Three days in Greece, and a little peace of mind

I hadn’t expected three days in Greece to do quite so much good.

A little, but from the heart, as the saying goes. The Greek heart comes with bright sun and salt. You leave after work on Friday, fooling yourself that thousands of others won’t have done the same. Kresna proves otherwise: traffic that doesn’t crawl but stops altogether. After a wait, you decide to turn back while you still can and try another road. Darkness catches up just before the border. The mountains continue into Greece, until another bend becomes one bend too many. You’ve been warned about substantial speeding fines, so even on an empty back road you stick carefully to the limit. I don’t think I’ve ever observed quite so many limits.

Our idea of being abroad is curious. Less than a kilometre past the border, the houses, plants and views all seem different. The road is an exception, still rough and without markings. Empty evening roads lit by the moon feel a little like the approach to Radiator Springs, where Lightning McQueen ends up in Cars.

Around midnight, you reach your destination.

The town is in Greece’s Macedonian region. That seems to explain why our landlady and I can manage a conversation in broken Bulgarian. When I ask where she learnt it, she pauses, then says she has roots in Macedonia.

By morning, the journey’s tiredness has gone with the sunrise. Before breakfast or anything else, I’m covering every exposed bit with sunscreen, worried about burning: face, ears, even the soles of my feet. The long beach, surrounding mountains and palms by the shore make a distinctive setting.

This part of Greece looks more like Bulgaria’s Black Sea coast

than the clear turquoise water and sand we tend to imagine. It doesn’t matter. It’s good to switch off and spend time with people you love. Good to hear a guitar and a ukulele from your patch of beach. Good to look at your phone at the end of the day and find more than half the battery left because you haven’t used it. To remember that life happens beyond social media. To take fewer photographs and keep the memories in your head rather than on a server. To fill your eyes with the view.

To feel salt on your skin and swim beneath the setting sun.

I notice charcoal-roasted corn on the cob, and that the beach has pigeons instead of gulls. Fancy pigeons, too, glossy and feathered down to their feet. You tell yourself that to feel properly in Greece, you should dance a sirtaki, eat a local gyros and perhaps drink an ouzo. But the feeling might simply be an inner quiet that makes three days enough.

At the border on the way in, a no-U-turn sign had seemed to say, “That’s it, there’s no going back.” Now it’s time to leave. We take the oddest back roads again, not to save motorway tolls, even though this is written by someone from Gabrovo, a town famous in Bulgarian jokes for thrift,

but for the pleasure of seeing Greece along the way.

Storks’ nests, a flock of sheep, little mountain villages, sunflowers against the evening light and olive groves. Enough to let the mind rest. Darkness falls again on the journey, and as we cross into Bulgaria, I’m left with the thought that there are lovely places, but nowhere quite like home.

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