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Posted in Europe | By tim |
Woken by rain – on our packing day. Everything is soaked. Put our tent under the cover of the toilet block to wipe it down and meet a Kiwi and a Canadian girl doing the same thing. They share our view of Rhodes and it is refreshing to talk to them.
We have to wait for over an hour at the bus stop – all the buses are full. The rain has driven the crowds away from the beaches and into Rhodes. We don’t really mind – we have fifteen hours to waste today. Goody’s restaurant in town kills another one and puts a stop to the hunger, then we leave for the airport. Chris walks miles to the nearest village to get apples and bananas and a paper.
At 8.30pm after a seemingly endless wait playing chess and talking, we can claim our tickets from the Airtours rep. Richard. Apparently our flight numbers are wrong and for a sinking moment, we are nearly on a flight to Stansted. Thankfully, Birmingham is still on but Chris discovers there is a chance he could get a place on the flight to Stansted leaving later. He is ecstatic at the prospect that he could even be home by sunrise tomorrow but he must wait to find out for definite. I wait till 3.35am regardless. Chris is imagining getting into Stansted and going straight to Harriet’s house, not to see her it seems, but to use her power shower. Can’t imagine anything nicer right now. Unfortunately, he returns crestfallen from the office – all the passengers have turned up and there are no spare seats. The tables are turned only minutes later when a flight to Manchester is announced and I get my hopes up for an early departure. The same old story though, no free seats. Everyone is doing the sensible thing and leaving this place as soon as they can. The hours quickly pass when we meet David, originally from Birmingham but studying as a mature student at Canterbury in ‘English and The History of Science’. He teaches us some of the finer points of chess and slaughters Chris in a long-drawn out game, having beaten me virtually seconds after starting.
So engrossed in talking and playing are we, that after 12 hours of waiting we actually miss the build up of the queue for check in and have to join it – not at the front as we’d hoped – but knee deep in the herd of Brummies. David runs into an eccentric guy who turns out to be curator of a museum in the Midlands, wears a huge Panama hat and cracks the lamest jokes ever. David’s conversation seems intent on taking the mickey out of the guy – in the nicest possible way – and it is all I can do not to burst out laughing. The Airtours plane is only three years old and seems pretty state-of-the-art. There are drop-down TVs for every three rows and radio stations on tap. Breakfast is served not a moment too soon an hour after boarding and afterwards the film ‘Twister’ offers light hearted relief from the sleepless night. A visit to the cockpit is the highlight of the trip. The view of the fairy lights over Austria as we cruise at 575mph across the cities is very special, as are the stars unimpeded by clouds above us.
From an engineer’s viewpoint, the cockpit is incredibly impressive and we spend twenty minutes or more questioning the pilots and joking about our travels with them. They can’t believe we’ve paid £180 just to be on this flight – but don’t make any attempt to offer us a discount. Captain Kylie seems to be a Kiwi – just one of many which appear to have been a recurring theme of our trip. Land without a hitch and although the steps are late arriving, the flight is on time. The Brummies really haven’t been that bad to travel with. Were glad of the cattle prod a few times though. Birmingham is cold and clear. Chris has all the luck. His Dad has driven up from Swindon and slept in the car and is waiting for him outside. Chris is obviously silently relieved he didn’t end up in Stansted – Dad wouldn’t have been pleased. And so the time has come for goodbyes.
I think a fantastic holiday for both of us comes to an end here. To be re-lived, enlarged and exaggerated again of course in Freshers week. It all seems a bit of an anti-climax really, but that’s only because Rhodes was not up to scratch. Compared to the rest of the holiday, the end belied the laughs and fun we had all along.
And as I sit on a brand new BR train home, opposite a pretty face falling gently asleep at this unreasonable hour and watching the clouds turn first pink then orange in a glorious blue sky, I decide that England is, after all, a fine place to live and that really, deep down, the desire to travel far and wide is only matched after more than a month on the road by the desire to be back at home, sitting in slippers by the open hearth with buttered crumpets toasting for tea. I can’t help feeling though, that as I get on with my life, shrink-wrapped and pre-packaged for convenience as it is, that all the people we’ve met – the shoe-shiners, the drunk, the street kids, the old bag lady – will all be getting on with their lives too. Even if I never see any of them again, likely as that is, the hardship that I have seen them experience will always be etched in my memory. Knowing they have probably got it harder now, thinking of them is the best I can do. Mind enriched, horizons broadened, perspectives changed. Maybe so, but as the crumpets get closer, and the memories flood back, I look outside and see nothing’s really changed. I’m still me. The world is still one hell of a big place. The adrenalin drops off. The sleep loss kicks in. I’m happy to be home and there are new challenges to be faced.
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