Something I quickly learned while traveling around the countries bordering the Adriatic, Aegean and Mediterranean Seas was that distances between them could be incredibly deceptive. The maps made everything look so close; Italy, Greece, Yugoslavia and Turkey seemed no more than the jump of a checker piece, but sailing on ferries and taking plane flights was much more time consuming! I also found that simply arriving on one Greek Island didn't mean you could easily jump to the next one, there were certain days for certain routes and certain routes for each island, most seeming to embark from Pireaus, the industrial port city linking Athens with the Aegean. Like it or not, I traveled back and forth many times to Athens and Piraeus simply to access to other areas.

The rest of my stay on Serifos was spent in the company of my new friends from Germany - whom, I will add, were not the dour, uptight, judgmental folks that Germans are stereotyped to be - but a welcoming, creative, intelligent, humorous bunch, fans of the Greek island lifestyle, its music, food and luminous sun. Each afternoon we spent together at the beach cove that was their campsite and each evening returned to Orange Juice and Makis for our nightly roundtables of conversation, laughter, and much alcohol. The Germans' tolerance for liquor astonished me and I envisioned them as infants nursing from steins of beer instead of their mother's breasts. I mean, how else could they consume the vast quantities of beer and still be coherent enough to argue life, politics, and art until the wee hours of the morning? At some point in the early a.m. I would stumble back to my walk-up rooftop room - the cheapest the small hotel had, about $14 dollars a night in early June, before high season pricing kicked in - and brandishing a sandal would smack mosquitos against the white plaster walls before passing out on my wobbly, narrow cot of a bed. I'm certain they had to give the room a fresh coat of paint after my depature, just to cover the dozens of red blotches left on those walls.

I didn't want this blissful (and boozy) time on Serifos to end but I had pre-paid for a 16 day tour of Western Turkey with a British tour company called Explore. The tour was called "The Aegean Coast and Asia Minor" and would begin in Istanbul and follow the coast of Turkey south visiting "Classic Sites and Harbor Towns" to the Turquoise Coast. It was time for me pack up and get on the road again, making my way to northeastern Greece where it borders Turkey. Flights within Greece are quick and cheap when using the national airline Olympic Air, but crossing borders the fares jump substantially and in any case Olympic Air didn't have flights into Istanbul at that time, so my next destination would be Alexandroupoli, a smallish town near the Turkish border. From there I would take a bus into Istanbul.

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