*Originally posted on my blog at http://callumjw.blogspot.co.uk/2015/10/the-holiday-from-hell-part-4.html*
The Boat Trip
So besides a few minor niggles this nautical day out passed mostly without incident. However, it is VITAL I mention the boat trip for what happened after...you'll see.
So as I said, the minor niggles, starting form the top:
1. I'm terrified of boats, the open sea, deep water, etc. etc. so was none too pleased about the prospect of the entire day floating about but agreed to the day long trip to keep Emma happy, but I was shitting the metaphorical brick for the entire duration.
2. We had the poor fortune (a theme you may notice) to be sat next to an arguing couple, not much older than ourselves, that bickered for almost the ENTIRETY of the day. At first I felt sorry for the girl, her boyfriend had been texting some girl on holiday and denied it at first but it all came out yada yada you've no doubt heard it before. This may just be the guy in me talking but by the end of the day I felt sorry for the poor guy, she was an A Class moaning, miserable, whining, ball ache. I don't think I saw her smile, even once they had 'made up'.
3. I got sun burnt
4. Moments after the below picture was taken I may or may not have pushed Emma off the top of the boat and into the sea without warning, which earned us a little domestic of own.
5. Moments after disembarking HMS Floating Death both Emma and I were hit by overbearing sea sickness which neither of us realised would come into play later that evening.
The Quad Bike Hire
Now as I said we had been on the boat an entire day; I was really looking forward to getting back, having a shower and getting a nice relaxing evening at a local restaurant under my ever loosening belt.
EMMA alas decided that the very moment we set foot upon dry land was the perfect opportunity to go and enquire about hiring a quad bike for the next day, something, we had been unable to do the day before because they were all sold out. See The Holiday From Hell | Part 3.
Fine, I decided, if it keeps Emma happy I could wait a little while longer for a shower and my mind was still partially distracted by praising the Lord for getting me back onto firm ground.
The shop assistant proceeded to look at me and say:
"Now you can use it to go out for dinner tonight!"
Looking back now I realise that it was here that my fate was sealed.
I smiled along and thought NO my first ever experience driving a quad bike will not be tonight in the almost dark on roads I don't know in a foreign country when I am not only exhausted, but sea sick.
But in reality.....
So the journey to the town (Notos) was a whopping 4.7 miles away and with the sun setting we aimed to get there before dark, an easy task for people as intelligent, mature and prepared as we are.
The first thing we noticed was that our map, given to us by the quad bike hire shop, was shit.
The second thing we noticed was that in a lot of European countries you can half work out road signs due to their Latin routes and similar letters. Greek, however was designed by someone who saw the welsh language and decided well that's just too fucking obvious and set a real challenge.
In short, we were not helped at all by the sparse and incomprehensible road signs. Want to guess how long that 4.7 mile trip took us?
You're wrong.
It took a little over 2 hours and we didn't even end up where we wanted, we stopped in a random town (which turned out to be the one next door to Notos) after we had both just given in at the first sign of a restaurant that didn't look too awful as extreme hunger had set in, caused mainly by not eating that day, due to the accursed boat trip.
How did it take so long, I hear you ask, well see Exhibit A, the map below, aka Our Route.
The 'X' on the lower left is where we started and the 'X' on the upper slightly right is where we ended up.
As you can see, we took the scenic route.
So anyway we arrive outside this restaurant, which all in all, looked good. Maybe we would be rewarded for our 2 hour slog through Corfu with a dinner that would mend our souls!
But first I had to park the Quad in the car park, which according to the sign outside the restaurant was 100 yards down the road.
I kicked Emma off the back of the bike to order us drinks (which I NEEDED) and get us a table, I'd only be a minute.
I wasn't a minute.
Half a mile further down the road I finally found the fabled car park and to get into said car park meant driving down a steep dirt slope that wouldn't be out of place on a rally circuit. Eventually, with extreme care, I made it down into the car park, which was essentially a sloped clearing that ended in a sheer cliff drop. This is where I learnt our quad bike had no handbrake and every time I let go of the brake the quad bike would roll backwards toward the cliffs edge at the end of the car park.
Eventually I realised if I parked the other way (side ways) it wouldn't roll back.
So I set back up towards the restaurant and Emma and what I hoped was an ice cold beer.
But there wasn't.
There was a Diet Coke, because I was driving.
Now as you can imagine after two hours lost on the back of a quad bike Emma and I were not in the most amicable of moods. Add some severe motion sickness into the mix, awful wait staff and an over priced meal then you have all the ingredients for what you can consider an argument trifle.
Which of course erupted sometime in-between finishing the main and paying the bill. However we both knew that ahead lay the journey home, ahead lay our fate, ahead lay that quad bike.
Now you may have noticed I haven't said too much about the experience of being on the quad bike and that is because on the way there, despite being lost, it was still good fun to drive and the novelty of it all lasted almost the entire journey.
There was no such novelty on the way back.
The way back only held doom and despair.
We walked the half mile to the car park, where it soon became apparent that our Quad bike would not make it back up the slope that led from the car park, the only exit. So I had to get off and run with the quad bike up the hill and combining its full power and my feeble push to get it to the top we made it with the only casualty being some mild sweating and dirty clothes.
Out of frying pan, into the fire.
We set off, oddly optimistic that our previous experience had taught us something, thinking that lightning can't strike twice. Lighting might not be able to, but world ending meteorites sure can.
After 20 minutes we found ourselves rolling into Notos, the town we had originally aimed for, which, annoyingly, was SO much nicer than the place we had just stopped for dinner. But the place was full of people so Emma jumped off to ask a local for directions, she came back beaming, saying:
"Apparently it's easy, just up, down, right, left."
So armed with our directions that sounded eerily similar to a GTA cheat code we set off still riding on our wave of optimism. Firstly we did the up bit, ALOT of up, there was so much going up that our quad bike, which we christened George, could only muster a pathetic speed of 13 kilometre per hour. With that in mind let me paint the scene:
It's 10:30pm at night, the village we are approaching is soundly asleep. Two tourists arrive, one with skin redder than a stop light, both in fancy-ass clothing, both wearing sunglasses at night like some weird homage to the Blues Brothers, revving every last ounce of their quad bike, on their heads they are sporting these god awful helmets AND THEN as if this picture could not get any more perfect, the girl on the back of this quad bike whips out her phone and starts playing music: Justin Bieber's 'Boyfriend' as loud as possible.
It was at this point I realised that if there is a god, he hates me.
But we pressed on, our four wheeled horseman of the apocalypse carrying us into the night. A night that I should add was:
A) Beginning to get quite chilly and damp, the effects of which are both heightened when travelling at speed on a quad bike.
B) Full of insects that crowded round our dim and frankly useless head lights but found other homes in our eyes and in our mouths.
After an hour, we came back into Notos. Fuck.
We tried again, beginning to believe that we may actually never see our hotel again. In our desperation we tried something new, we turned off the 'main' roads onto smaller ones. Which took us to places akin to where Ross Kemp would take a film crew, honestly these places where SCARY, smashed up cars sat abandoned in the road, trailer vans at every corner, stray dogs barking, sheer cliffs to oblivion all with no street lighting at all, only our dim yellow head lights to guide us.
In a brand new type of desperation we turned back in search of a main road. We got back to somewhere like civilisation and it soon became apparent that it was my turn to get off and ask locals for directions. I did so and returned to Emma with some good news, apparently we were not far and there was a short cut right ahead of us.
Now I don't know if the guy that gave me the directions was wrong, having a laugh, or just wanted us dead. Because that short cut lead us to a town, and I'm not exaggerating when I say, it was like something out of Will Smiths I Am Legend. It was deserted, pitch black, full of twisting tight roads and steep slopes. Eventually after much faffing and more revving we reached the town 'square' where about twenty locals sat in the dark passing wine bottles from one to the other. We looked at them, they looked at us. It was a horrible, tense moment; after a few seconds one of them waved us through and gingerly we drove past them in silence. Well as much silence as a quad bike carrying two twenty year olds can muster.
We flew from the town like a bat out of hell and thanks to some minor miracle stumbled upon a sign back to Agios Georgios, the town that housed our 'hotel'.
We made it back, two and a half hours after paying the bill. We wanted to get to our regular bar STAT but only a few hundred yards away we stopped and pulled over, to break into pure hysterical laughter.
To any passer-by it looked like two escapees from the happy farm.
To us it was like the ending of an epic journey that had been just another highlight of our ongoing awful luck, but for that one joyous moment we had fought Corfu and we had WON! (kind of).
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