We have 'previous' so far as Grimaldi Ferries are concerned. We used the company back in 2015 on the first moho trip to Greece. It was a dreadful experience. The ship was ancient, judging by the faded charts in the reception area, it originally seemed to have plied the Baltic. That must have been back in the 1980s, the decor may be best described as bad conference hotel plush, all maroon velveteen, brass rails and ghastly over-elaborate light fittings. They were merely grim, the mouldy quality resided in the carpets, the big swirly patterns barely visible through the grime, the texture spongy and a bit sticky, like walking along rubber backed velcro. The food was mouldy too, the worst we've ever encountered.
So to begin with the positives, the boat we took from Brindisi to Corfu yesterday was much newer and cleaner. Everything else about the experience was as grim as before. The whole point of swapping to a 1pm. sailing was to make sure we arrived Corfu early enough to check in at a campsite. As instructed we arrived to two hours before embarkation. As we drove down the potholed dual carriageway past the gaunt remains of old factories it all looked depressingly familiar.I was reminded just how god forsaken Brindisi docks were, the epitome of a dilapidated Mediterranean port. I'm sure I recognised Albanian guy selling knock-off trainers out the back of an ancient rusty Mercedes Sprinter outside the terminal. Nothing had changed since our previous visit seven years ago, including the level of disorganisation.
On arrival we were waved into the car park beside the terminal and told to find a space. This was tricky because all the bays were car length and by the time four other motorhomes had turned-up everyone else had to slalom between us to find a parking space. It shouldn't really be possible to create a traffic jam of parked vehicles, but here we were.
Why we were here was less clear, leading to lots of us wandering about looking confused. The guy parked next to us discovered that we should have booked-in at a desk in the terminal to get our boarding cards. Conditioned by our experience of the Dover docks' Gruppenfuhrers the controls in Brindisi might be regarded as either refreshingly relaxed or dangerously lackadaisical depending on your attitude towards authority. The woman behind the counter never actually looked at us, but continued a conversation with someone else throughout the transaction. Gill placed our passports next to her phone displaying the e-ticket pdf on the counter. The woman took the passports but didn't look at them, momentarily she glanced at the phone, then boarding cards with our names on them instantly appeared as if by magic. It was as if we had witnessed a conjuring trick. I can only think that she had surreptitiously typed in our booking number, but that was quite a neat trick given she was chatting away to her colleague all the time.
We returned to the van boarding cards in hand, in our absence our next door neighbour had ascertained that when it came to loading - which now must be imminent - the guy in the hi-viz by the entrance would direct us from the Terminal jam towards the loading lanes' scrum. It was noon, we were due to depart in an hour. Then another email from Grimaldi arrived announcing that the boat had been re-scheduled to leave at 3.00pm. This pissed me off big style. We had moved our sailing from yesterday precisely to avoid a mid-afternoon departure to avoid arriving in Corfu town in the dark and having to find somewhere to sleep over night before booking into our campsite next day. In truth this didn't look too tricky. Reviews on Park4Night mentioned parking places near the port that people had used when arriving late. Still, driving a motorhome around an unfamiliar town in Greece at night is not something you would choose to do readily.
All this waiting around could have been tedious, normally that would be the case, however the lone traveller in the swanky black Mercedes Westphalia camper parked next to us decided to befriend us and proceeded, over the next ten hours, to tell us his life story.
The first installment filled the time we waited to move from the terminal car park to the embarkation area. First he claimed to be Swiss, then admitted that actually he was a German citizen living in Zurich. He was on the ferry to Corfu because he had bought a 14m catamaran which was berthed in Gouvia marina. He was heading there to complete the paperwork. The company he'd bought it from had promised show him how it worked. He had never sailed a boat before. Nevertheless, he planned to sail it to Majorca by the end of October because he was due to compete in the Iron Man half triathlon there. His longer term plan was to sail it to the Caribbean via Lanzerote, then onwards to Hawaii through the Panama canal. "I must be there by October 2O23," he explained. "I am booked into the full Iron Man there."
Mixed-in with this unlikely tale we learned that "like all Swiss people" he did not like being told what to do, "It is up to me what goes into my body..." (anti-vaxxer!). "We only hear from experts who agree with the government elites, there are alternative facts that are hidden.." (right wing libertarian fantasist!).
Oddly enough on each of our past three trips we have ended up next to an unvaccinated guy living off-grid to avoid Covid regulations. In February found ourselves in Puerto Serrano next to an Austrian man stuck in Spain under the radar because he refused to fill-in Covid related paperwork and was unvaccinated. Going home was not an option for him, the Austrian government was the only one in Europe to make the jab mandatory; he faced a €3500 fine if he refused to comply. Three months later on the Beara Peninsula in Ireland the Swiss guy next to us in a rented van asserted the same libertarian mantra, "it is my choice I do not need to ask permission to be myself." In his case this was wrapped up with a lot of gobbledygook about 'positive energy '. He had managed to dodge lockdown in Europe by house-sitting in Mexico for months. All three had certain similarities, they were all Germanic and looked it, stereotypically tall, blonde, athletic and in their own way obsessed with a kind of puritanical zeal. Equally fascinating I suppose is what exactly is it about us that prompted each of them to tell us their story. In the 'Ancient Mariner' the protagonist 'stoppeth one of three'. 'Wherefore stoppeth thou me?' enquires the reluctant listener. A good question that never gets answered, either in the poem or here in the Brindisi ferry queue.
Boarding formed an intermission. The process was chaotic. Some of us were heading to Corfu, others to Igoumetsita, but no-one bothered to separate the two groups until we were alongside the ship. It took ages, especially as a the Corfu bound vehicles had to reverse on. So it was after 4pm before we departed, we would be lucky to arrive in Corfu before midnight.
Most of the ferries criss-crossing the Adriatic are long crossings which require you to book over-night accommodation. Consequently the whole mid-section of the ships are taken up with cabins and the public areas - cafeterias, bars and lounges - are more compact than on a typical cross-channel ferry. This is fine unless, like now, the boat makes a day-time crossing, then the seating capacity is insufficient for the number of people on board. As we were one of the last vehicles to reverse on board the only place we could find to sit was on a narrow window sill.
Here we were perched when our new friend found us and simply picked-up his story where he had left off, expounding further on his favourite subject - himself - for the entire seven hour crossing, while we sat on on our window sill then later squeezed around a tiny table in the café and nodded sagely.
At first he had come across as a rightwing libertarian nutjob. in fact he was more complex than that, a bright, thoughtful, somewhat conflicted nutjob! He was clearly inspired by his slightly wacky plan, but also very nervous that he would not cope. The yacht was his pension pot, it was a risky throw of the dice to sail the thing across the Atlantic singlehanded as lone sailors are regarded as uninsurable. He was older than he seemed, in his mid-fifties though he looked ten years younger. 'I feel my life is slipping by,' he mused. 'Now is the time I muist do this,' he asserted. I couldn't tell if this was an expression of determination or an attempt subliminate nagging doubts. It would have been easy to get quite annoyed by his persistence, but what else would we have done with the time. He was an intriguing character and it is always thought provoking to come across someone whose way of thinking is profoundly different to your own.
We arrived in Corfu half an hour before midnight. Disembarking was as chaotic as boarding, though thankfully it took five minutes rather than five hours. Finding a parking place in the town was surprisingly easy. It had been an exhausting day. Given the urban location it wasn't too noisy overnight until the early flights from the nearby airport began around 6.30am.
At first light I hopped out to take a photo. Car park, dock, Albania in the background, we really were here, it hadn't been a weird dream. Normality resumed, we paid the car park guy €5 .00, then set the sat-nav to Lidl, sometimes you crave adventure, sometimes you are reassured by the mundane. I think we were both ready to seize the uneventful.
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