The Golden Step (24 page)

Down to a beautiful green sea as clear as glass, on a long curve of pebbles under huge yellow cliffs that stood crumpled and squeezed into vast folds of rock. ‘Sweetwater, they call this place,' said Bob, the elderly curly-haired Canadian I fell in with. ‘I'll show you why,' and he took my katsouna and dug it deep into the pebbles. Fresh water welled up in the hole, dark and shining. I tasted a palm-full, as sweet and cool as a mountain spring. ‘Just arrived here for this year, so I've been landscaping,' Bob said, indicating the flat area of pebbles he'd smoothed off with his spade to make a foundation for his tent. We sat and chatted, basking in the heat of mid-afternoon. This was the sixth year Bob had come to spend the summer at Sweetwater. ‘We live simple here,' he said, looking out over the hazy sea, ‘and we live naked.' Sitting action to words, he let drop the towel he'd gathered round his waist as I came up. Looking round I could see other naked men, lone figures on the wide beach.

‘I'm retired now,' Bob said. ‘I'm spending my pension exactly how I want. I cache my gear each winter when I go back to Canada – a tent, the spade, some cooking things, you know – up in the cliff there, in a little cave, and I climb up and get it when I come back again in the spring. It's always there.'

‘What do you do for things you want, food and so on?' I asked. ‘Well,' allowed Bob, ‘I do walk over to the town now and again. But I don't need much, and I don't
want
anything. I'm aiming to shed wanting stuff. All I need is the sun and to get clean, to live cleanly, do you know what I mean?'

First-class hippy gobbledegook, was my first thought as I crunched away across Sweetwater beach – just the sort of nonsense I haven't had to hear for the best part of two months. God, is this what the south coast is going to be like, a transatlantic New Age shitefest? But the barren hillsides, the empty shoreline and the milky blue sea rebuked me. I began to be ashamed of my cynical reaction, and to turn Bob's laconic words over in my mind.

Looking ahead I could see a tiny white toenail at the foot of a great sunlit cliff, a perfect single curve of buildings, roadless and silent, framed between bushes of papery purple rockrose. As a paradigm of peace and quiet, there was no beating this. A big shark-nosed ferry from Chora Sfakion was thrumming into the bay at the head of its wake, another crescent of shining white. I walked into Loutro just ahead of the disembarkees, got myself a room with a nice seaward balcony, dumped the pack and flaked out on two chairs with a groan of satisfaction. Three days to go to my 50th birthday, and I couldn't conceive of a better place to celebrate that curious event.

When they bring the road to Loutro – if they ever do; there has been talk of it for decades now – Crete will lose something extremely precious. You just can't mix tour buses and tranquillity. And there's no doubt that the little port, if one can even dignify it with that title, would be a major attraction for mass tourism, what with its pretty white hotels, its handful of seafood tavernas on the beach, its delicious semi-circle of a bay, and the giant hillsides of grey and orange that cradle it round and catch the warmth and light of the sun from dawn till dusk.

Loutro is a transhumance village of the modern age. The sheep (well-heeled, well-mannered English and Germans of the middle classes, the former distinguishable by their white pot sunhats, voluminous shorts and thick novels, the latter by their minuscule, religion-revealing swimming slips) are boated in from springtime onwards, and the locals give them their grazing, tend them and milk them of their money. Then when the weather turns nasty the sheep are boated out again and return to their winter quarters in Southwold or Landshut. The trouble is that there aren't nearly enough sheep in this little tourist flock to satisfy some of the locals. ‘Increase the flock,' is the cry. ‘The pasture can stand it. Bring 'em in by road and let's have another line of hotels squeezed in behind, or up on the cliff above there. Oh, it's a protected archaeological monument, the site of ancient Phoenix from which St Paul's ship was blown in the most famous gale in the Bible? Yes, OK, but who actually goes there? Where's your visitor numbers? Where's your
bottom line?
' Local politics being what they are in Crete, money will probably do the pleading and secure the judgement in the end. But for now only the bass drumming of the ferries and the occasional snarl of a fisherman's outboard engine disturb the deep pool of Loutro's peace.

I fossicked around in Loutro for the best part of five days, tending my battered feet, easing my pack-belaboured shoulders, yarning with my neighbours and letting the sun and sea breeze exorcise the quite appalling stink from my walking boots, now banished to the outermost corner of my balcony. I also did a little navel-gazing in quiet hours alone on the scrubby hillsides or kicking among the stones and pottery shards of Phoenix. Fifty seemed an age when a lot of men woke up to find they hated themselves and the life they had dug themselves into, an age of displacement activities, of big red motorbikes and small blonde ‘friends'. What did I feel about it? Not a lot, was the answer I came up with. What had changed in the last ten years? I'd become greyer, wider, quieter; more amused at myself; more interested in what made people tick, good and bad. More aware than ever of the power of music and laughter to break down barriers. More opinionated, maybe, but – thanks to all those years spent exploring the backlands, the islands and odd corners of the world – even less inclined to paint myself into any one specific religious or political corner. Before setting off on this walk, I'd have certainly said that I'd become more cautious, but now I felt quite differently about it – the fear-strung ditherer of Kato Zakros seemed to have got something of a grip on himself at last, and for that I could thank Jane and her wonderful, unselfish present. Family things, as ever, turned out to be the source of the greatest pleasure and the sharpest pain. That seemed about the sum of it – no great revelations, after all. But something to ponder: a raking through of ballast at a halfway point in the voyage, perhaps.

On the evening of my birthday the neighbours treated me to dinner, and we had a bit of a party. A ‘cake' made its appearance – an almond tart with one tiny candle in the middle. Our genial hotel-owner Vangelis poured us a brimming tsikoudia all round, and left the bottle on the table. Cue many songs and much hilarity, followed by a measure of skinny-dipping by moonlight. Ah well, you're only young once.

‘Would you please fetch that stick of yours?' said one of the waiters. ‘I've been wondering about it – where did you get it from? Oh, Kritsa, that's over in Lasithi, isn't it? Yes, this is a real good katsouna. My grandfather, he's a shepherd up in Lefka Ori, he'd appreciate this. You'd better look after it!' Another admirer of my plain white figwood katsouna! I turned it over in the lamplight, looking at its many scars and splinters. The rocks of the Cretan mountains had splayed its business end like a superannuated toothbrush. It was hard to imagine now how I would have fared without this faithful, silent and trustworthy companion, so often dropped, so often forgotten and gone back for.

Now for the final hurdle – the series of great south coast gorges that cut across the westward thrust of E4. According to the map I could just skirt the coast, crossing the gorge mouths one after another, nice and simple, easy as pie, job done. But now, remembering the solemn warnings I'd had from Kitsa and Pantelis about the section between Agia Roumeli and Sougia, and looking more closely at the concertina folds of contours coiling in brown loops down from the mountains to the coastline, and the purplish blush of shading the cartographer had added around the gorge clefts, I could see it wasn't going to be quite such a stroll in the park as all that. How could I tackle it? Those gorges looked scary but splendid, and I thought I could see a way to wriggle up one and down the next so as to cut out the bad bit of the coast with a great high loop into the White Mountains and back. ‘Faragi Samarias', the upward gorge was labelled, ‘Faragi Agia Irinis' the return one. I'd walked the Samaria Gorge years before, and vividly remembered it – Europe's deepest and most impressive gorge, 6,000 feet of fall, with thousand-foot walls which approached each other at their narrowest point so closely that with fully extended arms you could almost touch them simultaneously. ‘Doing the Gorge' had become Crete's Number One tourist adventure. Back then I'd done it the conventional way from top to bottom, inching down on somebody's heels with someone else's breath on my neck, one component in a long, long snake of walkers. This time it would be an upward climb, fully laden. A bit of a slog, but no particular problem, I thought. The Agia Irini gorge I'd never even heard of, but it looked long and deep enough. Better get in a little practice first – and here at hand, just to the west of Loutro, was Aradena, the exact gorge for the job.

A beautiful south coast dawn of pink and pearl found me high above Loutro, climbing the zigzag kalderimi that stitched a zip scar up the face of the 2,000-ft mountain slope. It was wonderfully cold on the hillside, still blanketed in its night shadow. The village shrank away below until a curve of the mountain shut it out of sight. The sea lay flat under an oily sheen, the influence of the still unseen sun running its hues from inky black to grey, from dazzling silver to the ice blue of a gannet's eye. By the time I had topped the ridge and was looking down on the mountain village and plain of Anopolis, the sun was up and firing the hills into gold.

In the village square stood a statue of Daskalogiannis, ‘John the Teacher', a little round cap on his head, a pistol and a dagger thrust jauntily into his cummerbund. The Sfakiot hero who led a revolution based on Anopolis against the Turks in 1770, he died under the flaying knife after upsetting the Pasha of Iraklion with an impassioned rant about the woes of Crete and its Christian sons and daughters. I sat at a taverna table with a cup of coffee and a bowl of yoghurt, regarding the noble profile of Daskalogiannis outlined against the slopes of the White Mountains. High and far above, the inner peaks stood against the blue sky, now streaked more with the pale grey of limestone than the white of snow. The hot spring sunshine of the past few days had evidently been doing its work, but all too late for me. I gazed on the summits, sighing, wondering if I would ever set eyes on that high desert heartland that I had so long feared and looked forward to.

Seven years were to pass before the hollow eyes of Daskalogiannis once more stared through me in the village square at Anopolis. It was October 2006, and I was in the passenger seat of a juddering 4×4 being driven by expatriate Frenchman Jean Bienvenue. We were headed into the mountains, bumping up the dirt roads of Lefka Ori to the very top of the highest shepherd's track. There we'd leave the pickup and strike out on foot, climbing higher into the heart of the massif. It had been niggling away at me, this hole I'd left unfilled since the spring of 1999, and here was the chance to put the last piece of the E4 jigsaw in place.

Up through the upper limits of the prinos, up to where the greenery died away and the naked limestone began to contort itself as if volcanic convulsions had torn it apart. The pale cones of Kakovoli and Trocharis, of Mavri Laki and Sternes reared high overhead, all of much the same shape and slope. Rough screes stubbled their flanks. Between them and around on all sides rose and fell the extraordinary landscape of the high desert. Sinkholes lay everywhere, some opening lips like those into which I had tossed stones on Psiloritis, others dropping away to form black, glassy-sided potholes of enormous depth. Dark grey pinnacles and humps of rock lay between the sinkholes. To be wandering these badlands in fog or snow would be inviting disaster. I could see very plainly now why even mountaineers as experienced and fearless as George Aphordakos and Iannis Pantatosakis would hesitate to venture here in spring, with patches of sun-rotten snow concealing as many sinkholes as they revealed.