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Relying on the interisland liners, charter yachts, or smaller, 30-ft. caïques that sleep two or three (for $40 a day), travelers can move on southeast to the Cyclades: Santorin, with its unearthly landscape; Paros, from which the masters quarried their famous marble; and Mykonos, which has lately become a kind of Grecian Capri. For 50¢, travelers can make the round-trip caïque ride to nearby Delos, Apollo's birthplace, which the Greek government maintains as an uncommercialized museum. There, in an eerie, glaring white silence, are the remarkable ruins of houses, theaters and temples—a ghost town from which no traveler returns without having sensed uneasily the presence of men and events of another age.
Eleven dollars will buy a one-way air ticket from Athens to Crete, and still another unseen aspect of the Greek way: Candia's fragrant food bazaar, the Minoan ruins near Knossos, and the high Lasethi plateau, crammed with hundreds of white-sailed windmills. In any of the little plateau villages, a traveler can buy his lunch merely by hailing, say, the butcher, who will put a table outside and provide wine, bread and cheese, while curious, good-natured Greeks in baggy trousers, sashes, boots, brocaded vests and fierce mustaches gather round and ask the stranger's name, occupation, origin and income.
Steppingstone to the Dodecanese Islands off Turkey is Rhodes, where, as one poet says, "the days drop as softly as fruit from trees." The old 14th century battlements, and the lush rhododendron and bazaars are worth savoring for a day or two (the Hotel Miramare is on a good beach, has private bungalows, charges $10 for a single room). Sailing up the chain, travelers experience even more the feel of how the Grecian islands are creatures of the sea, bound by myth and religion, commerce, a mystical aloneness: Kos, where Hippocrates was born; Patmos, where the monastery exhibits the St. Mark Gospel written in silver on 33 leaves of purple vellum (and where the hard-scrabbling islanders, says a visitor, "live on packages from relatives in New Jersey"); wooded Samos, divided from Turkey by a spectacular channel; Chios, one of Homer's many birthplaces; Lesbos, where Sappho wrote her molten poems.
Toward the mainland, north of Athens, are the Northern Sporades and the delightful island of Skiathos. Its beach, Koukounaries, is one of the finest in the Aegean, and the sand, laced with mica, glitters like silver. Skiathos is a playground for the sturdy loner who is happy with rucksack and sleeping bag. Although the islanders are conservative enough to be repelled by the sight of women in shorts or slacks, they are also warm and carefree. One night recently, two American women who had bedded down in sleeping bags in a park, woke suddenly to find the young men of the village singing gaily and dancing around them in a circle. After a few laughs, they wandered away to let the visitors finish their sleep.
Caribbean & Indian Ocean from Flying Fish to Araby