Mani

From my classroom, I can see the house where Jane Austen lived out the last weeks of her life, and the people looking at it. At lunch, I pass them in the street, absorbing this information from the blue plaque. They look a little deflated, peering in the windows, trying to see through the gap in the curtains, but it is empty, being restored.

Disappointment at the industry which springs up around literary figures is but an echo of the adage about meeting your heroes, but it is on my mind as we drive down from Kalamata towards the Mani peninsula. Between switchback glimpses of the Ionian far below, I try to recall Karen Blixen’s house in Nairobi, or Victor Hugo’s first-floor flat on the Place des Vosges in Paris. Hugo wrote standing up, I found out, at a beautiful red wooden desk, and the view from the window was lovely. I don’t remember Blixen’s house, only that we shuffled through, that it was ‘preserved’ as it might have been, minus anything that made it look lived-in. Google tells me that it was a big single-storeyed building, symmetrical, with a deep stoep on which to shelter from the equatorial sun, but I cannot match the images with any memory of a feeling. It wasn’t boring, exactly, but on a trip which included the wild glory of Samburu, it was filler, as so much tourism is. We are heading to Kardamyli, where Patrick (‘Paddy’) Leigh Fermor and his wife Joan lived. I love his writing and don’t want to be disappointed.

Heading south

I needn't have worried. Paddy and Joan’s old house is a museum, but it is only open two hours a week to casual visitors: 11-12 on Mondays and Thursdays. I find this out on Thursday at 1145am, after a few days of doing other important holiday things like swimming and lying around. My hotel is 15 minutes’ walk away, and I leave on Sunday. Unlike the indignant review below the relevant information on Google, I am not unhappy. I can’t help thinking that the Benaki Foundation, who host actual scholars and researchers at the house, have alighted on the right strategy for deterring gawpers and shufflers-through like me. You know: tourists.

Kardamyli beach

Paddy was not a tourist but a traveller, so following him is not about visiting his home. His Mani: Travels in the Southern Peloponnese is like the peninsula itself: a spectacular series of rises and falls, some of them ordered, some arriving in tumbling lists, explosions of prose strewn down the mountainside of a chapter, great cascades of Hellenistic speculation and connection. They are not random, but clues for the curious: the travelogue equivalent of academic footnotes. And they can be hard going. But the rewards are there for the casual reader in the description of the journey itself, in the exquisite relief of a passage where shade is found under an expanse of carob tree after a long uphill climb; in the joy of diving into a placid sea, its surface tension, maintained by an oppressive sun, finally broken. They are so good and immediate that even in the benign balm of spring, when the air is pleasantly warm and the sea at its coldest (swimmable still - Paddy swam long daily distances year-round well into old age, once his legs became less reliable for roaming), I can feel what he and Joan are going through. I can taste the dense, salted sweat of midsummer dehydration. It is exquisite travel writing, especially in its portraits of the people he meets. These often lead into a history lesson, a declamation or a flight of fancy. But even in the densest historical passages there is always the sense that he is trying to make a philhellene of the reader. And it is not a tough conversion. You get to keep your old beliefs, although my Hispanophilia is being tested. The Spanish coast is so much more built up than this one.

The Mani is the long, slender middle finger on a map of the Peloponnese. If your map doesn’t include contour lines, you might miss it as you look for places to visit. But the Taygetus mountain range which runs down the middle of the northern part and the bare, rocky peaks of the south give it a vastness, each fold of the landscape revealing a new story. From Kardamyli, the peninsula stretches southwards into the haze for 50 miles in a series of headlands and mountains protruding out into the sea. The land in April is a palette of greens, the sky blue, and the sea has a sheen from the warm spring sunshine. All along the road are olive groves, some flowering, and beneath them are grasses and pink and white and yellow spring flowers. There is none of the mowing or ploughing of soil for another crop beneath the trees that we see further north, perhaps only because there are too many rocks. Dry stone walls and terracing become more of a feature the further south we go, perhaps, as Paddy suggests in Mani, for something to do with the stones strewn across the landscape.

The tip of the peninsula

As he wrote, Mani has absorbed and half-forgotten wandering people for millennia. As well as a travelogue, his book is a quest to find out who exactly Maniots are, or were. They have changed somewhat now, become prosperous. When he arrived, they were already peaceful where once they had prosecuted lunatic clan feuds at a village level for control of scarce resources. Vertiginous towers, the signature building of the peninsula, were built in strategic locations at the head of a village by ambitious clans, who then used them as vantage points from which to fire upon rival families in guerrilla wars which were no less vicious and deadly for having a ritual, and breaks. The descriptions remind me Peter Mathiessen’s accounts of Highland Papuan warfare in Under the Mountain Wall, or even Homer, on a smaller scale.

Gerolimenas

The Maniots Paddy and Joan met were ragged for the most part yet warmly hospitable, leading a hardscrabble day-to-day life in which a visitor was nevertheless a pleasure and a rare treat rather than a burden. This hospitable attitude remains (although I should emphasise that you will be charged for your stay, even if Paddy and Joan often were not). But the hosting is still generous and sincere, joyful even. Kardamyli’s latest imports are weekenders from Athens, who are not here to seek out Paddy’s old haunts but to eat well, relax, swim and stay in the lovely hotels run by the descendants of his old housekeeper, or villas built on hills high above the village. Our apartment is at Elie’s, on the beach, one of 10 or so attached to the excellent restaurant of the same name. Their buffet breakfast is divine, with freshly baked bread, tarts, cakes, pastries, and fresh fruit, yoghurt, honey, cheese, curds. The view down the beach towards the village and further along the coast is gorgeous. We swim for miles each day to work up an appetite for the next meal.

Oh no, overordered again

Some visitors will walk up through woodland and spring flowers towards the bare peak of Mount Profitis Elias or its neighbours. We did for a few days beforehand on the eastern, Spartan side of the mountain, which in April is even lusher than Kardamyli. Mystras, a large Frankish-Byzantine-Ottoman citadel, is simply breathtaking, a Peloponnesian history lesson in stone, and a haven of calm. It is gloriously alive with bees and new life in Spring, but spectacular at any time I imagine. The Despot of the Morea, a semi-autonomous ruler of the region based there in the Byzantine period, is my new favourite job title.

The citadel is 3 hours’ walk from Anavryti, from where Paddy and Joan set off into the Mani in 1956, having ignored dire warnings from Spartans on the plain below about the strange people they would meet. The village is an impractical 650 metres and 10 switchbacks above the town of Sparta, where the jobs are, especially since the economic crisis of 15 years ago, and is deserted as a result. From a peak of 4000 inhabitants in the 1970s, it now has 33 (although many more come to their holiday homes in the summer months). Two of them are among the loveliest I have met, Maria and Yiorgos Kanellopoulos, a French teacher and mountain guide respectively, who together run the Arhontiko guesthouse with such generosity and warmth. Maria’s home-cooked food is simple yet spectacular (“How has she made this so delicious?” my daughter suddenly asked one evening) and comes in hiker-friendly portions. Yiorgos plays the bouzouki in the evenings and guides in the day, when he is not attending to the needs of the building, once the village doctor’s house, which he is sprucing up for the season ahead.

Family portrait, Arhontiko

The village is only 19km from Kardamyli as the crow flies (soars?), but a 4-hour drive via Kalamata on a mountain pass, two-and-a-half if you take the motorway around the mountain, although that would be too many good views missed. It took two days for Paddy and Joan to cross, with a mule helping in the latter stages. The chapter is called The Abomination of Desolation, to give you an idea of how hot it gets in summer. There is little shade up top. Yiorgos says he can do it in 19 hours (not bad for a 67 year-old!). He doesn’t carry much except the same type of twice-baked hard-as-stone paximadia bread fed to Joan and Paddy in 1956, which he rehydrates in mountain springs, and a few olives. You have to know where the water is, and Yiorgos, as the man charged with maintaining the Anavryti section of a long-distance trail down the peninsula, knows these mountains better than anyone. I wish I could go with him, but our 14-year-old, who likes walking, will not like this. Yet. But we’ll be back. Yiorgos is doing this hike again in November with guests, he says, but offers many others. Our own were gentler, self-guided affairs but we still managed to hike under emerging deciduous canopies singing with birdlife and into drier, sunnier, quieter coniferous forests, up to isolated churches, shrines and even a monastery.

Just another deserted cove

From Kardamyli south, we follow Paddy and Joan around - a little. Beyond Kardamyli, there are likely only the landscapes he described left to encounter, rather than people who met the author as he travelled. Sian and I spent a few months ‘in Patagonia’ twenty years ago, where every 3rd traveller was reading Bruce Chatwin. There will not be anyone like the woman in the Chubut valley who made a living sitting by the grave of a horse named Malacara telling tourists from Buenos Aires stories about her grandfather’s escape from marauding Indians in 1884 when said horse leapt over an impossible chasm. She was livid at Chatwin’s portrayal of her family as naïve, living a simple life. I found it warm and affectionate, but it infuriated her. Her revenge was to tell me (and likely every other tourist who asked about Chatwin, although she only spoke Spanish) ‘in confidence’ that he had introduced AIDS to Argentina. I decided she had probably met Nicholas Shakespeare as he researched his wonderful, intimate biography of the man, and found out more about his untimely death. It was an extraordinary comment, conspiratorial in its tone, similar to the details-vary suite of stories from a certain type of white South African I met occasionally in the 2000s who liked to tell a story they had heard from ‘someone who lived nearby and saw it’ about presidents Mbeki/Zuma who used to fly prostitutes by helicopter into their official residence in Cape Town/Pretoria. The details varied.

The Entrance to Hades, apparently

Black fish this way

We only have a few days. The excellent roads mean there is no recourse to mules, caiques or hard scrambles up and down peaks. Instead, we drive up high for views and down to swim in sheltered bays which we fancy were on their itinerary. At the southern tip, we swim at one of several claimed ‘entrances to Hades’, as Paddy did. His entrance was underwater, and he swam through an opening into a phosphorescent cave. Ours is an opening by a beach, where we snorkel and our daughter notices that all the fish are black, having perhaps escaped. We eat well in coves by the sea, in villages like Gerolimenas, from where Paddy set off at night to sail round the southern tip. We encounter no crowds like the ones at Delphi the week before or Nafplio the weekend after. It is the most blissful, perfect few days. The guidebook complains of faux-tower building, but there is so much landscape and so little development that it really doesn’t seem an issue. I almost hesitate to go back in case the spell is broken. It will be busier in summer.

 Greece is epic. Everyone knows that. But it is the peace I will cherish. Athens was green and pleasant, its sites uncrowded, its neighbourhoods varied and alive. A momentary wobble at the people lined up to view Delphi, I realised, was down to having read Paul Theroux’s description of it in Pillars of Hercules. He visited in the company of luxury small-ship cruise passengers, which might not have helped. (Top Delphi tip: hike up the mountain above for a couple of hours in the late afternoon sun). I love his writing too. It is no less acute in its descriptions than Paddy’s but somewhat further along the misanthropy scale. If we hadn’t come to Mani, I might have written something waspish about the crowds of weekenders wandering aimlessly in and out of each other’s photos in Nafplio at sunset while not acknowledging I was one of them. Instead, we sit at a fish restaurant and watch hundreds of swallows flying back and forth above us. We will soon be on our way northwards too, and are entirely relaxed. What a holiday!