Story of Matt , Part 8 - Crete, Part 2

If that first night in Sitia wasn't the worst night of my life it was close. It was certainly the worst night of our time together.

I marched into town knowing how hurt Matt would be when he found out I left without him, but had I stayed with him it would have been a miserable time too, and he wouldn't see the need to change the way he was treating me. It was a drastic action, and I was afraid I had gone too far. I knew he might never forgive me but I couldn't turn back.

I wanted nothing more than to forget the pain I felt and the pain I was causing him. At dinner I ordered a small bottle of Ouzo worth seventy cents and a 750ml bottle of retsina worth fifty cents and proceeded to become drunker and sicker than ever before (or since).

I am not blessed with the ability to forget everything by the next morning after a drunken binge, although my memories are as altered as my vision was. I had the company of at least four other young travelers, a Brit, an Aussie, a German and an Irish lass, and we seemed to have fun until well into the night. They decided to do a stroll along the beach, but I was too wasted to keep up with them. I remember sitting on a log wondering what to do next.

Eventually I made it to solid ground and staggered up the main street towards the hostel, stopping into a café along the way. The old men, who to spend their days silently people watching from the café, all stood out of concern went I staggered in the door. I knew then I was seriously fucked up.

Somehow I made it back to the hostel, stopping at the primitive washroom to be sick. Then I stumbled into the dorm. I found Matt's bed, sat down and started explaining apologetically. His sole concern was getting me to keep quiet and not wake up everyone in the room. I found my own bunk, fortunately a lower one, and passed out.

The next morning I was up at the crack of dawn to use the washroom again. It was a total mess. I had apparently missed the toilet completely the night before. It was a terribly difficult chore in my condition but I spent half an hour cleaning up the mess the best I could before anyone else woke up.

Matt was furious with me, and although I was embarrassed and apologetic, I was still furious with him too. We stayed in Sitia another two days while I was too sick to travel. We were both too choked to talk about our feelings. The fact that he stayed with me, and that we traveled on together another three weeks, told me that he cared. He stayed right beside me the two days, in spite of the tensions between us. By the second day, we were talking politely and he was even sweet and caring at times.

Early the next day, still feeling the effects of my $1.20 hangover, I set out with him on a rural side road over the hills to the south coast. By noon we reached the port of Ierapetra. We caught the attention of a young local man about our age when we stopped for lunch. He struck up a conversation and insisted, against our objections, on buying us a big jug of Greek wine. The smell of it was enough to turn my stomach but he was seriously offended when I said I was too sick to have any. He toasted us with "Yamos!", which ironically means for 'to your health'. I pretended to drink it, spitting it back into my glass every second sip, and whenever he was distracted I poured half my glass into Matt's.

To save me from a fate worse than death, Matt eventually drank it all. For once he rode behind me after lunch as we continued west along the south coast. Alcohol brings out the sides of our personalities we usually keep a lid on. With Matt, it always made him horny. Suddenly I felt his hand caressing my back and ass as we rode along. He had pulled up beside me and had the biggest foolish grin on his face. I was grateful for his attention but also horrified that someone might see.

The road began a long and steep climb away from the coast at the beach town of Myrtos. Given Matt's condition, both his drunkenness and his horniness, I figured it was best to stop for the night. I left him fumbling with the bike lock while I booked a room for two. I filled his arms with our bags so he wouldn't fondle me until we got to the room, and once inside I helped him undress and guided him to the shower. As soon as he was out and toweling himself off in slow motion, I jumped into the shower myself. I was pretty horny too by this point, but in the time it took to shower off my sweat and return to the bed, he was already dead to the world and snoring like a lawn mower.

Early the next morning, we set out under grey skies to tackle the massive hill on the road that led north and inland away from Myrtos. Matt was his old self again, regrettably, and he powered swiftly up the hill and out of sight. I shifted down to my lowest gear but the chain slipped back up to second gear repeatedly. I pushed harder on the shift lever to lock it down. The plastic lever snapped off in my hand and the chain jammed between first and second gear. I couldn't even roll the bike so I waited patiently at the bottom of the hill.

It was close to an hour before Matt came looking for me. He had waited at the top for almost that long and he was angry to find me still at the bottom. He took out his tools and locked my derailleur into second gear for the rest of the trip. That would allow me to climb hills but I would never be able to get up a decent speed on the flat stretches.

The road we were on headed back to Iraklion on the north shore. We wanted to stay on the south side, which required us to take unpaved mountain roads for half the day to reach our destination. At points it was so rough that even riding at walking speed was nearly impossible. The vinyl-coated cardboard panniers couldn't stand the vibrations and tore away from their straps. Matt had a couple spare bungee cords we used to strap them onto the top of my rear rack. We hit pavement again when we reached a broad valley that led to the west. We followed it to the town of Mires.

We stayed two nights in Mires, using the day between to ride, baggage-free, to the famous hippy town of Matala on the south coast, where Joni Mitchell wrote the song "Carey". On the way, we passed an orchard of orange trees. Matt climbed the wall and picked a couple for later. Having no bike bag to keep them in, he stuffed them inside his cycling shorts where they settled nicely around his crotch. We glided by the Minoan ruins of Festos, where a bus load of school children were waiting for a tour. The boys were kicking a ball around the courtyard while the girls sat in row along the top of a wall facing the road. One by one I watched their mouths drop open in awe as they checked out Matt's crotch. As soon as we rounded the next corner we started laughing so hard that we had to stop riding for a while.

Matala was fascinating, a throw-back to the end of the 60s with period western rock music blaring out of hippie paraphernalia shops. Most of the "homeless" travelers had made camp in natural sea caves on the hill sides that the Nazis had expanded for defense during WWII. On its small, rocky beach we ate our lunch before returning to Mires. The oranges were sour, in spite of their lovely aroma (!), so we didn't eat them.

On our last day on the island we rode back to Iraklion, after having a delicious breakfast of octopus and potato stew at a local restaurant. The three engaging elderly women who ran it spoke no English but they insisted that we learn and practice the Greek word for bicycle - podilado I think. That put me on a natural high, so when our road bent to the north uphill and into a fierce headwind with intermittent rain showers, I was singing. Matt, on the other hand, was in a foul mood. How things change in just a week!

I returned the cursed bike. The bike rental shop owner was disheartened when I laid out the broken gear shift lever, the two torn panniers and the kick stand that had also snapped off by then. I am not sure whether later he was angry with me or if he realized that buying crap wasn't worth it. We didn't stick around long enough to find out.