Eat n Crete

Let's begin with a swerve from the title, misdirection being the secret of good blogging. Accretion will take time.

Doing a PhD is a bit like working for the man, with one or two fundamental differences: there is no man, and not much work is done. The closest one gets to a pale imitation of the man, at the same time a shabby excuse for work, is through optional participation in the library. The Cambridge Faculty of Classics Library may well be the snapshot of an organisational psychologist's brain at the moment of orgasm. Desks stretch out in perfect monomorphic geometry, as far as the eye can see: and what this eye sees is other eyes seeing it. At your seat, laptop unfolded, a microsoft word document stares into your soul; it's your first love, and there is something mystical in the meeting of face and interface. But sometimes - every half hour? every quarter? - your fingers slip down the trackpad and renew flirtation with the dock. A row of colourful icons springs into life. Which to choose? There can be no choice. Firefox burns brightest in the southern osx sky. One well-aimed click and the benign baby blue and white of standard gmail format pops up. A moment of raised pulse as the number fades into focus: it hasn't changed. Better check again in fifteen minutes. What's happening on the Guardian though? No change. But there's a reputable News service on Facebook right? Click scroll refresh scroll. 'John Smith is enjoying the sun in Mauritius.' 'John Smith has uploaded new photos.' 'John Smith has skin cancer.' Wait. This isn't news. This isn't even information. It's just people spurting their immediate situation all over your mind, leaving it there to fizz and sizzle and quench the spark that wants to burn through the cord connecting you, tangled itself. Your fingers can't unplug themselves from the trackpad. Why am I reading this? Scroll. These are seconds, minutes. Scroll. Refresh. Scroll. Ooh, hang on, that looks interesting.

'Tom Geue wrote another rubbish note that takes ages to get going and then never really gets there in going.'

Sign me up. But not so fast. There's a new set of eyes in the library. I can feel them burrowing straight through the top of my spine and out my adam's apple. The blue square with white 'f' passes straight through my eye-gouged neck. I turn around.

It's my supervisor. For she too works in the library. We all work in the library. It's a big panoptic prison that jolts you awake every time you fall asleep in cyberspace. And who will supervise the supervisors? Other supervisors. The chain goes all the way up to the big supervisor in the sky - s/he has five hundred publications and counting. But even s/he is not immune from supervision, via subvision. I look out and up at the soft white puffs in the blue vault and - rarely, yet every so often - the slow sky browser refreshes to form a giant f. A copy of Plato's Republic lies open in a prominent quarter of the heavens. But I'm not fooled. I've caught God checking facebook.

'John Smith is dying in a horrible natural disaster. God, where are you?'

'Fuck. Better get back to work.'

And we'd better get back to Greece; well, fly in for the first time, through a sky notably devoid of f's. A genuine feature rendering PhD life distinct from the grind is that, provided you're not teaching or seminaring, you can take holidays whenever you want. Not too far, and not for too long; the most vigilant supervisor is actually the one that has a permanent post in your own head...and you can't escape that one. A friend and I were sitting in the pub one night, on a brief but standard form of Cambridge holiday, and we decided we needed a) sun and b) nature. A few more sleeps and we'd booked flights for a week's jaunt to Crete, a place where (so we'd heard) sun and nature cohabited in neighbourly good cheer. It also happened to be the cradle of western civilisation - Zeus was sort of born there, fact - so naturally recommended itself to me as classicist. More to the point, it recommended itself to me as student in the low income sense of the word. Because Crete's a classical land, I was eligible to claim funding from the faculty to go there. If there was an emoticon for 'cash register sound', I'd be threatening to use it right now.

It was the subsidised Romance of a lifetime. Now it would be a stretch to call myself a Hellenist, let alone a Philhellene: the small amount of Ancient Greek I once knew has shrunk to the size of handy supplement to English translation. Plus I think the Romans are way funnier and much more interesting. So I didn't go in with the goosebumps people imagine must form, implied by the poke of outrage: 'You're a CLASSICIST and you haven't been to GREECE?' By no means a die-hard, but not completely lay either, I suppose I was in a good zone to be impressed. And I was - but ruins were only a fragmentary part of it. In six days, my German mountaineer and I covered a good chunk of the island. If it hovered on the reflux line labelled 'more than we could chew' at the time, I can at least digest it for you now.

This was, in half, a walking trip. So we wanted to warm up. I'd learned on my in-flight last-minute research that one of the distinguishing features of the Cretan landscape is the abundance of plateaus. Among the more famous is the Lasithi Plateau, a little south-east of the capital. Ok, bam, that's the destination. But there was an obstacle, which is where this qualifies as a boring plot: no buses were running to the plateau that day. Give up? No way. Not when you're unfurling a plot. So we jumped on a bus to a junction 40 km from our town. Then - nervily, like two migratory birds in the wrong place in the wrong season - we did it: we made a sign. I carved out 'Psihro' in scratchy Greek letters. It would be the first of many signs in our passage from hitching childhood to adolescence. We shyly brandished the sign for forty five minutes, waving it, aiding it with the extension of thumbs, near stepping in front of traffic; all just to get noticed. It was like Hollywood, where the signs are people. The drivers had signs of their own. Sometimes it was the eyes-ahead ignore. Sometimes it was the apologetic look and the mumbling of Greek; I lip-read and deciphered 'I'm making a mockery of you' mostly. Sometimes it was the frenetic pointing at the dashboard, meaning one of the following: 'I'm running out of petrol.' 'I'm not going far from here.' 'I have a dashboard.' All had dashboards, and many had the nerve to point this out. But we couldn't tell for certain. It was a new script. I felt like an impotent archaeologist; I couldn't crack the code. But the end was all too intelligible. No one stopped.

I'll spare the story of how we came to know it (suffice it to say that waiting was the medium), but I'll give you the message: never put an obscure town of tiny population on your sign. For it's more than likely that no one will be going there. (Aside: I'm thinking about a series called something along the lines 'When Cambridge Students Deal With Practical Situations' - this would be the type of thing that would make the cut.) A few changed signs and two lifts later, we sat in the back of a farmer's truck and let the machine climb the hairpin bends for us. We had the wind in our hair, spanners and other miscellaneous lumps of metal jabbing at our coxics, sesame snacks - and we were learning.

I just need to take a moment to dwell on the idea of the plateau, which I didn't really think about before or after reading that 'distinguishing features of Cretan landscape' sentence. The plateau is a land within a land, a microcosm indistinguishable from the macrocosm but for reference to its frame: a ring of high mountains. Flat ground at high altitude; for some reason I find this combination sexy, perhaps because it appeals to the remnants of a childlike treehouse fetish, the longing for a self-contained space up above. And this plateau was hidden among the clouds. You pass into a thick fog on the way up, the turn from ascent to descent your only positioning guide. A few metres down the tortuous track and everything opens up: a vista of verdant green criss-crossed by penstrokes and rectangles. It was like the first entry into a land before time, except this land had windmills and agriculture, and time. We walked the 8 km diameter of the plateau and made it to our town just before sunset, climbing the foothills at the edge to survey the plain in golden light and watch the shadows creep across it further and faster. Our vantage point was the cave of Zeus, supposedly the place where Rhea hid her son (not yet the best god on Olympus) to protect him from his hungry father. The gate was closed. I jumped the fence and knocked on the door, but nobody was home. God is dead, indeed.

From the relative cold and moisture of the mountains we hitched back down to coastal sun, wedged between sacks of animal feed. The locals kindly dropped us on the main road back to the capital, on which we assumed we could jump on a bus within the hour. Wrong, but for good reasons. We had forgotten it was a national holiday (independence day, celebrating the end of Ottoman rule in Greece). This meant: parade, and lots of it. Triumphant trumpets blared over crackly loudspeakers as the youth, the future of Greece, took to the streets and marched in ascending order of age. The litluns were criminally cute: they all took their duty to march in formation very seriously, stomping emphatically and swinging their arms higher than the wide angles of an overexcited pendulum. As we and they moved up the age divisions, the seriousness turned to expert looks of distinterest, ironic smiles and flashed glances. My favourite part was watching the parade disperse, and every participant walking back from where they had come, but broken out of formation and clumped into cliques: sixteen yr old girls linking arms and laughing about how hot Costas looked in his traditional dress. Yep, that's definitely what they were talking about. Damn, Costas.

Back in the capital later than expected, the day was lost; so we decided to try our best to get to another small town on the south coast by nightfall, another victim of the one bus a day rule, one bus which we had missed, or which had never left, never arrived. Again we thought we'd push our luck and bus it to the nearest junction (50 km from the town), then hitch; if we got stuck in the mountains, we'd just have to tent down on an uncomfortable slope. We used our last bit of paper (EasyJet booking reference) to make another sign, walked up to the appropriate road, dumped our bags and settled in for the waiting game while velvet dusk worked its way down. A lift came along pretty quickly, but it only got us a third of the way. We waited an hour or so outside the taverna of the mountain village; five cars passed, and passed us by. Eventually some kind taverna gents came out to help us; the one that could speak a bit of English was from Palestine and had a brother in Melbourne. While his original nationality made him a non-typical example, I encountered the same story again and again over the course of the week: I've got a relative in Melbourne. Never have I felt it more of an advantage to be Australian; though it never secured us special treatment, it always greased the transactions with good smiles. This instance was no exception: within five minutes we were in one of the taverna manager's friends' car, twenty euro lighter, but on our way to where we wanted to go. Which was slightly further away than our mental cartography had admitted.

We were on schedule, always important when travelling with a German. In town by 9, we had a room by 9:30. We strayed off the footpath into someone's backyard, and my friend shouted what we thought was Greek for 'sorry', then asked if they had a room. They had a room. What a room! After a swordfish stop and a pina colada down the docks, I woke in the morning to hints of gleaming sun; just to confirm, I threw the bright blue french doors open and stepped out on the balcony to be smacked in the face by broad beams of heat. It was 8am. It was hot. Apparently Australian troops fighting in Crete in WWII had thought of it as Australia floated north of the equator. I could see why. Sun in the face is, for an Australian, quite possibly the most evocative memory jogger out there. Whole acres of past life bloom from dormancy.

We breakfasted on the pier, stocked up on camping gas and pissweak mediterranean sunscreen ('for pre-tanned skin' - premature of us?), and began our three-day hike. We never thought this would be a walk in Hyde Park; but I don't think either of us quite comprehended the magnitude of the ups and downs, the difficulty of terrain, the rocks and thorns that would bruise scratch and cut into us over and over. But, even for the flesh wounds, this was the most glorious trek I've ever stepped along. After my walkabout in Italy, down a patch of the crowded Ligurian coast, I had decided that the whole perimeter of European seaside was at maximum capacity. But in three days of hiking, we ran into four people. The cliffs, the crags, the gorges and the beaches were ours on exclusive loan.

Initially, we budgeted for a few stops in civilisation: Loutro, a blue and white village accessible solely by foot and boat, would provide the last proper nutrition for a few days. One of the fascinating things about passing through this town and the next was the living construction site that a seasonal tourist culture creates right at this transitional time. A week before official season began, nothing much was open for business; but everything was open for refurbishment. Saws and paintbrushes hustled the day away, while we lingered over lunch. Loutro was especially striking for its visible skeleton of tourist infrastructure. The invasion was nigh - and so you had to look your very bluest and whitest.

We bedded down for a night on the beach with some bread, olive paste and rough red wine. Our last town for two days would come in the morning; and we had staked a lot on its furnishing us with provisions. But we were out of season, and they were out of stock. We managed a big loaf of bread, twelve packets of marmalade and a whole lot of water. Well, what we thought was a whole lot of water. Turns out you need to consume a bit more than 1.5L per day when you're heaving a heavy pack up an 85 degree slope...in the sun.

When Cambridge Students Deal With Practical Situations: They Almost Die.

No, I exaggerate; we did run out of water the day after, with a good hour till the destination town. But running out at that point was a deliberate, rationed manoeuvre. It meant skimping on consumption for thirty six hours. And man, was I thirsty. Drinking small amounts of water while thirsty is tantamount to being Tantalus: the dude doomed to perpetual hunger and thirst in the underworld. Except worse, because he had zero satisfaction, whereas we had measured sips of hints of tints of satisfaction with the countdown to full emptiness hanging over us every time we guzzled slightly more than we should have. When we made it to Sougia, I recruited every liquid I could think of: water, coke, orange juice, pear juice, I could have even swallowed litres of my own bodily fluids, if I'd had any to donate to an iced glass. Sweet damp moisture. I'll never be embarrassed about sweating or wetting my bed again. All wetness, produced or consumed, is a hydrated blessing from above.

We took one final hitch to another intermediate mountain village, where a bus would take us back to the cities of dense plenitude, cities, wonderful conglomerations of availability and waste. There is more to tell, but it wouldn't be the same. We came to these cities and all we wanted was to eat, drink, meet - to relieve the backlog caused by deprivation. We thanked Zeus for refilling every slackened branch of vein. We poured libations of raki directly into our mouths. We talked, we traded dollops of conversation. We couldn't get enough.

But you, dear reader, are bloated. Slender emetics and slippery laxatives from here on in. We all have to overcompensate when we've eaten Crete.