I am packing a bag. Underwear, socks, T-shirts, jeans, shorts, a toothbrush. I don’t know when I’ll return home. In my mind, I call up memories from the 2006 war, and how I travelled through the same pastoral surroundings I now live in, aflame.
The car waits in the shaded olive grove. Deep within the trees, in the early evening haze, I think I see a giant, white iguana sprawled on the ground. It seems to raise its eyeless, mouthless head, its translucent, limbless body shifting, lurching beneath it.
I look again; a plastic bag.
I throw my bag in the trunk, next to my banjo and a pair of boots.
As I drive south, putting kilometers between myself and the Northern border, lightning flickers ominously on the horizon, and the words of a Palestinian friend echo in my mind. “What did you expect?”
I didn’t expect teenagers and children and the elderly to be snatched from their homes, raped, their dead bodies paraded through the streets.
The tears well up again in my eyes, my heart pushes against my throat.
I oppose the occupation and my government because I see human life as sacred.
“This is what decolonization looks like,” an Instagram story from an anarchist-leftist collective I follow posts triumphantly. I unfollow them.
I oppose Hamas because I see human life as sacred.
This is not what decolonization or freedom-fighting looks like. This was not done in the name of freedom and the sanctity of human life. If Hamas’ actions are a victory to take pride in and to celebrate, 50 years of oppression and occupation are equally a cause for jubilation.
“It’s time to raze Gaza to the ground,” an Israeli friend’s Facebook status echoes in my mind.
I grind my teeth and hold the steering wheel tighter, my knuckles whitening – is human life not sacred to anyone else?
My village’s WhatsApp group is abuzz with messages – the border fence with Lebanon has been breached. Behind me, the hills echo with the booms of detonating ammunition, the buzz of helicopters and fighter jets.
Yesterday night, I stood unarmed at the entrance to the village, a flashlight in my hands shining into a thick darkness, impotently waving down cars in a pathetic pantomime of security.
Our government has abandoned us.
I drive faster, a light drizzle covering my windshield in muddy teardrops.
Why did I stop, and what have I done since, and what am I planning to do next?
Fear not, kind readers. All shall be revealed – and it shall be revealed… now.
Chronologically speaking, I think I left you off relatively early in my travels. I did write a few updates from Italy and France and possibly one from the UK, but they mostly covered the first few weeks of my journey, skipping over Cyprus almost entirely, and tapering off sharply after Kastellorizo.
In Kastellorizo, as I’ve written, I’ve had incredibly fresh raw fish, brought in on a yacht full of pensioner-pirates (not real pirates, just very swashbuckling old drunks) from Haifa who docked next to us, whose captain tried to convince M to sell me to them, and with whom I also had the following conversation:
“Hey, kid – come aboard my boat for a minute, won’t ya?”
“Um, o..kay? Hang on, let me take my sandals off.” (It’s considered bad etiquette to board any sailboat with shoes on, and I was walking along the dock.)
“Leave the sandals on, I want to ask you something. Come on, sit down.”
I gingerly boarded the boat – a rusty old steel tub full of empty Ouzo bottles and dirty laundry. The captain was a large, barrel-chested man with long, grey hair, arms covered in eclectic, squiggly, sun-faded tattoos. I pushed a pair of moth-eaten boxers aside and sat in front of him, as he poured me an oily glass of arak.
“Tell me,” he said, gesturing at my head with his half-empty glass, “Why don’t you cut your hair?”
From genuine trepidation, his hint of a grin and playful intonation allowed a sense of relief and smartassery to wash over me, and, now relatively secure in the knowledge that was not going to eat me, I immediately retorted with “Why don’t you cut your hair?”
The old pirate raised an eyebrow with newfound appreciation for my rhetoric prowess.
“Listen, kid – this is very important. You know why I don’t cut my hair? For the same reason I have these tattoos.”
I waited.
“Because it pisses my wife off.”
My travels were full of encounters like that – humorous, joyous, friendly, weird and blunt – but the most colourful, adventurous characters I met were almost all on or around boats.
Another boat encounter – this time in Cyprus:
We had phoned ahead and spoken to the harbormaster at a small marina in Paphos, to make sure we’d have a berth to moor in when we arrived. We were assured we would, but when we arrived, it turned out to be a risky place to tie up due to depth and underwater obstacles.
Valiantly coming in for the rescue in those early morning hours, however, was a severely drunk fisherman. “You can do it, is safe!” he assured us, milky glass of ouzo in hand.
“No, we can’t! We’d tear the boat up on the rocks!” M shouted back.
We really couldn’t, and ended up tying up to a larger ship’s hull, which made getting on and off the boat quite difficult.
When I finally did make it to land, I started a conversation with the old fisherman.
“You could have gotten closer,” he told me. “I know this marina – I live here, on this boat that I built.” He pointed at a floating shack precariously angled next to one of the docks.
“Is my home, is my work,” he said, his chest proudly sticking out as my eyes slowly moved over the graffitied plywood rat’s nest. “I call her ‘the Kamikaz.”
From Kastellorizo, M, S and I sailed on to Rhodes after spending about a week on the island due to unfavourable winds. The passage to Rhodes was uneventful, and we reached the large, industrial marina around nightfall. After spending the night on the yacht, I shouldered my pack (around 20 kilos (!!!) of camping gear, cookware, clothes and knicknacks) bade them a teary farewell (“We’re like your parents now, Adam! Keep in touch!” – I didn’t, but I should have, and I have nothing but a deep love for this special couple who took me into their floating home with open hearts and friendly smiles. M,S, if you’re reading this – I love you and am eternally grateful.) and boarded a ferry to Athens, not knowing where I’ll spend my first night in the city or what I’ll do next.
After a few days in Athens, I decided some green, leafy nature was in order. A few google searches later, I settled on Mount Pelion and its ancient villages, where I found myself trekking around its apple orchard-laden slopes and chestnut-heavy ridges with a newfound friend, then on to Meteora and Ioannina, before boarding another ferry in Igoumenitsa and landing in the South-Italian city of Bari, from which I then made my way to Matera, Naples, Florence, lake Como, and then crossed over into Switzerland, where I joined a childhood friend in her converted #VanLife van, then Zurich, Bern and Geneva (many childhood memories, some fond, some not). I then rode a train to the Jura mountains, where I stayed with Ben, a friend from my Lycee days who now lives with his wonderful partner, Mine, in a quaint country home complete with a well and chickens in their backyard.
From there – Paris, Brittany, another ferry from the French coast to Dover and its iconic, monumental white cliffs, London (where I became very ill), Scotland (where I stayed with my good friends Michael and Alicja who nursed me back to health), Wales (where I stayed in a small village in the woods, practised my banjo playing, made friends with the post office volunteer who filled me in on all the village gossip and brought me up to speed on the place’s history, from its days under Roman rule to the latest cellular antenna tower installed) and then back to London where I stayed with my friend Katie, met the artist Yuli Serfati for tea, and walked around for days on end, before finally deciding it was getting too cold to keep vagabonding, and boarded a plane (my first since setting out!) to Tel Aviv, for about £60.
I had a lot of beautiful encounters and saw a lot of stunning nature – so… why didn’t you read about any of it?
Somewhere on Mount Pelion, back in Greece, I had a very meaningful conversation with Noam, one of my best friends, in which I realised that by committing to blogging my experiences, I was committing to making them fit a clear, coherent narrative, which would, in turn, shape my trip.
Back then, that was an unwelcome influence, and something I found myself wanting to avoid. I wanted to allow things to take any shape they wanted, and to be as free as possible from my previous state of mind.
So when I felt like writing, I did – but even then, I was wary of trying to make things “fit.”
In my mind, before setting out, this blog was meant to be this grand chronicling of an epic journey. When it was relegated to a space for sporadic thoughts and impressions, it lost steam for me, and I left it untouched since, though my journey was, indeed, grand and epic.
So why am I back now?
A lot has happened since my return.
I made some major progress in my career; I built, recruited and trained a team of content writers in a large marketing company, then left, and joined a climate tech company,w here I now head all of their major communications, from marketing and branding to outreach, popular science and fundraising.
The really exciting part about all of this is that they’re developing an ocean-based platform for carbon dioxide removal – for the first time in my adult life, I feel like I’m part of something that’s working towards a lofty, important, admirable goal, in a setting that excites and fulfils me.
Taking the steps necessary to get to this point in my career wouldn’t have been possible had I not gone on this trip.
But that’s just work stuff.
The really exciting thing is that in the past year I’ve attended and completed a very comprehensive skippers’ training course. I am now a licensed boat captain, just like M – and my father.
If you go back and read the first post on this blog, you’ll see I was suffering from a maritime form of imposter syndrome. This is no longer the case.
Am I a seasoned, salty sea dog? No.
Not yet, at least.
But my ropemanship is fluent, I understand winds and currents and am developing an intuition for them, and I have a grasp that goes way beyond the basics of sails, motors, and navigation.
Which is why I’ve decided that it’s time to buy my own boat and start working towards a level of sailing proficiency that will allow me to cross the Mediterranean.
I’m currently in Lisbon, Portugal, following a two week vacation with my partner’s family, then another week with mine, and another week alone, exploring the Iberian Peninsula and the Canary Islands (more on this next time, I hope).
Tomorrow, I fly back home to Israel. I’ve already got a few prospective boats lined up to look at next week, and I think that chronicling this process could be an interesting way to keep track of my thoughts, priorities and considerations.
I’d love to have you join me as I get ready to head west of here once more – this time, with my own ship.
“This is passport control, right?” I ask the armed officer standing in the corridor, arms crossed, shoulders squared.
The agent at the ticket counter told me I should be at least twenty minutes early so that passport control will let me into the international platform where trains to France pass through.
“Oui,” the policeman answers, curt and disinterested.
“Do you… want to see my passport..?”
The police officer raises an eyebrow, as if I’ve suggested something completely absurd. He seems to think for a moment – not, mind you, about whether he wants to see my passport, but rather, as if he is trying to make up his mind on whether I’m a total idiot, or just very strange.
“Non,” he finally answers, and waves me through.
I find the casual nature of Europeans’ approach to borders jarring. While they seem to stand on ceremony almost everywhere else, dictating a severe form of discipline in everything related to conduct in public spaces, the official and, to me, strict realm of border crossings is almost comically informal. This is diametrically opposed to my experience with the Israeli state of things; while public conduct is exceedingly familiar and informal, crossing borders is one of the most serious bureaucratic undertakings one can imagine.
Oh well.
Im on my way to meet a friend from my high school days in France – now an artist living in the quaint mountain village of Arbois.
[Florence is now behind me. I’ve returned to writing on a Swiss train rushing towards Lucerne, after a short stay in Como.]
Time spent on the water moves differently. I don’t think this is metaphorical; as your body adjusts to the rocking of the boat, I think that your internal rhythm adjusts as well, breaking time up into different base units. The worn out description of days passing slowly but weeks rushing by holds true.I spend my time exploring the ports and cities we dock in, or practicing nautical knots M has taught me.
This practice isn’t just a way to keep my idle hands busy; the gentle lull of uneventful routine is spiked with brief but high-pressure intensity whenever we need to dock or sail away; the wind can change in an instant, demanding everyone spring into action, pull ropes, stretch sails, change course. It’s during these bouts of intensity that fluent ropemanship becomes indispensable. M has gifted me a small chord which I constantly twist into shapes, doing and undoing eight knots, flat knots, bowlines. Practice does make perfect, and, much like learning a new musical instrument, movements which were at first awkward, thought-out and clumsy, soon begin to flow into an effortless, absent-minded dance of the fingers. I often think about playing the banjo as I play with my rope.
Being able to tie the right knot quickly and effortlessly proves to be a very useful skill more than once, in several tense docking situations we find ourselves in. Generally speaking, I feel my movements and my body are becoming more graceful and adapted to the motion and shape of the boat as we continue to progress west. My bewilderment in docking procedures and sailing mechanics is slowly replaced by understanding, and then anticipation.
By the time we reach Rhodes, I’m proficient enough to debate approaches, distances and rope tautness with M, offering alternatives and suggestions which he often embraces. But before we can talk about Rhodes, we need to talk about Kastellorizo.
I’ve written a post covering my impressions of the island – but I haven’t really discussed the storm, and the long layover we had to make as we weathered it. More on this in the next post, where I’ll talk about storms, pirates and sashimi.
Last update was way back in Kastellorizo, and I’m already in Florence, after I passed through Rhodes, Athens and Mount Pelion, took a ferry to Bari, crossed over from Greece to Italy by sea, visited the rocky cave city of Matera, and walked the cobbled streets of Naples.
And I haven’t even really told you about Cyprus, have I?
I guess I’m not amazing at this blogging thing.
Anyway, there’s a lot to catch you guys up on.
I think my problem is that I’m feeling a restlessness that not only makes it difficult to sit down and write, but which makes it difficult to sit down at all. I am not, fortunately, talking about hemorrhoids. Maybe hemorrhoids of the soul.
On the one hand, there’s something taxing about covering these long distances, and seeing new places, constantly having to adapt to new cultures, mannerisms, languages. On the other, I just haven’t found the peace of mind I need to feel good about settling down somewhere for a week or so; so far, my gut tells me that’ll probably only happen in Wales.
But Florence comes close. It’s a beautiful city, with an ancient, scholarly vibe which I find very reminiscent of Cambridge and Oxford – maybe it’s just because it’s overcast and chilly today – and despite the breathtaking architecture and innumerable aesthetic masterpieces strewn all over its urban landscape, I’ve found it easier today to sit down and arrange my thoughts rather than rush from one piazza to another.
I’m in a book store’s caffè, a big, red mug of cafe americano steaming on the table in front of me, a light drizzle and cigarette smoke mingling in the chilly air outside the window. This feels like as good a place as any to recount my adventures so far.
Cyprus
After sailing for about 27 hours straight, weathering a slightly nauseating night shift alone in the Poodle‘s cockpit, the blank horizon began to give way to a looming mass of land: Cyprus.
As we inched closer, currents and wind working against us, I could start making out details on the shore front. At first, ridges and roads, then towering skyscrapers and immense cruise ships anchored off-shore in the relative safety of Limassol’s natural harbour, then finally masts and wave breakers and low buildings and people: the Limassol Marina was ahead, chatting with us on the radio, explaining exactly where we should dock.
Limassol’s marina turned out to be a perfect microcosm of my entire Cypriot experience; located in stunning surroundings, near a small but historical city center, the marina was packed full of Israelis, rich Russians and the odd Englishman, all pouring unbelievable amounts of money into the zoo they’ve built for themselves there. In stark relief, the relative squalor of the streets and infrastructure used by Cypriots themselves was almost shocking.
My overall experience of Cyprus, as you can probably tell, wasn’t a positive one. It felt like a gigantic tourist trap catering to the cheapest expectations of what “rich” should be, at the expense and exploitation of everyone involved, foreigners and locals alike.
It wasn’t all bad, though. More than anything, I was struck by how similar Cyprus was to Israel. It wasn’t just the weather, the geology, the flora and fauna – the people themselves all have familiar faces, and speak in familiar voices with familiar gesticulations. Their phonetics are the same, it’s just the language that’s different. Indeed, even their major geopolitical concern is an illegal military occupation in the northern part of the island.
I think that’s when I first started realising – a realisation that would later deepen in Greece – that despite not having open borders around it, and despite the migratory origins of the Jewish population in Israel, Israeli society is still very much part of the cultural and ethnic continuum of the Eastern Mediterranean.
And the feeling, I’m convinced, is mutual.
Cypriots (and later Greeks, and to a lesser extent Italians) were absolutely convinced I was a local, finding it hard to accept that I didn’t speak the language. After chatting with some of them, many told me as much: “Wow! You look Greek/Italian! You even sound like us and move like us when you speak!”
It’s an interesting observation – one bolstered by covering distance at a human pace, rather than a jet-fuelled one.
In Greece, this would become even more obvious – but we’ll get to that in a minute.
To sum Cyprus up, it’s not a place I’d recommend or encourage visiting, except as a pit stop for sailors coming to or from Israel. This impression, of course, is based primarily on my experience in marinas and anchorages – although I did go on a few short hikes, which were nice, but which can’t really compete with Greece and its islands, as I would soon find out. Perhaps if I went into the mountains my impressions would have been different. I’m sure I’ll get the chance, since my time on the Poodle was quickly making it clear that I find sailing and yacht life very appealing, and you can’t live the yacht life in Israel without going to Cyprus.
I don’t know if it’s just my love for Lucasarts’ adventure games, or if this is a more common association, but there’s something uncannily quest-like about being a tourist moving from island to island in Greece.
Take the remote island of Kastellorizo, for instance. I think that walking around that tiny island was the closest I’ve ever felt to being Guybrush Threepwood; each location on the island – the pier, the mountains, the monastery, the Lycaean tomb, the abondoned house district, the beach – felt like a distinct “screen” with the same NPCs continually inhabiting it.
Whether it was Vangelis and Lazarakis, the competing, neighbouring taverna owners on the pier, each a distinct (and opposite) personality cycling through a fixed routine, day in and day out; the tattooed caretaker of the empty monastery, all dressed in black and idly watering the plants in the ancient compound (which sits at the top of the Four Hundred Steps snaking up the cliff side) and then going down to the town each evening for a pint at the cantina, (where the local priest can also be found on occasion, nursing a beer), or the soldiers from the local army base, wearing mismatched civilian clothing and ordering the cheapest thing on the menu in the local café each morning – after a day or two it started to feel like a well known point and click scenario, after you’ve pointed and clicked on everything, exhausted every dialogue tree, and are scratching your head, wondering how to move forward.
Of course, these aren’t NPCs – the island is inhabited by real people with real lives! – but these real people are used to the ebb and flow of tourists passing through, and it feels like they are reluctant to interact with us in any meaningful way, instead choosing to stick to scripted responses that reduce communication to a minimum. In a way, it made me feel transparent, or reduced to a function.
I have no doubt that they, too, feel like functions in the eyes of the tourists. I think that’s something I’ll have to pay attention to as I continue to travel; I’m not sure if I should just avoid touristy locations, or work on breaking through these scripted conversations (where appropriate) and make myself more accessible and inviting for meaningful communication, but I have to do something, because I don’t want to experience my travels as a game.
I think what I’m trying to do is change the way I experience myself and my life, and thinking of this journey as a computer game is a sort of escape from that responsibility.
I swear I’ll get to Cyprus soon (it was boring) as well as to the actual sailing and night shifts and rough seas and all that (not boring at all, but I’m paralysed by the fear of not doing it justice), but for now, let’s catch up to where I am right now: the tiny Greek island of Kastellorizo.
Unbearably idyllic
This is our fourth night here. We’ve been here for this long because in addition to being a living, breathing, postcard-perfect manifestation of the clichéd romantic ideal of what a remote Greek island should be, we also know that the weather from here to Rhodes, on what is to be the last leg of the sailing chapter in my journey, is predicted to be harsh.
We decided to wait it out here, in the relatively safety the island’s harbour offers, but even with our anchor cast and moorings secured, it’s going to be rough.
I just spent the last few hours literally battening down the hatches and securing everything that couldn’t be stowed, and despite being several meters from the dock, we’ll be spending the storm on the Poodle, for two reasons:
The first is that we may need to attend to things on the boat as the storm progresses, and second is that in order to keep the boat safe, we had to distance it from the concrete docks so that it has enough lebensraum to move around without crashing into them.
The entire second half of the day was spent poring over wind forecasts and current charts, trying to understand together with the other skippers here where the brunt of the storm is expected to hit, and how best to prepare for it.
Skippers and locals trying to make sense of the weather
The first half of the day, however, I spent hiking alone on the high ridges of the island – photos attached.
There was also an underground crypt in an empty monastery at the top of a mountain, looked after by a groundskeeper dressed all in black and covered in tattoos head to toe – but I didn’t get any photos of that, sadly.
How will the storm progress, and how bad will it be to stay on board during taxing seas with dry land merely meters away? Stay tuned.
A while ago, I was sitting on the Poodle‘s deck while we were berthed at the Latchi harbor, and two Israeli kids – very young, one 5 at the most, the other about 8 – came up to the boat, speaking Hebrew with their grandmoter.
I greeted them with a “Shalom,” and the children were ecstatic. A Hebrew speaker! An Israeli! Here! On a boat!!
I understood their excitement – I remember the feeling of wonder and curiosity I had felt at those ages when I met Israelis abroad, too, and was happy to indulge them.
As a result, I was confronted with a very thorough investigation about my travels so far, my destination, and also questions about their parents and whether I know them somehow, and if not, why not, and would I like to.
After a while, their grandmother (a colourful character herself, adorned with a huge, gemstone riddled necklace and draped in countless shades of turquoise, from her tinted straw hat to her flowing, tie-dyed dress and down to her hemp slippers) told them it was time to leave (though they would later excitedly return with their parents in tow, insisting I meet them. This didn’t, I’m afraid, result in the immediate bonding I think the kids had hoped for), and wished me a pleasant trip.
“Grandma!” the older kid objected, slightly appalled, “He’s not on a trip! He’s on a journey.”
I couldn’t help but smile.
He was, of course, correct – though I would never dare to presume to use that definition without it being bestowed upon me by some external authority. In the matter of adventures and journeys, though, I don’t think there are any authorities higher than eight-year-old kids – thoughI feel that where I am journeying to, or what kind of journey this will be, has yet to be determined.
Anyway, I can now say that I’m on a journey safe in the knowledge that I’ve received the most relevant stamp of approval for it, and while I’m not sure where I’m headed, I know where I’m coming from – or at least, I know some of what I’m leaving behind.
I recently told a friend this journeying feels like a cleansing, or a detoxification – I’ve left the clutter behind me, maybe to never return to it, and moved on to what feels like a cleaner perspective.
But I didn’t leave everything behind, either.
The foldable bluetooth keyboard I’m typing this on is a loan from a good friend. The contact forms on this blog (did you check out the newsletter signup form on the About page, by the way?) were created by my cousin – and the site itself was designed and built while I was already on my way to Cyprus by one of my best friends from the job I left behind, Eliana Kovalenko Vardi, (who is more than just an extremely talented designer, by the way- she’s one of the best friends, hardest workers and even hardest partiers I’ve ever had the privilege to meet and get to know) just to name a few people and things that are anchored firmly in my past, but that continue to be major parts of my present.
I think a big part of journeying has to do with being on the way to something or somewhere, but before you can talk about Point B, it’s important to remember Point A, your point of origin, which defines and determines any path you set out on.
Without my point of origin – people like Eliana, and my cousin Shira, and my parents (and Noam and Avigail and Raz and Doron and Itamar and Inbal and Jonathan and Inbar and Nimi and Amir and Maya and Matan and Itay and Karen and Avishag and Meirav and Anat and Naama and Noy and Yativ and Omer and Shiri, and many, many others whom I won’t mention purely for the sake of brevity) – I would have nowhere to embark from. So while I tend to focus on what I’ve left behind, I also try to meditate on what I’ve taken with me whenever I can. It’s a lot, and this journey – and this blog – wouldn’t be possible without it, and them, and you.
So this post is a thank you letter dedicated to everyone in my point of origin. You’re all weavers of magic that makes eight-year-olds imagine and wonder – including my inner eight-year-old, who’s the happiest he’s been in years. I love you all.
Back on that test sail, I had felt a little nauseous.
It was nothing debilitating, but then again, we were just out for a quick spin around Haifa Bay.
This time, after casting off, there would be no turning back: it was us and the unrelenting sea for at least 24 hours, until we reached Cyprus.
M had warned me that seasickness was to be expected, and strongly recommended I equip myself with anti-motion sickness pills (“Kwells, if you can get them. Travamin will knock you right out.”) – and while I did buy a tablet, I was resolved not to use them. I reasoned that if I could power through that first long passage, I’d be set for the entire trip – but that if I succumbed to pills, I’d never feel at ease sailing without them, never knowing if I could hold my own.
Still, M&S, both seasoned seafarers, took pills as a precaution as soon as we were out on the open sea – and I was starting to feel queasy.
But I powered through – and as it turned out, I made the right choice. By the time we reached Limassol, I was fully acclimated to the boat’s rolling motion, could go below deck for long stretches of time, and generally function without any hindrance the sea might have posed.
This was a huge relief; some people simply aren’t able to function on a boat, no matter how long they’ve had to acclimatise, and I had found out I wasn’t one of them.
But things didn’t stop there.
It seems I have a natural disposition to boating in general. During our time at sea, my intuitions were generally on point, my reaction times good, and my senses sharp.
It took me less than 15 minutes to gain a good grasp of the boat’s dials, meters and electronic instruments, and I understood the dynamics between the boat, sails, wind and engine almost immediately.
At one point during that first leg, the boat’s autopilot crashed – I caught on immediately and helped M get everything back under control within minutes.
Fast forward a week, and M trusted me enough to defer to my judgement in a tight spot at the Paphos marina, where my directions literally saved the ship from incurring serious damage and very likely sinking.
On the day I’m writing this, nearly two weeks into the trip, M told me my inclination for sailing is one of the strongest he’s ever seen.
On the way from Limassol to Paphos, I found myself arranging ropes in an old maritime fashion. When M asked me where I learned to do that, I honestly couldn’t tell him.
In short, I feel like I’m slowly but surely living up to that “I grew up on a boat” line I was agonising over.
Next post: Limassol, Paphos and Latchi: Cypriot marina life, and my impressions from the island.
After that we’ll be chronologically caught up, so I might as well start blogging in real time now; this post is being written on the night of September 17. Tomorrow at 5 AM we set sail for Kastellorizo – the longest and most technical stretch of the trip. Hopefully, by the time we put into port, I’ll have the Cyprus post ready. See you on the other side!
Well, a lot has happened since that first post. I’ve written things here and there, but nothing feels like a cohesive sequence, so instead of continuing to delay and postpone my second post, I’ll just use what I’ve already written and run with it. Some parts may feel rushed, and it ends with a cliffhanger – sorry!
Wednesday, September 8th, dawn.
My alarm goes off and I crack my eyes open. My eyeballs feel dry as I try to blink the rawness out of them.
I groan.
As I sit up in my parents’ guest bed, kicking the covers down to my waist, I seriously contemplate going back to sleep and forgetting about this whole sailing into the horizon business.
I groan again, and blink again, squinting against the glare of my phone’s screen.
It blinks back at me. “5:30 AM.”
I sigh and laboriously roll out of bed.
Dragging myself downstairs, my stomach feels tight and queasy. I can barely swallow my coffee – breakfast is entirely out of the question. I don’t know if this is the result of excitement or extreme sleepiness. Probably a little of both.
The drive to Haifa along Route 6 is mostly a blur, but I do remember thinking that in the early morning hours, before the glaring hostility of September’s ungodly heat takes hold, the Israeli countryside can still be quite beautiful. It’s a nice note to part on.
I get to the marina at 7:30 sharp, and the combination of early morning fatigue, a huge backpack hanging off of one shoulder, and heading off into what will undoubtedly be a gruelling physical experience, all coalesce into an echo of my commutes to base during my military service.
But this is different. This time, I’m heading into what feels like absolute freedom, not a taxing, prolonged imprisonment.
I step through the marina’s gate, and there, down the first pier on the right, I see her: 44 feet of fiberglass, wood and perspex, with a towering metal mast and an endless tangle of ropes. The Poodle.
On board, M and S are already waiting.
I’ve met M, who owns and captains the boat, twice before. The first time, we met to chat, coordinate expectations, and get a sense of each other. After all, hitching a ride is one thing, but sharing tight physical quarters for weeks on end with a stranger is quite another. M left a very positive impression; thorough, professional, direct, friendly – but a little bewildered by my motives (“Why not take a plane?” “You do understand that sailing isn’t… easy, right?” “So this trip that you’re going on – why are you going on it?”)
It took a while for it to click, but his authoritative, friendly, intelligent, knowledgeable bewilderment with me, coupled with a shock of white hair and a deep voice with a raspy undertone all came together into one inescapable association: Back to the Future’s Doc Brown – only, instead of a DeLorian, his baby is a yacht.
The second time we met was on a test cruise with a few other sailing companions who are scheduled to join him on other legs of his sailing trip.
Among them, N – a seasoned sailor and travel companion’s of M’s, who, during that short excursion, took it upon himself to show me how to tie the boat to a dock, how to release and throw ropes, and how to unravel the sails. Of course, it was a lot of information, and hardly anything registered – but I did get a sense if what I don’t know and have to learn.
Saying a rushed goodbye to my parents and the friend who came to see me off, I went below and stowed my bags in my cabin (much like Queequeg and Ishmael, my backpack and I would be bedmates while I stay on board – there simply isn’t enough room anywhere else on the Poodle) and quickly began helping with the rushed, anxious undertaking of pushing off and sailing out of port. This is the first time I see S, M’s wife. We say our hellos, but quickly turn to boat-business. We’ll have plenty of time to chat out on the open sea.
M&S’s Itinerary (and where I fit in)
M&S’s entire trip is essentially a series of island hops.
From Haifa, their first stop is Limassol, Cyprus. After that, two more Cypriot ports of diminishing proportions and increasing westernliness: the town of Paphos (or Pafos), with its ancient ruins, tombs and temples, and then Latsi (or Latchi), a tiny fishing-port-turned-touristy-holiday-resort-destination.
From there, they plan to sail to a small Greek island called Kastellorizo – the easternmost Greek territory, right off the Turkish coast; allegedly a breathtaking destination with a dramatic topography which has passed under every major power in the Mediterranean, and has the architecture to show for it – then Rhodes, and up into the Aegean sea, where they plan a long, lesiurly sail from one tiny island to another.
My ride with them ends at Rhodes, where I’ll shoulder my pack and continue on foot – or at least, without a private cabin on a pensioner’s yacht.
Finding My Sea Legs on the Way From Haifa to Limassol
The first leg of the trip, from Haifa to Limassol, is also the second longest; going at an average speed of 5 knots, it’s expected to take around 25 hours. It’s also, M warns me, the most difficult – not because the waters are rough, but because none of us will be acclimated to the sea yet. Nausea and disorientation are expected, and M advises me to take anti-motion sickness pills as a precaution. Once we make it to Limassol, M reassures me, we’ll be acclimated, and the following legs, including the longest one (Latsi to Kastellorizo, 30 hours), will be much easier.
It’s on this part of the trip, I think to myself, that I’ll find out if I’m made for seafaring. I remember nausea and general unwellness from my first sailing trip to Cyprus, 29 years ago, but I’m hoping I’ll be able to overcome it this time, power through, and step on to Cypriot land hardened and tempered for the watery road ahead.
On the other hand, if I don’t find my sea legs, my journey as planned might very well come to an abrupt stop, and I’d have to rethink my plans from a Cypriot airport.
That won’t happen, but I’ll tell you all about it in my next post.
