“Piraeus?” asked the taxi driver. Yes, that was my destination.
“Problem,” he responded.
Fortunately, at this location on a lonely road in the wilds of the Greek peninsula of Methana, it was one that he and his Mercedes were uniquely placed to solve.
He drove the 10km to the port, also called Methana, swiftly, skilfully and silently.
A man clearly given to one-word questions, his next enquiry was:
“Ticket?” No, I needed to buy one.
That was the essential information he needed to know about whether to drop me at the Saronic Ferries office rather than the quayside.
“Eight,” he said, helpful holding up the requisite number of fingers to indicate the fare. The driver was well worth the €10 I handed over. He was the final element in a journey that had started early and optimistically on the island of Poros.
I was booked on the last British Airways flight on Friday from Athens to London Heathrow. I could have taken the high-speed ferry from the island of Poros to the main Greek port of Piraeus, followed by a train to Athens airport.
But I had arrived in that fashion, and I wanted to explore more of Greece on the way to the capital. So instead I hopped on a shuttle ferry to the mainland and proceeded to hitchhike north to Methana, a beautiful not-quite island. A ferry would be leaving at 2.10pm for Piraeus, giving me plenty of enough time to reach the airport.
John Humphrys – the excellent former presenter of the BBC Radio 4 Today programme – is rumoured to have a property on Methana. But he was not among the people who gave me lifts. The first was on the back of a motorbike, ridden by a construction labourer, who dropped me off at his building site.
The theme continued with Costas (civil engineer specialising in holiday homes for foreign buyers), then a building supplies merchant who took me to the pretty fishing village of Vathi, where I paused for breakfast.
Finally Miltiades drove me along part of the road that meanders around the north of the island. He was another civil engineer: evidently lots of foreign property buyers besides Mr Humphrys are attracted to Methana.
The main tourist attraction in Methana is a volcano, and Miltiades dropped me off at the start of the trail. It is a…
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