DANCER IN THE DELTA…

Bright and breezy Alexandroupoli, some 114 km south of Oreistiada, bustling with honking cars,  parallel roads with blocks and blocks of buildings, housing shops and apartments…  with the occasional sea breezes rustling through the streets on a hot summer’s day… was a welcome sight for us, the two travellers, recently out of the sticks of nowhere. This time we booked a room in a city hotel near the port…and we didn’t give a rat’s ar**…oops…we didn’t give a toss about parking facilities. The hotel was bright and modern and the room…walls with a lick of canvas beige, wooden floor with a wash of walnut colour and the bathroom, gleaming with glazed tiles and glass and shiny taps and… exuding the tingling freshness of shower gel and shampoo and body lotion scented with green tea and mandarin, teasing out all those happy hormones which make you slightly heady and… ready for fresh adventures.

That evening saw us sauntering along the promenade in the port of Alexandroupoli. On one side were the dark waters of the harbour, with the lights of the city glittering in them like a million stars and on the other side was a whole line of restaurants, with mouth-watering platters of seafood and grilled meat. The long pedestrian walk was swarming with people…families with babies in prams and children on roller skates and tourists and couples holding hands. It led to a magnificent lighthouse, standing 18 metres high, erected in the late 1800’s, to send out beams to ships entering the Bosporus or the Mediterranean. Under the dusky evening sky, it cast out nuances of old world charm to the place, like the sepia photos of the past, of wooden vessels bulging with cargo…barrels of olive oil, wine, bales of textile and tobacco…ships creaking under their weight, waiting to push out to sea and others… bursting with precious wares from distant lands, rocking into the embrace of the harbour.

In the narrow alleys, there were more restaurants and bars with people sitting on high stools at small round tables, sipping cocktails and tapping their feet to loud music pulsating from speakers inside the shops and others… drinking wine from long stemmed glasses and picking from small plates of scrumptious appetizers. The atmosphere was lively and invigorating. We sat at a pizzeria under a strip of night sky, dotted with stars… and had a glass of wine and a pizza with light and fluffy pastry, slightly chewy with delicious topping. The throbbing music and crowds put us right in the hub of things.

The next morning we drove 28 km north east of the city to the town of Feres, to take a trip through the Evros delta. They put us on a minibus with a few other people and off we went, bumping along a narrow road along the delta, to board a boat that would navigate us through this wetland. In the marshlands on the right, there were long-horned cows, standing in the muddy water and tugging at the grass and others, sitting in the mire like buffaloes. Our driver-cum-guide told us that they were a cross between cows and buffaloes and were bred only for their meat. They were free rangers, these cud-chewing creatures. They ambled from small farms in the surrounding areas, just as the sun peeped over the horizon, grazed in the shallow swamps and returned in the afternoon.

 On the left of the road was the actual delta area. There were shrubs and small trees, which would be totally submerged in the winter months when the river and its tributaries swelled and burst over the plain. We could see patches of water… ponds and lagoons with flocks of migrating birds… pelicans, storks, flamingos, herons and black headed-gulls and mute swans and other waders and species I’m not familiar with, feeding and fluttering and gliding off the water, before taking full flight to the north…their breeding grounds. It was an amazing sight, with the lot of us zooming in and clicking on our cameras.

The driver broke our concentration… ` Uh, if you’re lucky you may snatch a glimpse of the wild horses…’ `Where???…and WOW!’…we actually saw them in the far distance…lean and brown or black, feeding on a patch of grass and swishing their tails. They are of the Pindos breed, mountain horses… and this protected delta species are said to be descendants of those that had been abandoned during the Greek Civil War of 1944-49. But our guide, with a conspiratorial wink, had a more interesting tale to unspool… they were the progenies of the horses, left behind by the troops of Alexander The Great… they could even have sprung from the loins of Bucephalus, Alexander’s legendary steed, wild and whinnying, rearing on his hind legs… Yes, all mere speculation you would say… the fabrication of dreamers and tale spinners. But then again, if we didn’t weave out myths and colourful stories, our existence would be… oh…so mundane.

The mini bus pulled up to a rickety wooden jetty on the edge of the swamps, where a flat-bottomed boat was moored. The skipper was a man in his 50’s with hair greying at the temples and a sunburnt face. We put on our life jackets and found seats on the boat. There were two families in front of us, a couple about our age on our left, with expansive smiles and from their accent… Greek Americans. Behind us were a couple of young lads and a girl… probably students from the university… laughing and cracking jokes. It took me back to my student years when I was wet behind the ears and life was a breeze.

The boat chugged and stuttered along a narrow waterway with thickets of reeds on either side. The skipper, whom everyone called ` Kapetanios’…Captain… was behind the wheel at the back of the boat. After some time he got all bonhomie and wanted to connect with his passengers. He came and sat at the prow, faced us and started talking about the barricades the army was building on our side of the river and then meandered into other subjects… various and sundry. I looked at Yiannis in horror… ` So who’s steering the boat?’… ` He’s handed it to one of the students,’ muttered Yiannis… `Can’t you see it moving like a belly dancer?’ But before tremors of fear could set in, someone pointed to a lagoon on the left. There was a flock of flamingos, with shades of pink, with their black tipped bills, hooked and thick, sifting out food in the water and others just standing on one leg surveying their surroundings, with their heads pulled back on their s-shaped necks. We spied one that had broken away from the flock… a loner, no doubt … tiptoeing in the shallows by the reeds on its long spindly pink legs, like some awkward ballerina.

The Greek American couple came to the front with their backs against the widening canal and took selfies of themselves, trying out different smiles… but were cut short when the Kapetanios exclaimed… ` And there you are!’  pointing to a wide band of water flowing in front of us and merging into the sea…`This is the Evros!’ We got terribly excited, craned our necks and looked left and right. Much further on, on the left bank of the river stood the high metal walls… the reputed barriers to keep out illegal immigrants… and on the right were the banks and woodlands of Turkey. We went down the river a few km before we turned back and the Kapetanios, sitting at the prow and stretching his legs, became even more genial and generous and motioned to a boy of 14, sitting with his parents, to go back and take over the wheel from the student.

 The boy dashed behind and a younger boy of 12 followed him, clamouring out that he wanted a go at it as well. The adolescent took us on an unsteady course back. The Kapetanios was chatting with Mr Selfie, when the boy unsupervised, went past the canal we were supposed to turn into, taking us out to sea on a flat bottomed boat…`Hey! Hey! Turn right! Turn right!… everyone shouted. He spun the wheel and with it the boat… and we went into a graceful pirouette. There was a lot of commotion and the Kapitenios finally decided to take charge of the helm. We eventually stopped spinning and found ourselves facing a couple of black cormorants… sitting on driftwood resembling the sun bleached bones of some prehistoric animal… and watching us, like a bunch of undertakers, their black wings tucked in by their sides.

The Kapetanios steered us back on course and we sat back, relaxed and sighed with relief. We reached the mouth of the canal which would take us back to the jetty… when our Kapetanios, with a certain casual bravado… called out to the boy to take the wheel again. We looked at each other in stunned silence… the boy’s mother tried to pin him down in his seat but the father was more indulgent and agreed with our magnanimous skipper that the boy needed to have another go at it or he’d never shake off his fears. So once again our lives were in the hands of this teenager…` Go slow, go slow,’ everyone shouted. We chugged along on a straight course…no veering left or right until we saw the bend…` Turn left, ‘ we said calmly trying not to startle the boy…` Turn left! Turn left!’…we cried out frantically. The skipper stood up and ran to the boy’s aid… but too late. We went crashing into the reeds and the boat juddered to a halt.

I imagined us spending the night in the marshes with no help in sight… with yellow-bellied toads croaking in the reeds and otters clambering aboard and tickling our faces and jackals and wolves pacing the dark woodlands in the distance and then skirting the marshes… howling and waiting. But with a lot of revving and fumes billowing behind, the Kapetanios, to our huge relief, managed to extricate the boat and we shuddered towards the jetty in silence. The students were whispering behind us that the propeller got warped…` Serves him [ Kapetanios ] right,’ muttered Yiannis  under his breath. When the time came to pay the Kapetanios, we didn’t leave a tip but waited for our change… and Yiannis counted it in the palm of his hand in front of the man…who took liberties with our life.

Come back for the last leg of our journey. Cheers.