DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

The new Athens airport has two Olympic stores. I saw them both. We had three hours to kill, and it’s not that big an airport.

We found a newsstand selling English-language paperbacks. I picked up a title that looked interesting, some kind of crime-fiction beach novel, and gasped at the price: $15. The next one I checked cost $17. I could buy the entire Grisham library for $17 on half.com.

Our flight to Santorini was delayed, but the delay was not announced. We sat at the gate as our boarding time came and went, wondering whether we were in the right place.

The plane, when it finally arrived, was an abused-looking propeller craft. The interior reminded me of United Airlines circa 1985, with synthetic fabric seatcovers stretched tight across lumpy, uncomfortable, too-vertical frames. There were two seats on each side of the aisle, one class of service (“marginal”), and scratched and dirty windows through which photography would be compromised. I was denied the image of “Santorini from the air” that was supposed to accompany last Friday’s entry. And so began our descent.

A taxi drove us to Ia, a town at the northern tip of the island. Rena, the proprietress of the inn where we’d booked lodging, came out to greet us as we pulled up. She led us up a half-dozen concrete stairs, tough to navigate with our heavy bags, and turned left down a busy sidewalk lined with shops. Our suitcases have wheels, but the sidewalk was uneven — stones in mortar, cobblestone-rough in places.

We didn’t have far to go, but is it turns out, we weren’t going to our room. We’d only stopped for an orange juice. Hospitable but, under the circumstances, poorly thought out, for our apartment was a half-mile in the other direction. Because our flight had been late, the porter had gone home for the day. We dragged our suitcases for 20 minutes through crowds of fresh-off-the-bus tourists, all of whom watched us like we were some sort of local attraction: “Look, tourists!”

We marched on and on, over rough stones, down and up steps, shouldering our way through the crowds into the late-afternoon sun. Did I mention the heat? We were drenched. Did I mention the crap? The town of Ia hosts a population of wild dogs and cats; the sidewalks feature frequent installations of canine and feline digestive art.

Finally, up ahead, Rena turned left off the main thoroughfare. Steps descended and twisted away down the cliffside. There was nothing to do but lift the suitcase and follow. On and on we went, down a ridiculous number of sun-baked concrete steps. We had to stop as a large mutt urinated on the steps ahead of us. After it finished, we lifted our bags and stepped carefully across the spreading, steaming pool. This was a low point in a check-in journey best described by the word “miserable.”

(Some people would begin to laugh at this point. It was so hot, so disgusting, so generally bad, that lots of reasonable people would just give it all up and laugh at their circumstances, certain that things had to get better soon. But not me… I think I have a higher capacity for misery than most people.)

We came to a crazy-steep run of stairs, some a foot high. There were no handrails, just distant concrete patios to break one’s fall. Rena had gamely been dragging one of our thousand-pound bags, but at this point I had to carry both down the stairs. It was grueling and entirely unsafe; had I leaned forward beyond my balance, I’d surely have cracked my skull open on the steps, then been crushed by my own luggage. Perhaps that’s a suitable fate for people who tend to travel heavy.

At the base of the steep steps, Rena turned left and crossed a terrace to reach the front door of the cave house we’d rented. My first impression: the place was huge. Had this cavern been in Missouri, it would have been Jesse James’ hideout.

My second impression: it was very warm and somewhat dank inside. The further in we went, the warmer it felt. The lack of obvious air-conditioning controls could mean only one thing: we wouldn’t be needing any of those sheets or blankets on the bed. To put it mildly.

The size of the place made us nervous. We were certain Rena, who is not fluent in English, had confused our request and put us in the $150/night apartment rather than the $100/night apartment.

So we’d arrived… feeling exhausted, overheated, lost and unsettled. We couldn’t unpack because we were sure we’d be moving to a smaller, cheaper room the next day. We couldn’t cool off because our concrete cave retained heat like a pizza stone in a brick oven. We festered. Or, at least, I did. I’m good at it. (It’s important to know one’s strengths.)

Fortunately, we had four days in the most visually stunning city in Greece to recover. Here’s a teaser image of Ia from the west as the morning sun crests over the ridge.

Here’s the worst thing about leaving town: my server always dies. No, wait, the worst thing is not being able to get my laptop online to diagnose the problem. No, wait, the worst thing is having to rent a slow Windows PC with a Greek keyboard and a gimpy mouse, by the minute, because I have to try to fix the problem anyway. No, wait, the worst thing is the Internet Cafe people have stripped out all the control panels so I cannot change to the Dvorak key layout and I’m therefore reduced to hunting and pecking as I type my desperate emailed help requests. No, wait, the worst thing is that in the stress of the moment I cannot remember any of my passwords because I haven’t used them in two weeks. No, wait, the worst thing is that everyone around me is sucking down cigarettes as if the faint wisps of fresh sea air coming in the door are toxic and must not be breathed at any cost. No, wait, the worst thing is the NetCredit timer software ticking away my last Euro seconds before I finish composin

“You’re going on vacation in Greece?!” exclaimed my brother. “That’s such a Euro thing to do. What’s next, a man-purse?”

Well, there will be no man-purse in my immediate future — not even one of those nice leather ones with the fancy tooling around the edges that match my chaps. But I will be in Greece for the next 10 days. Updates are sure to be sporadic. I can say that with certainty because it’s already 4 days later and I haven’t written anything since I got here.

Here are four more images from the Rotweinwanderweg.

I’ve heard the expression rocky soil, but I think this is beyond rocky-as-adjective. The soil is rock.

The grapes don’t seem to mind, though. They were huge. It’s harvest time, which means the grapes are not only fat and juicy and ripe, but sweet too. I couldn’t prevent my companions from sampling a few bunches. (I couldn’t prevent myself from sampling the samples, either.)

This is a typical vista on the trail, as it winds between (and in one case, through) vineyards.

This is another typical vista: a small town just down the hill, vines growing practically up to the front doors.

The weather in Germany is frequently rainy. Citizens seem to embrace this, as dismal as it is. Perhaps they’ve all chosen to remain here because the grey skies give them something to be displeased about. (Complaining is a national pasttime.) (Hmm, come to think of it, I’d fit right in.)

Yet for six weeks over the summer, there was no rain. The dry spell did not affect the vegetation, so far as I can see — the countryside is as lush and green as pond water downstream from the phosphate factory — but the rivers have shrunk appreciably.

Now the Rhine has an extra 20 feet of shore on each side, revealing about a zillion clamshells and a few discarded tires. Not far from the eastern bank stands the Dom, the Köln Cathedral, imposing like a nun at the back of a grade-school classroom, ruler in hand, veil not quite hiding the dark scowl. The huge church is oppressive in spite of its coating of thousand-year-old grime.

Rhine Stones
I never pass an opportunity to stack river stones into sculpture — order from chaos, balance in defiance of gravity, art using raw materials from nature. (Yes, I’m a fan of Andy Goldsworthy.) Faintly visible in the background are two gondola cars from the Kölner Seilbahn.

Urban Recycling
The modernization of the German steel industry has orphaned a number of steelworks. We visited one that has been uniquely repurposed as a tourist attraction, Landschaftspark Duisburg-Nord. An artist (Jonathan Park) was commissioned to create a permananent installation of primary-colored lights, which at night transform this enormous, hundred-year-old industrial blight into surreal beauty.

This is an exhibition that would last about 24 hrs in America, because that’s how long it would take a visitor to fall down one of the poorly-lit metal staircases and sue the park owners into bankruptcy. The passages and stairs have to be dark, or else the effect of the colored lights would be lost. The Germans pick their way through carefully in spite of the danger, and the exhibit is much better for it.

Not pictured, but equally impressive as an example of urban recycling is the ~80 foot tall Gasometer (storage tank) on the premises. It was scrubbed clean, filled with water, and is now the classroom for a scuba diving school.

Rotweinwanderweg
The Ahr Valley is home to a number of small picturesque villages and a greater number of wineries. The towns, and the train connecting them, fill the valley. Climbing the steep hillsides are row after row of grape vines.

The “red wine hiking trail” runs along the ridgetop. Every few kilometers, a side trail descends to a town, which offers regional fried specialties in any number of charming restaurants.

The trail is not a loop, but the train in the valley makes one-way hikes easy. We hiked up the valley for two or three hours, stopped for lunch, hiked on to the next town, and then rode the train back to our car.

In the town of Altenahr we passed the local Metzgerei. The logo leaves little question about what happens inside.