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Black Sea - 1
GETTING THERE, AND MEETING Mrs. NEMESIS.
You’ll need
a boat.
The best way to see the Black Sea is to sail there via the Aegean Sea, the Dardanelles, the Mamara Sea and the Bosporus.
The best vessel we’ve found so far for such purposes this decade is the Crystal Serenity
which, we later discovered, has won - for six consecutive years - the Conde
Naste title of ‘world’s best cruise-ship’.
A middle-size ship, as cruise-liners go these days, and with enough room and amenities to make you feel relaxed and uncrowded. You are hardly aware of the passenger numbers. And its size
does not prevent it from exploring remote parts of the world.
We boarded
at Pireaus in the third week of August 2007, after surviving two Athenian taxis
that traveled at 100kmh through traffic while their drivers chatted away on
cellphones, bruising pedestrians, and us passengers only slightly. Thankfully we then cruised peacefully to two
places in the Aegean Sea before sailing through the Dardenelles. Having
reached Istanbul’s Golden Horn in the fading light of the fourth day, we negotiated
the dense shipping traffic in the Bosporus, bypassed the coast of Bulgaria then
docked in Romania’s Constanca in early morning light.
It was
there that we met ‘Mrs Nemesis’, a portent of all our discoveries as we circled
the Black Sea and eventually disembarked in Instanbul.
But first
we enjoyed the ‘must-see’ Aegean sites of Santarini and Ephesus – both almost
ageless world-wonders
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Santarini,
you will remember,
is perched on a cliff-top staring into the crater of a huge volcano which
blew itself into oblivion three or four thousand years ago and became the
mythical home of the lost civilization of Atlantis.
Its grand natural setting is its wonder – a
broken circle of sheer limestone-and-lava cliffs, with black-sand beaches at their |
 Looking into the volcano's crater
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feet, and rolling rock-hills at their
backs.
A smaller wonder is how the main fishing village clinging to the edge of the crater has
turned itself, since I first visited it, into a global tourist trap.
Where you once
zig-zagged up the cliff clinging to a donkey or mule and sought refuge in some
fisherman or farmer’s cottage, you now zip up in a cluster of cable-cars and
get charged seven-star prices for a night in a whitewashed b&b. More likely
you spend hours standing in line with tired tourists, blocking whole streets while queuing to get down the cliff to their waiting ships. I walked down the cliff’s old zig-zag
cobbled path instead, feeling sorry for the tourists and the donkeys,
which also stand in endless queues because so few tourists deign to use them
now.
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 Isle of Santorini. . .On the edge.
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What
tourists are supposed to look for – and don’t – are the remnants of Phoenician,
Spartan, Minoan, and even earlier occupations, being unearthed from the
volcanic ash that covered the island in about 1500BCE.
What we
were to look at – and hadn’t expected – were the treasures to be seen as we
voyaged eastwards. |
Our journey
would take us out of the Mediterranean; through the Agean Sea; the Sea of
Mamara; passed the Sea of Asov and back to the Bosphoros and Dardanelles. The geography and geology are, by
themselves, fascinating. Now move on and look at the Black Sea map, in the next article ‘Blackground’
[For information on world-wide cruises, try Chris Hunholdt at
Cruises-for-Africa
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