vEaster Sunday, April 12 from above the Atlantic, Nice to JFK

Ah, Athens. Ah, Greece. Especially in the foreign service, you can’t go home again; or, if you return to a place where you served happily before, none of the same people who made it home will be there. So it becomes a completely different experience to be enjoyed just for itself. And that’s what happened for six days in Athens. Only my friend from Erie, Dolly Di Marco, still lives there, as she has for thirty years since she married a Greek ship captain and had her lovely daughter Elena. My Greek diplomat friend, Xenia, is the consul general in San Francisco and wasn’t going home for Greek Easter. Nor were my friends Diane and Norman; she is an art professor at the U. Of Minnesota and they will be returning in the summer to their home overlooking the harbor of Rafina, access port to the Cyclades Islands.

I departed Cairo in the middle of the night and it was still the middle of the night when I arrived in Athens with only two hours of sleep at best. The metro which was only completed in 2004 all the way to the airport is closed so more lines can be added so I had to take a cab to Dolly and Elena’s. Dolly went to work and I to bed, miraculously. It felt great. Dolly and I wandered around the old city parts, known as the Plaka, drinking coffee and reminiscing. On Tuesday, we invited a friend of Elena’s to come to the house for a much needed pedicure and manicure. Then off to the hairdresser for and equally much needed color and cut.

Next, a quick trip to the American Embassy to see the new consulate building behind the existing building which was being built when I left. Spacious new headquarters for Americans in Greece to come to renew or replace passports and for Greeks to endure their interviews in order to get a visa to visit America. All the Greeks who I had worked with are still there and it was so lovely to see them and to be remembered by them. Two members of my A100 class are now assigned to Athens so they gave me the grand tour and then Elaine and I walked down to the local platea restaurant "Flower" where we had all enjoyed many a horiotaki salata, the traditional Greek salad.

On Wednesday morning, Dolly and I picked up a rental car and drove to beautiful Nafplio, a Venetian city on the coast of the Peloponnesian peninsula. April is too early to go to the islands and even Nafplio, a favorite Athenian weekend spot was pretty sleepy. While I lived in Athens, I always took visitors to Nafplio if their time was limited. There one gets a taste of the sea, a medieval castle, access to the Mycenaean bronze age archeological site, and the chance to eat lots of Greek food and sip cappuccinos or wine by the sea. Dolly and I did all of that and more, including visiting another lovely town near Corinth. Upon our return to Athens on Friday night, we headed out for some old Greek torch songs at a bar Dolly knows of. It was fun.

Saturday morning early, I was off to Corsica with Easy Jet. No assigned seats on Easy Jet, just a mad, pushing rush for the five hour flight to Paris Orly. Then a couple hour wait for a flight to Ajaccio, Corsica. Corsica is the fourth largest island in the Mediterranean (Crete, Cyprus and one other which escapes me are larger) and while it is an rather unwilling part of France, the Italian influence is very strong. Lovely old limestone farm houses, a spine of mountains down the middle that makes driving hair-raising and the views breath-taking. Kathryn (political officer at US Embassy Kabul) had taken three weeks R and R to meet her UCLA freshman daughter Joan in Spain for her spring vacation and now her sixteen year old son, Alex, in Corsica. I was lucky enough to be able to tag along. They were renting an old flat in a one horse/no internet town two hours from Ajaccio via twisting, turning roads. No superlatives can adequately describe it’s wildness, its savage beauty, or the hikes we enjoyed/endured.

On the third day, we embarked on a 8.6 mile hike (these are not ambles but real hikes over rocks and through creek beds with lots of ups and downs). Half way through we got lost, wound up somewhere else, and figure we managed more like ten miles by the time we regained the car. It took me three days to recover and then we decided that we just had to try it again and do it right. Wrong. We made it throught the first part where the previous error had been made but got lost again. This time we logged thirteen miles. Every inch between the tips of my tows to the back of my waist hurt. A lot. But I was ever so proud of myself! I can keep up with someone fifteen years younger than I am and a sixteen year old and still be here to talk about it.
Mostly, hiking was what we did. Imagine a young man who willingly spends a week of spring vacation with his mother and her old friend! It was great. We had lots of great Corsican food, heavily weighted toward very Italian, thin crust pizza and drank a bunch of Corsican wine.
Kathryn and I spent yesterday in Ajaccio again because Alex left in the morning. While still a small city, it had lots more life than the rest of the island. Shops, restaurants, and, of course, a nice walk up to the top of the ridge for another breath-taking view of the harbor.

So, here I am, sitting in the Jet Blue, wifi provided area in JFK after getting up at 5 am in Ajaccio, flying to Nice, waiting two hours, enjoying a nine hour flight to New York and finally on US soil. How long ago the flight to San Diego and then Hong Kong feel. And yet I have savored each and every moment. I know that I will look back on this last three months as one of the most amazing things I ever did. Memories of sights, scenes, conversations, old friends and new, relationships, understandings and observations of history and people, a vast display of natural and manmade wonders and problems.

Tonight I’ll spend two hours driving back from Buffalo with Scott. And while I’ve been gone, Marty, Kelly, Kelsey and Davey have moved back to Erie from Florida and I’ll see them tonight too. I’ve missed Coug’s, Scott’s, Mom’s, Heather’s, and Kelsey’s birthdays during my oddysey and it will be fun to give them all the gifts I’ve gathered from around the world.

I will conclude this travelogue by saying that above all what I realized on this trip, as I have during the last ten years or so of what Jane Fonda would call the late second act, early third act is that I am truly blessed. For lack of health, financial wherewithal, bravery, confidence, most people don’t have the gift to be able to do what I have done. My sense of gratitude is immense and I stand in awe at my own good fortune. I have seen a world where people with mangled limbs live without food or shelter; I have been in places where people are waiting and trying to kill each other in the names of religion and nationalism; I have heard of young lives being cut down by breast cancer and other scourges. I’ll never know why I have been so favored to have had such a charmed life. I only know that my gratitude is boundless.
Thanks for sharing my odyssey with me.
Chris

April 3 Entry, Post Elderhostel

Friday, March 20 - Sunday, March 29
For purposes of a travel blog, an account of these ten days is mostly one of sight-seeing and schlepping around on buses with the Elderhostel tour group. We always think that we have formed true friendships with people we’ve spent this much time with but there usually is no real follow up. Eight or ten of the people I would hope to stay in touch with, however. All are retired, intellectually active people. Most are thrilled with the election of Obama although there was more than a handful of people from Texas and we sensed that there were still some holdovers. Everywhere we were greeted as returning heroes to the world, though. It feels so much better to hold our heads up again. Which is not to say that the news on the financial front is good or that the US isn’t caught up with much ado about nothing in the form of the outrage over AIG bonuses (an outrage, yes, but it’s like worrying about a marshmallow burning on a campfire while the adjacent building is ablaze). I will never ceased to be amazed by our ability to be distracted or frothed up with much ado about nothing when the issues are so serious. I can only hope that the people at the top aren’t so overwhelmed with lack of support staff and the greatest challenges of our time to be able to function.

Tourists in Europe say they can’t look at one more cathedral; in Greece, they can’t look at one more rock. And in Israel, Jordan, and Egypt, one tires of Roman and Egyptian ruins, lectures on waves of marauding invaders and successive dynasties, power struggles, and theorizing on the engineering abilities (whether structural or political in the form of organizing slave labor). Highlights:

We visited Bethshean on the Israeli side and Jerash on the Jordan side of the Jordan River. Both are fantastically intact Roman cities reminiscent of but not quite equal to Ephases. Then it was back to Old Testament history with the visit to Mt. Nebo, where God gave Moses the view of the Jordan Valley and the land that he had spent forty years in the desert rallying the ancient Israelits to deserve only to be told that he would never enter it; Moses promptly died here.

My personal focal point for deciding on this trip was Petra, the ancient city of the Naboteans, mentioned in the Bible as the Edomites probably, and it did not disappoint. Most of my readers have probably seen filmed pieces on this incredible world heritage site so I won’t wax poetic about it but wow! In the middle of desert, there is a gorge through which spring floods have passed for eons. At least a half hour walk through this gorge yields a now ruined city. For centuries the Naboteans buried their dead in elaborately carved tombs in the sandstone walls of the gorge and near the entrance to the city. Eventually , they began to live here, however, and this was the scene of a thriving financial center at the crossroads of the east west caravan routes and the north south trade routes.

Summon up all the travel superlatives you can and apply them to seeing Petra. A once in a lifetime experience. We spent an entire day here and one of the first afternoons with truly free time. The hardiest of the group climbed the "1000 steps" (reminiscent of Machu Pichu or Nepal) up to the top of the city for the amazing view down the other side of the mountains which ring Petra and walked the two and a half miles back through the town for what was the first and last serious exercise of the trip!

We left Petra the next day, drove along the Dead Sea, visited another Crusader castle, and stopped to smear ourselves with Dead Sea mud, swim, have lunch and a beer for a few hours at a Dead Sea resort. Onward to the Amman airport and the evening flight to Cairo;
Tuesday was spent in Cairo visiting the Great Pyramids of Giza and the sphinx, Memphis and Sakkara. My sister and I had been to Egypt three years earlier and I had no intention of ever returning but, as it was included on this trip to Israel and Jordan which were my real interest, here I was again. You can see far better films on the subject on the Discovery Channel or History Channel that I can give. My impression then as now is that once you have seen these things that you have heard about all your life, you don’t need to see them again. It’s not that they are disappointing but besides the enormous size and the wonder you feel at how they could have been built, you are struck by the brownness, the sand, the desert. The Nile forms a green gash through the desert, an awesome phenomenon to behold but the desert, to me at least, is oppressive. At least this time, the temperature was perfect and the crowds were not so enormous.

The other thing I remember about Egypt is the chaos, the crowds, crowds mostly of men in the long Egyptian dress, men staring at me or whomever I am with. Yes, we’re white and Western. While I was an object of interest in India, I was far more so in Egypt. And while the Indians are also aggressive in hawking their wares or begging for Western money, the Egyptians feel far more sinister to me. I took a long walk one morning along the Nile while the rest of the group was visiting the Egyptian Museum and the Coptic and Jewish areas of Old Cairo and the bazarres which my sister and I had seen last time. I was wearing a turquoise sweat suit with a tank top underneath. It was warm enough to take the jacket off but even with it unzipped to let in a little air I was getting stares, an occasional whistle, and a few cat calls. In India, if your shoulders are appropriately covered, you’re simply an object of interest. Apparently in the Muslim world, the throat and neck and hair are the erotic zones. Interestingly though, the women may all be wearing headscarves and there is no skin showing, the jeans and knit tops are absolutely skin tight. Yes, some of the older women are in full abayas, some with only eye slits, but generally Cairo and Amman are secular cities with covering of the head accepted.

On Wednesday, March 25, we flew to Aswan to embark on the three day cruise of the Nile. The ship is one of probably fifty plying the exact same route and schedule. Picture six by eight ships tied up together and having to walk through the lobbies of five other ships to get to your own. The result, of course, is that even your state room is looking into the stateroom of the ship next door. And, of course, Egypt doesn’t have electrical hookups for the ships so all fifty have their generators running so opening the window will also bring you lots of diesel fumes - and the cigarette smoke from other ships or passengers. Ugh.

Most of these ships look a bit shabby; certainly ours was. The dining room is below water level so you are eating in a room that makes you feel like it’s the middle of the winter somewhere. There is a lovely bar and lounge on the fourth deck and on the fifth is the pool.
The one day we were sailing, Thursday, was magnificent. A line of ships rather than fifty tethered together. The Nile is wide and lovely. The shores are lined with pastoral settings of lovely green fields and crops. Immediately behind looms the desert and pure brown. An awesome contrast.

The long and the short of it is that I’m not sure whether the way to see the wonders of the Nile in Aswan and Luxor is by cruise or the way my sister and I did it - boarding a plane everyday to fly to a different city, check into a different hotel, pick up a different guide, etc.....

The sights of Aswan and Luxor are incomparable. The temple of Karnak is what had knocked my socks off before and did again. Fully intact, it is immense. Unlike most of the Roman ruins, though, like Ephesus particularly or Jersash etc, Karnak and Luxor are temples not cities. As on the grand tour of Europe one thinks that one couldn’t see one more cathedral, in Egypt one can’t see one more temple, one more rock. Karnak is the best of the best, though.

By the end of the Elderhostel trip, I have bonded with three couples and a number of the individual members of the group. Often real lasting friendships are made on trips like this and it will be interesting to see if we actually do stay in touch.

Would I do it again or take another Elderhostel tour? I will probably never go on another tour again in my life but if I did, it would be with Elderhostel. This was a grand way to see lots of things but not to experience the life in the places we went. I would love to have spent two weeks in any one of many cities in Israel or Jordan as I did in India. The daily or every-other-daily schlepping between hotels, the pace of group travel which slows to the speed of the worst knees or hips in the group, the buses, all of it gets very, very old. Group touring is only good for seeing sights and having the details taken care of for you....

A final note on one of our guides and the culture of Jordan. Zuahir is a forty year old father of three, son of a Bedouin sheikh whose position he is entitled to inherit but which he has ceded to his brother, fully fluent, and considered one of the best guides in Jordan. He was chosen to be one of the first translators into Iraq with the Brits and we were extremely fortunate to have him. I have encouraged him to apply to the Mid-Career MPA program at the Kennedy School at Harvard because he will undoubtedly be a leader in his country one day.

Zuhair gave us great insights into desert/Arab/Bedoin/Muslim culture. He emphasized the strength of tribal culture - and even shariah law. Tribes settle differences between people, command absolute loyalty because they deserve it, maintain the glue of social control and a sense of belonging. People stay in line because to stray would be to bring dishonor on the tribe. He admits that it is all very good except in the instance of the extreme of punishing women who "stray," even if the straying is rape. He defends the covering of women as a way to maintain modesty but doesn’t deal convincingly with the flip side of the coin which must be that men cannot be expected to the control themselves in the face of the female body so it is women’s obligation to stay covered.....

Zuhair makes a convincing case for tribal culture; surely the failures of democracy in taking care of our own people in America or in providing order or justice in most Muslim countries - Iraq or Afghanistan come to mind - are obvious. I really did come to understand that we focus on and judge Arab culture for the way it treats women but we often fail to see that our world of mass culture and the void in values that it has widely created may actually bring greater pain for more people. Perhaps we shouldn’t be so quick to judge. Similarly, Zuhair notes that our "successes" in Iraq have come only when we engaged tribal leaders; he also suggests that we give up on this "democracy" business and the whole "election as vehicle to nirvana" idea. Some cultures just aren’t ready for it. Or, perhaps, the best way of organizing and governing people has just not yet emerged.