The Golden Step (2 page)

The one electronic device I would allow myself, thanks to a well-honed apprehension about stray dogs (I had encountered on past occasions the immense wolf-like beasts the Cretan shepherds called dogs, far from their masters and keen to show me all their teeth), was a Dog Dazer, a clever little gizmo that emits an ultrasonic scream, inaudible to humans but highly unpleasing to dogs. It had saved my ankles several times before, and also provided a moment of high comedy on a previous occasion when, walking with a party of Americans in the hills of Provence, a pair of local Cerberuses had come racing at us out of a farm track. When I pressed the Dazer's button the dogs screeched to a halt cartoon-style, did a music hall double take, and ran off yowling into a cornfield. ‘What happened to them?' my companions wanted to know. ‘Oh, it's a kind of high frequency ray that jellies their brains,' I deadpanned, trying to be funny. ‘I killed 'em.'

Never in the field of human irony-bypass can eyes and mouths have opened so wide. ‘Oh – my –
Gaahd!
' they gasped. ‘You … you
killed
them? Oh, the poor, poor things! Quick, we must find their owner and … Oh my God, what if he sues? Who's got any cash?'The whip-round was well under way, and the Somerville name turning to the muddiest shade of mud, by the time I managed to demonstrate the Dazer's harmlessness on a nearby cow. But I don't think the Americans ever quite believed anything I told them after that. I kept catching them looking sideways at me.

‘Go where you want and do what you like,' Jane had said. ‘There's just one prohibition. No writing.' That was a shrewd blow. I had been making a full-time living as a travel writer for the previous ten years. Travel writing is a precarious business, very much subject to the whims of fashion and the caprices of commissioning editors. He who keeps a full wall planner survives. Every trip taken, every family holiday, every walk in the country becomes a means of generating income. A Sunday afternoon stroll with friends in the Cotswolds? Turn that into a Walk of the Month for the
Daily Blah
. A family week in Cornwall? ‘How to Amuse Stroppy Teenagers on Holiday' for the
Sunday Sloth
. A sudden summons to London? ‘Ten Museums in Half a Day' for
Jabberwocky Magazine
. And so on. Without my wife's embargo I'd be scurrying round for Cretan commissions; I'd take every sidestep to every famous site; I'd arrange ‘just an hour, honestly' meetings with tourist representatives. I'd be note-taking all day and scribbling all night. There would be pressure to perform, to move along, to get somewhere and do something. In other words, I'd be tense all the time and I wouldn't see a thing.

Drop all that, was Jane's injunction. Go with the flow. If you want to stop, stop. If you want to walk on, keep going. If someone invites you, say yes. If you can't be arsed to visit this or that site, then don't. You're not writing a guidebook, or any sort of book. You've been living by timetables and in the future far too much. Don't plan this adventure; let it happen to you, day by day. Live in the moment, just for once. If you're going to have this experience, then for heaven's sake have it to the hilt and beyond. Otherwise, do something else.

That was fantastically liberating, and also quite frightening. How was I actually going to cope with two months of not working, of not worrying about anything except how to get from A to B over tough terrain, and how to secure a plate of food and a bed for the night when I got there? How could I prevent myself transferring my time-of-life anxieties to the trip, to the route, to my welfare, to a hundred and one potential bugbears? There and then I made a resolution to try to trust to common sense and the kindness of strangers. The latter I knew I could rely on – Cretans, especially mountain dwellers, are some of the most hospitable people on earth. The former I was more dubious about.

The fact is that travel writers, in their operations for national newspapers and magazines, have a very unreal experience of travel. Someone offers, arranges and pays for your flight, your hire car and hotel. A charming sticky-haired girl in a red bolero meets you at the airport with a sheaf of booklets and maps, with complimentary passes and a timetable which, if you don't hold out against it, will skewer you to five dawn calls, five long lunches, five very long and boozy dinners, ten coffee meetings (‘including the Mayor of the Regional Commune and the Head of the Bureau of Local Initiatives Touristical'), and twenty trips with a driver and interpreter whose English is just a little better than yours to visit a brand new tourist attraction that will make you an hour late for your next coffee meeting with the promoter of a rival attraction forty miles down the highway. Unless you are very firm about being left to your own devices and finding your own story in your own way, you can wake up one day to find that your powers of planning and thinking and acting for yourself have leached away. You can actually discover that you are
frightened
of travel, in the sense that proper travellers of the calibre of Freya Stark or Wilfred Thesiger or Patrick Leigh Fermor would have understood it: a setting off into the unknown and unpredictable. And you can certainly find that those powers you once took for granted as innate – knowing intuitively the direction to head for, finding the right place to doss down under the stars, making the best of a bad job in adversity, lucking across the very person who can help you out of a fix – have become blunt and unreliable. I wasn't sure just how much I had declined towards becoming a tourist rather than a traveller, and this was the perfect way to find out.

I petitioned for, and was granted, permission to keep a journal of my wanderings. Other than that, it would be Jane's way for me. And as soon as I decided to let it all just happen, things became a whole lot easier. I fixed up a few lessons in Greek with Aglaia Hill, a charming Greek-born teacher who lived a few streets away from me. We had great fun devising a personalised phonetic phrase-book, all the way from
Meé-pos échete thomátio ya ména?
(‘Do you by any chance have a room for me?') to
On
í
ra gliká!
(‘Sweet dreams!') and my favourite, a fiercely shouted
Páre ta skiliá!
(‘Call off your dogs!'). Preparing for the walk now was merely a question of deciding how little I could get away with carrying on my back, filling my pockets to bursting with drachmas, and fixing a date. Greek Orthodox Easter seemed a good and suitable time to start the walk in Kato Zakros. Springtime in Crete should guarantee decent weather (I could take a risk and leave the tent at home), and there would be sheets of wild flowers all the way. I could hope to reach Hrissoskalitissas monastery just in time for Whitsun, which would nicely book-end the adventure. And a Cretan Easter with its processions of flowers and candles, its midnight feasts and shattering volleys of firecrackers would be a great send-off, too.

Arriving in Iraklion with a few days to spare before the Easter celebrations, I made straight for the premises of SOHI, the Iraklion branch of the Greek Alpine Club. It was the Greek Alpine Club that had initially surveyed and way-marked European Hiking Route E4. A phone call to its secretary Kitsa had convinced me that among the members of the Club lay my only hope of finding someone to tell me at least something definite about the mountain path, already assuming a mythic or dream-like quality in my inner eye thanks to a complete absence of hard information on its terrain, its present state or even its actual whereabouts. ‘You'll find us up the stairs at 53, Dikeosinis Street – but only between 8.30 and 10.30 on weekday evenings,' Kitsa warned me over the phone. ‘We Cretans are proper mountaineers, you know, and during daylight … well, we like to be up in the mountains.'

Seeds of my Cretan odyssey had been sown several years before by Charis Kakoulakis, erstwhile President of OYK, the Long Distance Club of Crete. Charis is a wide-screen dreamer, fingerer of many pies and passionate man of Crete. He had been my friend, educator and Mr Fixit in Crete for ages. His work as press officer for the island's tourist organisation, fantastically haphazard in most respects, was the anchor that prevented Charis from floating clean away on a sea of wonderful schemes. But the great Minoa Kelefthos trans-Cretan running race was his very special baby from the start. ‘Christopher,' he'd rhapsodised in his airless Iraklion office, ‘this is going to be a very bloody marvellous thing. Everyone will come to Crete and we will give them all hospitalities. Everything will be very nice,' and he emphasised the point with a patent Charis gesture, forming a circle of completion with forefinger and thumb, then making a horizontal pass with it in the air that drew a definitive line under an invisible apex of perfection.

A noble idea that briefly found its moment in the early 1990s, the Minoa Kelefthos super-marathon invited the world's elite long-distance runners to compete in the most gruelling of mountain races from end to end of Crete. Their course, the reverse of mine, started with morning prayers at Hrissoskalitissas monastery out west, and finished twelve days and some 300 miles later with a sizzle of tortured feet in the sea at Kato Zakros in the east. On the steepest stages – the inhospitable White Mountains of the west, the ascent of the fearsome 6,000-ft deep Samaria Gorge, the slopes of Crete's highest mountain, Psiloritis – participants were permitted to slow to a walk. Elsewhere it was all running. The terrain was consistently rubbly and breakneck, ankles always likely to be turned or broken. Vertical drops and fathomless sinkholes were often only a stumble away. Rest stages – typically a mat on the floor of a village hall – were few and far between. All the competitors gained at the end was honour, glory and a pair of battered feet.

Remarkably, no-one died or was seriously hurt. Even more astonishingly, some of the pioneers and a handful of acolytes came back for more punishment over the same course a couple of years later. The whole splendid enterprise fell apart after that, a victim of lack of money and leadership. But the Minoa Kelefthos had left an intriguing legacy – the idea that the whole length of Crete could be travelled on one continuous footpath, and not necessarily at the double. Where runners had blazed the trail over mountains and down screes, through forest and up gorges, walkers might follow. I was powerfully drawn to the notion, and even more so when I discovered on looking more closely at the maps that the Minoa Kelefthos runners had in fact been mostly following a route that had already been surveyed, brought into being and waymarked as European Hiking Route E4.

The European Hiking Routes, numbered 1 to 11, were the brainchildren of the European Ramblers' Association, founded in Germany in 1969. It was another noble idea: Europe's citizens in free flow across cultural and political borders, carrying with them the healthful spirit of internationalism as they strode from Sweden to Italy along E1's string of high paths, or followed E3 from Santiago de Compostela on the stormy Atlantic coast to the shores of the Black Sea, or ventured the 3,230 miles from Lapland to the Aegean Sea along E6's mighty southward course. The notion of Spaniard and Bulgarian meeting with broad smiles and hearty handshakes among the Carpathian mountains of the Czech Republic, or Finn and Greek slapping each other on the back in the Austrian Alps, is a great and inspiring one. The fact that, in a purely practical sense, no rambler would be likely to find the time, the money or the multiple languages to accomplish the European Hiking Routes is by the way. More to the point, standards of way-marking and of maintenance of the E-paths by volunteers have varied enormously from one country to the next. Those European nations with a deep-rooted history of long-distance leisure hiking, such as Germany and Austria, tend to keep their European Paths in good order. Those without such traditions are less enthusiastic, more neglectful and more strapped for cash, a manifestation that becomes more marked the further south one looks. Crete, as a glance at the map shows, is the most southerly place in Europe.

Kitsa turned out to be a bird-like woman in her early 60s with a pair of very sharp eyes. With her in the little club room at the top of the stairs sat two younger men. Pantelis Kampaxis was a slim, athletic chap of twenty something, with plenty of charm and a nice girl by his side. The other man – ‘Pantatosakis, Iannis,' he introduced himself formally, adding a bone-crusher handshake – a former hero of the Minoa Kelefthos race, looked most impressive, a low-slung and stocky Hercules with a black beard and close-cut hair flecked with silver. Together we spread out my two pathetic-looking maps with their unconvincing red threadworm of a path. Iannis Pantatosakis stabbed his strong forefinger at various points along the route and shot out terse descriptions of each successive section, while I scribbled frantically in my notebook. The phrases fell like tablets of stone from the mountain: ‘Good road … asphalt from here to here … good road … dirt road … water here … shelter there … little bit problem here … dirt road … good road …' From what I could gather during this two-minute seminar, the whole trip would be a breeze, a gentle wander all the way on asphalt or dirt roads. Looking furtively at the mighty calves and barrel chest of Pantatosakis, his air of frighteningly hardy self-reliance, I wasn't entirely convinced by the dismissive ‘No problem, it's very easy' with which he concluded his survey.

Soon Pantatosakis, a man clearly ill at ease between four walls, was on his way down the stairs, three at a time. When he had gone, Kitsa and Pantelis Kampaxis filled me in on a few realities. I couldn't quite make out how much of the route was actually visible as a path on the ground, but it was clear that the Cretan leg of E4 was in an unfinished state. The route was supposed to be way-marked with ‘E4' signs in yellow and black, mounted as tin cut-outs on tall poles or painted onto prominent rocks along the way. But rain, sun, snow and itchy goats in search of a scratching place had worn away many of the painted signs, while most of the pole-mounted markers had been taken for souvenirs, snapped off for vandalistic fun, or shot full of holes by shepherds at target practice. One particular section, the seemingly straightforward run of coast between Agia Roumeli and Sougia towards the end of the walk, they wouldn't recommend I touch with a barge-pole. ‘Very bad marking,' said Kitsa, frowning, ‘very bad path – many cliffs. It's easy to lose your way, and if you break your leg you can lie many days with no help.' There seemed to be little formal accommodation along the route in terms of hotels or bed-and-breakfast places, though Kitsa and Pantelis both thought that hospitality towards the stranger still held good as a rule in the small hill villages and the scattered shepherds' huts in the mountains. And there were a couple of sections where I was definitely going to need some help with wayfinding for a day or so – making my way across the tangled landscape of the Dhikti Mountains south-east of Iraklion, climbing a still snow-clad Mount Psiloritis in the centre of the island, and crossing the high inner fastnesses of the White Mountains in the west, where sudden fogs could descend at this time of year and late-lying snow bridges hid sink holes many hundreds of feet deep.