Bike Sale

Above: At the secret rendezvous waiting to sell our 2 trusty Honda 90 motorcycles in Greece.

Saturday 1st October 1983

We took morning coffee on the sea front before wandering back, via the fishing scenes at the harbour, to our 10:30 hrs. rendezvous. We pulled up at the waste ground by the crossroads just out of town for our secret trade mission with Val and John. They turned up about an hour late and furtively wheeled our machines into John’s garden, out of sight, as if they were a drugs cache.

We returned to “Gregory’s” to close the deal, leaving with £35 pound sterling in familiar blue fivers and a scribbled note of sale. We then set off on foot for Golden Beach along the 7 mile uphill road. We were glad to find that the restaurant and the tourist attractions were closed for the season and the white sandy beach was almost deserted. We broke out the diving gear and took to the water. There was little marine life in the green, crystal clear, weedless water, save a few camouflaged fish and the odd hermit crab.

The familiar tingle in our loins was rekindled as a naked venus took to the sea on our left. As on our last visit 4 years ago, the air was filled the hum of bees, many of which dived kamikaze-like into the sea, their little corpses delineating the tide mark on the beach. George set off along the beach for a walk and stumbled upon a naked pair “rutting”, before returning to watch another topless beauty slink into the water. I made a final sortie into the luscious green waters and went out further than before to discover a wealth of star fish on the sea bed.

We started to walk back when a civil chap and his son pulled up in a hire car, and thus we were conveyed back to Thasos in style. Back in our room we gave way to temptation to indulge in our supermarket fare and George trotted to the supermarket, despite our plans to eat out tonight. He returned with an armful of cold meat, cheese, bread and all the trimmings, to which we gave our hunger free reign.

Next we walked into town for a bottle of vino by the old harbour, and then on to a cat-infested eating parlour for a Spaghetti Bolognese feast. We also re-acquainted ourselves with “Shadow”, the scruffy black slip of a hound who we had met this morning. He had left us to engage in the propagation of his species with a female mongrel.

We tottered back “home” under the burden of over-stuffed bellies to pack our gear and sleep off our excesses. Plans for future working holidays were the main topic of conversation and these thoughts roamed pleasantly around in our brains as we prepared to move on into the “unknown”.