Terra Incognita

 

photo by Newell

 

 

photo by Newell

Most road maps of Samos have three color coded road designations.  A heavy red line is the designation for major transportation routes, these roads are challenging for even seasoned drivers.  Fine red lines designate secondary roads which are poorly paved, cliff hanging donkey trails, not for the faint of heart.  Fine yellow lines, indicate unpaved jeep trails.  On secondary roads safety improvements for night driving are limited to a little white paint slopped onto tree trunks or jutting rocks.  A winding mountain road with a sheer rock face on one side, and no guard rail on the other, could have a little ridge of earth mounded up along the outside lane to indicate some erosion problems that the Greek NTSB hasn’t had the funds to address yet.  These things take some getting used to by Western drivers.




photo by Newell

There is a thin squiggly red line on the road map that runs along the south western coast line of the island, then arcs up along a steep mountain range at the island’s western edge, and dead ends in a little village called Drakei.  Neither one of us had seen the West End of Samos so we decided to take full advantage of our rental car and go exploring.  Kathy prefers to do the driving here now, but that has not always been the case.  The roads are as poorly marked as they are maintained, so there were some dead ends and back tracking, but the scenery was spectacular by even Samian standards.  At one point the little red line led us straight through a village with streets so narrow we folded the rear view mirrors flat against the car to squeak past the buildings.  Another place required a three point turn to make a 90-degree bend in the road.



photo by Newell

We stopped for a frappe’ and snapped a few pictures of the boatyard in Drakei, then headed back by a different route.  Kathy approaches driving with the same goal oriented focus with which she attacks all of the tasks that she sets for herself, worrying about the obstacles only when she encounters them.  Accelerating toward our next agreed upon destination with the self-confidence of a native driver, she provides her passenger with a less focused perspective from which to appreciate the full range of possibilities posed by the scenery passing sometimes inches from his nose or hundreds of feet below the flimsy side panels of their rented car.  Once Kathy has put her hand to the steering wheel, she doesn’t look back, or down.



photo by Newell