Aristi, Greece: Doris to the Rescue (Again) and Our Rafting Debacle

 The hotel we were staying at in Aristi was absolutely beautiful with breathtaking vistas everywhere you look.  But even Shangra-La can have its issues.  We were high in the mountains and internet service could best be described as “spotty.”  Plus, yesterday morning, Bob and I had no hot water.  When we met Judy and Mark for breakfast, we all complained about the lack of hot water, while sitting outside overlooking this picture perfect scenery.  As we listened to ourselves complain, we all concurred that none of us could ever have made it as “mountain people.”  Bob said that if the four of us were on the Lewis and Clark expedition, America’s western-most boundary would have ended in Parsippany, New Jersey.

Doris explained that our adventures that day would include viewing the Vikos Gorge, the second deepest gorge in the world, with the Grand Canyon as its sole rival and rafting down the Voidomatis River, the cleanest river in Europe. Our first stop was the gorge, just a few minutes from our hotel down an ever-present winding road. We all looked at this marvel and realized that at least at this spot, we were the only people there. Unlike the Grand Canyon, there were no bus loads of people coming to see the view.  It’s a good thing because other than the winding road, there was no place to park! As we talked about both the beauty and the lack of tourists, we suddenly heard someone screaming.  Of course, knowing only the word “thank you” in Greek, the four of us had no idea what she was yelling about, we just stood there and hoped we weren’t trespassing on her property.  Doris however, being Greek, understood what the woman was saying and started running.  All of a sudden, we saw her picking up an old man from the ground! He started to tell Doris that he had recently had a stroke and was clearly walking with a significant limp, but his wife told him not to say anything.  I’m not sure who she thought Doris was going to tell.  Judy then ran over to see if she could help (again, travel with a nurse, if you can) but this old lady would not let out any family secrets.  We left him in a chair, with the old lady saying, “He’s all right,” as she shood us off to go on with our business.   

And then we proceeded to the rafting portion of the day. I’m not going to lie, we had a lot of discussions about this part of the vacation.  Besides the obvious conversation about whether we were all too old to raft down a river, we had lengthy conversations about what to wear.  Doris told us to wear our bathing suits and t-shirts and shorts, in case we got wet.  This was a problem.  For seven days, we have been eating our way through this country, as if each meal was our last, and the thought of each of us getting in bathing suits was too much for us all.  If there is a suggestion box for the tour company that we used,  I am going to recommend that any activities requiring bathing suits be scheduled for the beginning part of a trip, before the eating frenzy gets into full swing. 

We got out of the van to begin rafting and as our young guide prepared us with life jackets, helmets and water shoes, I can only imagine what she thought of us. I saw no other rafters in their sixties and seventies and if I were her, I would have been thinking I had drawn the short end of the stick. Her trepidation must have only grown as she saw the way we all got in, or more accurately, fell into the raft. And then she began explaining what we had to do once we hit the rapids and the two dams, when we would experience drops down into the  river.  For four educated people, we were not able to understand what we had to do and after several minutes of questions and concerns about several of our health-related issues in having our bodies twist in the way she was describing, she finally both showed us what we needed to do and then made us practice before we came anywhere near the rapids.  Needless to say, our “dress rehearsal” was not as successful as we had hoped.  I landed on the bottom of the raft, already filled with an inch of water and I couldn’t get up—mainly because I was laughing so  hard. This did not bode well for when we were actually descending from the top of the dam.  

Unbeknownst to us, our guide was very concerned about our overall lack of rowing power as more power than we clearly had was needed to get over the first dam.  We stopped to see a stream and we all saw Doris and the guide talking.  Soon after the conversation, the guide was on the phone.  Evidently, she voiced her concerns to Doris, who told her in no uncertain terms to call her supervisors to figure out how we can safely get to the bottom of the dam.  Fortunately for us, the conversation was in Greek.  Had we (I) understood any of it, we (I) would have been more frightened than we (I) already were. 

We neared the dam and our guide began to yell, “Row harder, row-harder!,” but to no avail. When we finally got to the dam, only 1/4 of the raft went over,  leaving us at a stand still, teetering on the edge. Our guide got out of the boat to try to push us over, but clearly, our overeating of baklava and tzatziki sauce was acting like an anchor, because that raft wouldn’t budge.  She then told us to start jumping up-and-down and moving sideways, which we did but with no apparent rhythm because the raft didn’t move an inch.

In the meantime, a crowd of people began to gather on the bank of the river to watch this spectacle.  It took nearly 10 minutes and a whole lot of jumping and swaying to finally get the raft over the dam. Doris later told us that we now held the record for the group that took the longest to go over the dam. It’s a record that none of us are so keen to hold. 

After spending the morning in the lovely lakeside town of Ioannia, we flew back to Athens to spend the last leg of our journey on the island of Spetses.  The bad news was that there was a lot of winding roads to get to the boat that took us to the island.  The good news is that we didn’t have to paddle…..