As a young woman, I never really travelled alone – I didn’t have the nerve or the inclination. But in recent years, I have started to do this in a small way – perhaps just tagging on a couple of days to trips with family or friends.
This week I am in Athens, for the first time, and very much enjoying exploring this beautiful city, the Edinburgh of the south.
Last night I dined on roast chestnuts and a blackened corn on the cob from a street barbecue, while watching the sun go down in the gardens of the Acropolis. This of course, is the temple of the female god Athena. (I have to admit it is way better than the one on Calton Hill).
In the legend, Athena contested with Poseidon for the city – Poseidon struck a rock and brought out salty water while Athena offered the townsfolk an olive tree. The Athenians preferred the latter – otherwise the city would now be called “Poseidon’s”.
I was fancifully applying this to the present day as I sat on a wall, sharing my dinner with a passing tortoiseshell cat. I prised a bit of the hot nut – which looked like a tiny brain – out of its shell and she gingerly nibbled at it.
Donald Trump’s “drill baby drill” and last week’s bullying attack on a historic climate change agreement on shipping seem a bit like the Posideon offer. – lots of salty water in the form of rising sea levels.
We need a latter-day Athena to vanquish him, I told my companion, before returning to my hostel to go to bed with an old Dick Francis, a vintage paperback that I found in the book nook.
When travelling solo, I usually stay in the female dorms of hostels. They are cheap, central, lively and I prefer them to the equivalent-priced Airbnb option which often involves a schlepp to the suburbs, where I have to follow check-in instructions in the dark by the light of my phone – “the keysafe is behind the bins down the alley”. And then those last day blues where I resentfully scrub the oven shelves despite having paid an £80 “cleaning fee”, for fear of getting a bad review from the host.
Hostel dorms are classed as female or mixed, and they ask for your passport when you check in. I have stayed in a mixed dorm once – the pilgrim hostels on the Santiago de Compostelo have huge rooms with many beds. But I don’t stay in them when traveling elsewhere – I feel much more comfortable in the female ones. They are usually friendly and incredibly quiet – I have shared rooms with louder mice – although if someone has an early flight there can be a lot of scrabbling. They vary in terms of facilities but they are always interesting.
I mentioned in a Substack post that I stayed in one in Paris. Great location – a vast pile close to the Seine, looking like the one in the children’s classic picture book Madeline: “In an old house in Paris that was covered in vines lived twelve little girls in two straight lines.”
But whenever you booked online, you seemed to get a different room. On my last night, passing through the city on my way home, I found myself in a garret where the single beds were a bit too close together.
When I went to bed, someone nearby was snoring in a way that reminded me very much of my grandpa. The snoring was constantly interrupted by a heavy cough. My dorm mate’s pedal extremities protruded from under the duvet. It was all a bit like a modern setting of La Boheme – not “Mimi, your tiny hand is frozen”, more like “Blimey, your knobbly feet look freezing”,
Next morning, it became apparent that L… (I am not going to reveal her real name) – who must have a female passport – was a trans lorry driver from England. She looked much more feminine when up and dressed, light brown, shoulder-length hair, a white form-fitting, V-neck t-shirt and jeans.
I bumped into her again when I took a wrong turning and was hobbling along a corridor in the wrong direction. L… had got the hang of the lay out in super quick time and led me on an unauthorised shortcut down the turret stairs into the courtyard, where she offered me a fag. (I’m an occasional smoker, so I accepted.)
To my relief, I discovered that L… was probably not, as I had feared in the wee small hours, suffering from TB, but merely a chain-smoker of Marlboro Reds. She confided that she hadn’t stayed in a hostel before, but was just filling in a couple of days before meeting her boyfriend, and was finding the lack of privacy challenging.
The Box Bed hostel in Athens is much more comfortable. There are three bunk beds in our dorm, arranged facing a wall, so you’re not too close to anyone else, and each bed has a hand-sewn curtain that pulls right across. The vibe is friendly. I get bored of my own company after a while, so I enjoy quizzing my fellow inhabitants.
I woke up this morning to find a young woman sitting on the floor doing something with a pump. I thought she was blowing something up. She explained that she was sucking the air out of her luggage – turning a rather large bag of clothes into a much smaller one, in an effort to stay one step ahead of the airport baggage-size police.
The staff are friendly too. After the first night, the receptionist/host lady thoughtfully moved me into a bottom bunk – which saved everyone the nocturnal amateur gymnastics display as I descend the ladder to go to the loo.
Last night, I was working on my laptop at a table in the foyer when the receptionist – a cheerful man with an enviable capacity for alcohol – emerged from behind his desk and attempted to get a bit of a party started by introducing everyone and pouring generous measures of something strong for whoever would join in. I turned down a Bourbon and he finally found a bottle of Scotch, Ballantine’s, behind the gin. He then told everyone that I was a lady from Scotland who would drink only Scottish whisky.
A melancholy young Russian came in and sat down. I asked if he was a tourist.
“Yes,” he said, opening his arms wide. “I am permanent tourist.”
I asked if he’d seen anything in Athens.
“I saw the Acropolis today,” he replied.
“What did you think of it?” I asked.
He stared into his Jim Beam for a moment.
“Expensive,” he said.
I thought about him when I went around the place myself. It is breathtaking – the structures are on a massive scale with a commanding view of the countryside- but I guess it is not always easy to connect with the history of these places. You pay your money – 30 euros – and join an endless river of humanity streaming through the gates.
There is probably an argument for saying that the Acropolis is best viewed from a distance – up close you can be distracted by the huddled masses, footsore, dusty, some of them no doubt wondering why they came, if there is going to be a queue for the loo or why there is no cafe. You start people-watching instead – which is also part of the charm of travel.
But whenever I see the temple from the city, white in the morning sun, or glowing in the floodlights at night I remember my dinner with the cat and reflect that two millenia after it was built, humanity as a whole faces the same dilemma. Salt water or the olive tree – which will we choose?