Beware of Greeks bearing gifts, and Cretans driving chariots, er, cars
SOME OF you may have deduced from last week's column that I am of the view that Greece's truckers' strike and its impact on Cretan petrol supplies was a bad thing. Not necessarily true.
In fact, it had one major benefit. The dearth of fuel meant less traffic. And thus, less lunacy.
Never one to shy away from sweeping generalisations, I can tell you here and now that several Cretans we came across drove like terminally-ill joyriders.
Greece and Portugal habitually inhabit the upper reaches of the EU road death tables. They are to traffic carnage as Celtic and Rangers are to Scottish football. The rest of us are just making up the numbers.
Unwitting tourists, (ie me), would be forgiven for thinking on first entering the stream of Cretan traffic that they'd blundered into the midst of a demolition derby contested by PCP addicts. The driving we ecountered was mental. Bottom-clenchingly mental.
Take, for example, secondary roads. Sane folk see two lanes and two hard shoulders. These Cretans see five lanes. Two actual ones, two you drive in when you don't want to get rear-ended and one up the middle where random lunatics play chicken with each other.
The hard-shoulder business is most unnerving.
Failure to pull in to let other motorists overtake can result in being furiously tailgated by irate drivers waving guns, bits of their anatomy or freshly-executed roadkill at you through their windscreens.
I duly complied with the custom. Until one day, tired of ditch-surfing, I decided out of the blue to venture out into the actual lane.
What possessed me, I know not, but it saved my family's life. Some 50 metres around a corner, what did I see in the hard shoulder but a tractor fitted with an elaborately pointed device that would've made Torquemada squirm. Reversing. At speed. We avoided being kebabbed by seconds.
Up the mountains were worse still. All bets are off up there. I found myself one day driving up a hill steeper than a ministerial pay rise. The road was as cratered as the moon. To each side were drops that would give astronauts vertigo. To say I was nervous would be a crushing understatement.
The Cretans had no such problems, tearing down past me like falling boulders, forcing me into gutter after gutter.
I tried to stand my ground in my Micra, but failed miserably. Ever had an Opel Manta carrying seven people and a pig bear down on you on the wrong side of a glorified goat-track at 100 km/h? You'd get out and walk too.
Don't get me wrong, there are - I'm reliably informed - traffic laws on Crete.
They even have speed limits. But these, like stop signs, traffic lights and all road markings, are routinely ignored by the locals. Which, considering the level of enforcement, is hardly surprising.
The place is also riddled with bumfluffed teenagers zipping about on mopeds like flies around the proverbial.
With seemingly nothing better to do than pull wheelies down pedestrianised alleys in the vain hope of impressing dumpy Scandinavians, scattering yours truly as they went, they drove me nuts.
You know me. Not a vindictive bone in my body. But by the end of my holiday, I'd have given anything for a length of piano wire to string across said alleys at throat height.
I noted with pleasure that farmers have a great grá for the flatbed truck, the more battered the better.
All the better for broadsiding tourists, presumably. I was driving behind one when I pointed out its cargo of huddled black goats to my toddler daughter.
"Goats, Dada!" she parroted, delightedly. "Stinky goats!"
"Erm, they're not goats," said Mrs Emissions to me quietly. "They're widows."
My poor child was very confused. I'm dreading the next funeral I bring her to.
