Zen and the Art of Donkey Maintenance (19 page)

Uncomprehending of what lay ahead of her she followed me meekly enough on to the quay and as far as the railing of the
kaiki
. I stepped aboard and gave a gentle pull on the lead rope. Suddenly she realised what was expected of her.

Her ears went up in that familiar twin exclamation mark of astonishment approaching horror. The expression of shock was further increased by her eyes opening so wide that the whites were visible all round.

The four-wheel brakes went on hard as I leaned back on the rope. There was an immediate reaction from the group of people come to watch the departure including one well-dressed lady who said, surprisingly in perfect English: “Oh, the dear thing doesn't want to go for a sail.”

Dear thing my foot. Three men got behind her to push but were immediately scattered and Gaithuri had got back the ground she had lost by back-pedalling and dragging me with her on to the dock.

Old Manouli, a large man, contemplated the situation in silence for a few seconds while we all awaited his judgment breathlessly.

Then he bent down under Gaithuri's head and began to manhandle each of her front feet forward alternately a few inches at a time.

The trouble was she wouldn't move her back feet in unison so although there was some ground gained in front, the overall progress was nil. Also, Manouli, in this unaccustomed position, showed signs of approaching apoplexy. He soon gave it up.

A considerable debate followed and I felt confident that the men, who know donkeys as well as their own families, would find a practical solution. Finally, they recommended that I unload Gaithuri and try again. I shrugged my resignation at the thought of unloading all my carefully packed possessions and began untying the first knot.

“That will not be necessary,” said a young man and, beckoning a friend to help, they proceeded to lift the whole load off, saddle and all.

I clambered aboard again, this time taking with me a handful of the grain, known as
tajee
, which was my donkey's favourite food and which I always carried in case of emergency or to reward her for meritorious service.

I didn't even have to pull her. She was over the rail like Arkle nibbling at my hand. The crowd shouted their approval and Manouli beamed his relief. I was not going to demonstrate any relief until we got Gaithuri off at the other end. I was also hoping she would behave herself during the voyage.

Two hours later, we edged alongside the small jetty
running out from the apron of pebbles on which the scattered houses of Roumeli were built. In the background the overwhelming bulk of the White Mountains had been split asunder to form the great canyon of Samaria.

But I was temporarily more interested in Gaithuri's intentions. Fortunately, the level of the jetty coincided with the level of the deck. There was the two-foot high rail to negotiate and she gave another Cheltenham performance. It must have been impressive because I hadn't been ashore ten seconds when a young Cretan approached me.

“Do you want to sell your donkey?”

I had heard this so often in so many villages that it no longer surprised me or even interested me. But this time I was astonished. There were no roads in or out of Roumeli.

There was the weekly mail boat on which we had come and there was a daily ferry – if there were enough passengers – to and from Chora Sfakion along the coast to the east. There was the path down the gorge from Omalos, frequented by the more energetic summer tourists but impassable in winter when it was mostly waterfall.

There was also, I hoped, another path along the coast that would take me to Sfakia. If there wasn't it looked like Omalos after all. Unless I sold the donkey in Roumeli and ended my circumperambulation ingloriously by boat and bus.

However, I didn't want a debate about it then and there. I pointed to the laden saddle lying on the jetty.

“Who will carry that if I sell the donkey?”

It always ended the discussion.

I turned to Manouli who, having discharged his duty to Roumeli, was anxious to set off for Gavdos, a low dark smudge on the horizon.

“How much?” I asked. He hesitated just a moment.

“200 drachmas.” Just under thirty pounds.

I looked at him with surprise and disapproval. The normal fare for one human being was forty drachmas.

I hoped that in paying without protest I hadn't established an inflated precedent for other voyaging donkey owners.

If that dawn at the mouth of the Samaria Gorge I had known what awaited me in the White Mountains, I think I would have settled for the afternoon ferry to Chora Sfakion – only an hour and a half's boat ride along the coast.

The previous evening I had been assured there was a good unmistakable path along the shoreline and that I would reach Sfakia in six hours.

Well, the path was so good that I was about to lose at least six of the toenails that had so recently reappeared after their earlier bashing and was so unmistakable that I needed all the talents of Daniel Boone to follow it but I ended up at a 3,000-foot high village called Anopolis instead of down by the seaside at Sfakia.

It all began well enough. Apart from the sand, that is. The gorge was still dark and sinister when we set off and for the first hour we plodded along the coast through sand. Every ten minutes I had to stop and empty the beach out of my boots. Underfoot conditions improved briefly when the path left the foreshore and began to climb among the pine trees. There is nothing nicer to walk on than a carpet of pine needles.

But we didn't arrive at this temporary deliverance without incident. At the end of the long beach a rockfall guarding the ascent into the mountains narrowed the path.

A few moments of contemplation persuaded me that it might not be possible to get the donkey with its overhanging baggage through but that it was worth a try.

Gaithuri, as usual, knew better than I did, but
against her better judgment, she was coaxed into the narrow opening until she felt herself wedged. She must have suffered from a form of claustrophobia because as soon as she felt the pressure on either side she jerked back in panic and whirled around so violently that the baggage, saddle and all, were hurled to the ground.

That took me a good twenty minutes of precious time to sort out in the course of which I discovered she had put her foot through the canvas of my folding bed. That was the first of four loading and unloading operations that day.

At one stage, late in the afternoon, I started trembling at thirty yards of narrow ledge with a fearsome chasm on one side, a sheer wall of rock on the other. I was so frightened that Gaithuri would get scraped off the mountain (would I have let go of the rope?) that I repacked my belongings so that the load was all perched on top of her saddle. She looked more like a high-rise development project than a donkey but I achieved my purpose. The path repeatedly disintegrated, whenever we emerged on some plateau into scores of goat tracks and scores of goats.

What made it all the more frustrating was the frequent vision of Sfakia nestling restfully in the sunshine way down there just beyond the next headland and the knowledge that I was constantly going up when I should have been going down and north instead of east.

When I realised the path I was on led to a flock of houses on the high mountainside, I gave up all hope of reaching Sfakia that day. It was not just a matter of time and distance. We were both exhausted when we struggled up to the first house and I was all for establishing Base Camp One for the night.

There was the usual hospitable reception from the lady of the house and her family. I asked if there was a cafe in the village where I could spend the night.

“No. There is no cafe here. We would be happy to give you a bed but my husband is away. I am sorry.”

It may sound an odd argument to more sophisticated Western ears but I had heard it a number of times on my way round the island.

“But,” she added, “why don't you go on to Anopolis? It has restaurants and rooms to rent and is only one hour-with-the-feet.”

“Is the path good? Better than the path from Roumeli?”

“Much better. As good as a road.”

It sounded a reasonable proposition and I was relieved at the prospect of being within an hour of Anopolis where I knew there was a good road down to Sfakia and even a bus service to Chania. I wanted to get out of those mountains for a while.

I gave Gaithuri half an hour's rest, supplemented by a bundle of lucerne from our hostess.

We could both have done with an hour or two, but I was less concerned about our physical state than about the ominous black cloud masses which were already hiding the summits, and the gradually increasing rumble of distant thunder. It looked like the first rains of the season had arrived and I didn't particularly want them to fall on me.

Instead of being at Anopolis one hour later I was still climbing and all for establishing Base Camp Two there and then had it not been for the imminent threat of a violent storm. The path underfoot was good enough but it proceeded at an incredible angle which limited
movement to ten minute bursts with five for recovery, and twisted and snaked alarmingly round the edges of precipices and rims of ravines that had me sweating with vertigo as well as exhaustion.

Near thunder rolled and reverberated through the gorges and vivid flashes of lightning struck the mountaintops with whiplash fury. There was a smell of sulphur and brimstone in the air and I began to feel like something from the Ride of the Valkyries. Gaithuri did not seem to be emotionally involved but she was stopping more and more often just when I wanted her to go faster before the rains came. They were moving towards me over the mountains like a grey wall.

In different circumstances I would have found the scenery and the whole environment of the storm breathtaking in its awesome beauty. But I'd had a surfeit of scenery for one day like too much Lobster Newberg or too much Ernest Hemingway. All I wanted was to get to Anopolis and one of its restaurants as soon as possible.

It was a vain hope but I was, thank heaven, away from the precipices by the time the first big drops hit. For the first time since the previous March, I put on my lightweight weather-proof which very soon proved that it wasn't.

As soon as she felt herself getting wet Gaithuri stopped in her tracks. How could an animal lay claim to intelligent thought when it did that sort of thing?

We had a real tug-of-war on the top of the mountain and pretty soon the gorges were reverberating with other than thunder echoes as I hurled Billingsgate curses at that
obstinate head.

It was a contest of wills which I had to win or drown and it went on for another full hour until I had literally dragged her into Anopolis and its friendly electric light and distorted television screens.

It had been a hell of a day. One that I would look back on as the most strenuous and frightening of the whole journey – unless there was worse to come.

The clatter of a bucket awoke me. I stuck my head out of my sleeping bag into a cold dawn knowing exactly what was happening. It was my donkey, Gaithuri, sticking her nose into the remnants of the bucket of water which was the final chore I performed for her before turning in for the night.

It was a familiar noise and I had wakened to it often enough when sleeping out. There had been no room at the inn in the small seaside village I had staggered into the previous afternoon. This followed Gaithuri's refusal to clamber over a heap of rubbled rock on the short cut along the beach that I had hoped would lead me quickly to journey's end at Matala.

This dawn was not like the many other dawns of my walk around Crete. This was the last one. Matala, where it all began and where it would all finish, was only four easy hours away. It was with very mixed feelings that I saddled and loaded Gaithuri for the last time. How many mornings and middays and evenings during a whole year of continuous movement had I gone through this same ritual?

Each item of baggage had its own fixed place into which it had been fitted so often that it almost went there of its own volition.

Each piece seemed to have acquired a personality of its own that was part mine and part the donkey's and part an absorption of all the sunrises and sunsets and the myriad other experiences they had shared with us.

Even the ropes seemed to weave and tighten through their established twists and knots without persuasion from my fingers.

My thoughts drifted back through the years searching for identification of my own emotions as I looked down on a day that would bring so much to an end. A mixture of sadness and joy.

The recognition eluded me until I had travelled back in time to my schooldays. That was it: a mingling of all the feelings of the last day of term with the last day of the holidays.

Gaithuri was her usual indifferent self. There was no way (at least to my knowledge) she could know that this was the last day of a journey that would make her the first donkey ever to have walked around the perimeter of Crete.

It was just the beginning of another day's march for her in the footsteps, literally, of a foreigner who had become more familiar to her than the Cretan family with whom she had grown up. In the gathering light we set off along the beach. In half an hour it was light enough to read the notice – not a very emphatic one – indicating that the sands ahead were part of a Greek Air Force landing ground and prohibited to the public.

“What the hell,” I said to Gaithuri, “I can't read Greek anyway.” And plodded on.

At first, I paid no attention to the noise of the helicopter. Anybody who spent any length of time on that coast had to become more or less immune to helicopter and aircraft noises whenever the American Sixth Fleet was in those waters – which was far too often.

I was just beginning to think that this particular noise was getting too close for comfort when my arm was nearly jerked out of its socket as Gaithuri suddenly reared back.