Monday, 15 September 2008

14 September to 17 September 2008

Rome, Italy to Bari, Italy to Plataria, Petreti and Corfu, Greece

The least favourite part of my trip!

14 September 2008
Rome, Bari and Plataria

This morning we headed off to Bari to catch our overnight Ferry to Greece. Two things I learnt about Greece:

- 1. In Greece you aren't supposed to flush your toilet paper - something about small pipes - ewww so they have an open rubbish bin you are supposed to put it in - grose!

- 2. In Greece it is acceptable to smoke ANYWHERE including the bathroom at 8am in the morning.

And my time in Greece just got worse from here on in ...

15 September 2008
I am sick, very sick, I have bus sars badly and not only am I feeling crapola its raining in Plataria, it hasn't rained in four months and today it is raining four months worth of rain, brill!

During dry spells we managed to load all our gears onto our manky, poo smelling, leaky boat. These boats were small, they were skippered by people from our tour, some of them having limited experience others having none and got to be captain's on their merits (ie. non-drinking!). Our boat had six girls, five with no experience and the captain with limited, we are all here to tell the tail so she did a good job at keeping us alive!

Weater before we headed out - Me holding onto life ring (as least I knew where that was!)
So as the rain poured horizontal raindrops our sailing leader decided it was a good time to head out sailing. We boarded our boats and prepared for the worst (except for life jackets, you think he would of shown us where they were and told us to put them on eh?). Anyway we headed off into the hurricane horizontal rain, fog and strong winds to start our sailing adventures in the piece of shit, manky, leaky boat. So motor boated out of the harbour and into the hurricanes sea swells.

After a while sailing (and generally feeling miserable) a huge gust of wind hit us, our boat did a 90 degree turn and our motor cut out. Shit, starting to panic now - I was freaking (jumping out of a helicopter is nothing compared with thinking your boat was going to sink in a mini hurricane), we couldn't see anyone through the fog, it was windy, raining and our motor had stopped! Luckily our radio worked and we called for help and explained that well OUR BOAT WOULDN'T START AND WE THOUGHT WE WERE GOING TO SINK! just as the main boat was turning back lucky our engine kicked into life and we managed to motor out of the scary weather and onto calmer seas where I think everyone was feeling a tad seasick.

The afternoon was spent hanging out in port and trying to dry the beds of our piece of shit manky boat and to top off the night I had to sleep on the crappy table bed (did I mention that I was sick!)


16 September 2008
Petreti to Corfu

Slight improvement on the day before

This morning we had a demo on how to put up and down the sails on our boats before we headed out to sea on some much much calmer seas. Today was a pleasant days sailing where we got to put up both sails and could sit down and relax on the boat.

<- Me sailing (also tyring to get rid of tan marks)
Once we docked in Corfu harbour we jumped off the boats as quick as we could and headed into the town to do some souvenir shopping. Once shopped out we headed back to the boat and decided to go for a swim and have some drinks. Some of us having had more drinks than others we headed up the hill to finally have some dinner - some delish 2 euro kebabs where they put the chips in the kebabs, genius!

At the top of the hill we left the others and three of us went down as Camilla (oh so drunk) needed to go to the toilet. The toilets were locked and as she was still in her togs (she had previously been searching for sunglasses that had fallen in the water at night, don't ask!) jumped into the sea. Once done we hauled her out of the water using all the mite that two girls (one who was so close to coughing up a lung) have after drinks but on the way up her jandal (she was Australian before she hoped on the boat with three Kiwi's who converted her - jandals all round) fell into the water which she then leapt in to get, I used every single muscle in my body to pull her dead weight out again. Once out of the water we went back to the boat where she point blanky refused to get back on that manky boat. After some coaxing we managed to get her on the boat but she did not want to get inside. Eventually we managed to tuck her in bed in the boat and all went to sleep. Check out some funny movies here .

17 September 2008
Corfu to Plataria

Today we packed up and headed back to Plataria where we started, yah, I was over sailing and over coughing my guts up. It was really windy today and we were able to put up our front sail for a while, but as it was so windy it was really rocky and was making us feel sick so we put it down again and just motor boated. Once we docked at the port I jumped off the boat as fast as I could and spent the afternoon hanging out on dry land and trying to get antibiotics from the chemist. Yah, its the last night on the manky boat .

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Great sailing attire almost bets Peter Blake's red socks