who sat on our package for two more days. The upshot is we kicked around Rhodes for almost two weeks longer than intended.

Honeymoon

Don’t get me wrong, we like Rhodes. A lot. We spent the first couple of days of our honeymoon there eight years ago, before boarding a charter boat and sailing to Mykonos. From that point, it was our intention to return in our own boat. So, we did. Checking things off our bucket list always makes us feel more accomplished. This time around, given all the extra time, we learned a lot more about the island. Particularly about it being two distinct places, one for the tourists and one for the locals.

Mandraki, Rhodes Town’s ancient harbour, is the place to be. It is less expensive and, we were told, friendlier than the modern marina a couple of kilometres around the corner. 2300-ish years ago, the harbour’s main attraction was a giant statue. At his height, the Colossus of Rhodes stood over 100 feet tall and was one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. He tumbled headlong into the water when an earthquake struck the island in 226 BCE. Several plans to restore the massive bronze statue were postulated but never amounted to anything. It took the pragmatism of an invading Arab army to finally break up the remains and sell them off. Rumours of a reconstruction continue to swirl to this day. I think it’s unlikely. After all, the job has been filled by the Statue of Liberty quite successfully.

Windmills

Situated in the middle of the tourist hubbub, some boaters complain of noise in the harbour. That should not come as a surprise if you’re visiting in the height of summer. By autumn there is plenty of peace and relative quiet. Visitors stroll up and down the quayside during golden hour, admiring the warmth of sunset on the three windmills atop the breakwater. A few hundred metres further they arrive at the old castle and lighthouse and turn back to appreciate the many yachts. It’s an international mix. Besides Greek, there are French, German, Russian, Polish, American and British flagged boats. Their admirers generally disembark from the giant cruise liners and come from all over the world.

Aleta, as ever, was a head turner. One of her fans was a guy from Seattle living in Denmark visiting Rhodes with his Malaysian girlfriend. Later we stayed in the old town at the charming Nikos Takis Fashion Hotel. Its owner, Elias, was so enamoured with our story, and Carol, that he asked to come aboard Aleta for a tour and some insights into cruising life. We happily obliged.

What attracts people here is what has brought them here for centuries. For crusaders arriving by sea, Rhodes was the last stopping point in Christendom before tackling the fruitless task of saving the Holy Land from Islamic rule. More prosaically, with a fine natural harbour, it sits at a trading crossroads that attracted merchants, soldiers, pirates and prostitutes in droves. The city’s fortified walls traded hands over the centuries, occupied most recently by travellers seeking cool, chic, restored accommodation in the maze of yellow gold solid stone alleyways. It’s all very picturesque.

Out of Town

Not far from the city centre is an ancient, largely unrestored, Acropolis, with a large Olympiad left by the Romans. A little further down island lies the ruins of some of ancient Greece’s most important cities. Principle among these is Lindos, with its shoulder-width whitewashed streets and imposing castle. Each turn through the town brings you face to face with tiny shops selling anything from artwork and jewellery to chotskies and sun cream. Pavements of stone mosaics with black sea creatures set against a white background are fashioned from rounded, flat beach rock set side-on. Beautiful to look at, just don’t walk barefoot – it’s most uncomfortable.

Still further down, at the southern tip of the island, is Prasonisi, one of the Med’s best kitesurfing spots. And it’s one of the Aegean’s, since the seas meet on either side of the sandy isthmus. My resident expert on the sport, Carol, says the flat beach is a perfect place to take off. Better, you have a choice of beaches so there’s always an onshore breeze. And the breezes are, we were told, very reliable. The only downer to this wannbe hipster’s surf-style commune is that the road to it passes through a NATO military live firing range and past a honking great oil fired power plant. Such contrasts!

Metrics

After tracking our USPS packet online for days, we got a message saying delivery had been attempted but no one was home. Another delivery attempt would be made the next working day. Our marinero, George, saw no sign of the package, nor had any attempt to contact him been made. My suspicion was the ‘delivery attempt’ was the result of someone fulfilling a metric online, rather than actually doing the work. Nevertheless, the possibility our registration might be on the island was encouraging. We hovered around the next day, a Wednesday, to no avail. On Thursday we took action.

Poking our noses into the main post office, a place even more decoratively depressing than a typical US post office, we handed the chap behind the counter our tracking number. A couple of minutes later he helpfully informed us our package was at the Hellenic Post’s courier service ELTA, about two miles south. We needed a walk and eventually presented our demand to the ‘expediter’ in charge. Poking around his backroom produced our documents and deepened my suspicion that no attempt to deliver was ever made. The fact ELTA is an anagram of LATE wasn’t lost on me, either. But our registration and my new American passport had at last arrived and we were free to leave.

Check Out

All we had to do was check out of the country. A visit to immigration for a stamp, customs for several stamps, and the harbour police for several more stamps and a 5-euro fee took care of that. We decided that as complex as checking into and out of Greece as sailors is, the staff we dealt with were unfailingly helpful and patient. If you have to do old style paperwork, carbon copies and all, at least Greece makes it pleasant. By the time we fired up Aleta’s motor the following morning, we’d explored almost every inch of Rhodes. Old town was all but closed for the season, leaving the city’s few remaining restaurants in the capable hands of year-round residents and university students.

Photos