Passport fees up

Press, 7 October 1980, Page 12

Passport fees up

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NANCY CAWLEY

Nancy Cawlev is a former member of the literary staff of. “The "Press” who is currently on an extended working holiday in the United Kingdom and Europe.

Greek odyssey yields cure

Tile British High Commission in Wellington has increased its passport fees and postage rates. It now costs $28.60 for a new passport (valid for 10 years), $7.80 to add particulars to an existing passport, and $6.50 for amendments such as a change of name because of marriage.

There is no charge for renewing an existing passport that w'as originally issued for a period of less than 10 years. The registered airmail charge has been increased to $1.85; surface mail (registered) to $1.50.

The registration of a married woman as a citizen of the United Kingdom now costs $l3O. The cost for a minor is $65.

Island-hopping in Greece is not all ouzo and bouzouki music. Even in early summer hundreds of tourists are on the move, looking for a cheap bed for the* night, tavernas with better-yet mousaka and Greek dancing, the most-talked-about- ruins and museums, and those perfect beaches where they can offer their bodies to the sun, topless, bottomless, and mindless. Greece has all these in abundance, but they take a bit of finding and recommendations by other tourists are risky, everyone has a different grading of priorities.

For most, the jumping-off point is Athens. Large comfortable ships with island names leave the port of Pireus daily, on the 18-hour trip to Crete or on shorter trips to nearer islands. There are over a thousand to choose from. Accommodation ranges from first-class cabins to deck-class plastic chairs. •

The pack-carrying brigade come aboard equipped with bottles of mineral water, bulging plastic bags of food and sleeping bags. Because I approached Greece from Brindisi, on the heel of Italy, I had

already begun my. island-tasting before I reached Athens. There are d- few magical names that aU would-be travellers keep at the top of their list. For me, Corfu — one of the lonian Islands halfway between Brindisi and Athens — had always been one of these. Much of my fascination stemmed from the writings of Gerald and. Lawrence Dutrell about 'his garden-island. where they spent their childhood. Corfu stays lush and green until late summer, as beautiful in its cover of forests and flowers as the sun-baked islands of the Aegean are with their sparse grasses and scrub olive trees It is a hilly island with nowhere far irom the sea. There seem to be as many whitewashed villages on the hillsides as there are in the valleys, all linked by narrow, snaking, well-sealed and sign-posted roads, but untouched, for the most part, by the commercial tourism of Kerkira (Corfu Town) and the bigger beach resorts. These bewitching roads to nowhere run through great shady tunnels of

trees, and are bordered by the incredible wild flowers that are for many the main attraction of Corfu. There are few young people to be seen in the quieter areas; are they all working in cafes in town? It is always old musing men or old women, in dress and head-scarf of black,, that one sees tending grazing animals, or herb-gather-ing, beside the roads.

“Yahsoo!” they call, clenching and extending their fingers in a child-like wave.

I travelled with Australian and English friends in a convoy of hired motor-scooters to Glyfada Beach, on the island's west coast, riding pillion behind a crazy light-house keeper from North Wales. The tiny glass--1 rented shrines by the road, he said, marked places where people had survived accidents. Our swaying wind-in-the-hair progress was too exciting to be frightening, even allowing for the intermittent hazard of dozing dogs and slow-moving donkeys. It was May, and still early enough in the season for the long sandy beach to be half-deserted. An old man in a cloth cap came past, selling oranges from a basket lined with leaves, charging more than town prices. I paid willingly, knowing it was a ripoff. 1 was swimming on his beach, wasn’t I, on his island? The long sultry day had the timeless quality of childhood,, and, like all worthwhile days in beautiful Greece, ended over good food and retsina, with a display of dancing — the trio of pieening co-ordinated males the very epitome of timeless, traditional Greece.

After the obligatory day or two of sight-seeing in Athens, my search for the perfect island took me to los, ten hours out of Pireus by boat, and one of the Cyclades Group. On the boat I met two Australian girls. Tina and Erica, semi-locals who had rented a converted donkey-stable for the summer. They helped me to find a cheap room with Antonio and Katerina. Away from such centres as Athens, living is cheap in Greece and the large cool room, with a huge brass bed, cost 100 drachmas, (about SNZ2.OO) per night. It is rumoured

that if Greece joins the E.E.C. e prices xvill rise substantially. The whitewashed honeycomb of houses, churches.' shops and restaurants that makes up the tiny village of los. sits high among the bare hills (first placed there perhaps, like many others, because of dependable spring water). A few houses straggle down the hill to the tiny port. On the headland beside the harbour, a White church with a bell-tower and cupola looks like an ornate sugared cake. From my balcony the view had the intricate fascination of a Brueghel painting. The flank of the golden hillside opposite was ribbed with terraces and dotted with dusty cypress, olive and fig trees. Heat shimmered off the stones and bleached grass, and the air was like warm milk. Donkeys and farm folk came and went along the dirt paths between cubist buildings and on the ridge nearest the village, where they had once caught the breeze for corn-grinding, a row of decaying windmills stood' hand-in-hand. Sometimes a tiny, far-off woman would come out of a house arid spread an armful of coloured washing on a stone-wall, or a farmer would unload a mountain of hay from his diminutive donkey. At night,. washed with moonlight, the valley was ancient and mysterious, quiet silent except for the spaced chimes of an owl-call. Because los was discovered by tourists about six years- ago, there is a lively ■ night-life in small bars and discos —'most of them devoid of anything that is Greek, but the long sunscorched days belong to ■ the real Greece — sunbathing and swimming on splendid beaches, walking on the thyme-scented hills, or sitting drinking coffee at an outside table in the town square—merely a widening of one of the. village’s labyrinthine alleyways, where the old men sat in their own shady area with their ouzo and cigarette’s. endlessly talking and gesticulating.

Everyone "should visit Greece at least once in their life-time. The author of “Zorba the Greek,’’ the late Nikos Kazantzakis, once wrote that we need his homeland as a cure for our modem ills; need to pass through its calm beauty "as through a sanatorium.”