Adventures in Greece: Part 1 of 2

Edda Hofer & Ed Rogers
around 1976

From Salzburg to Greece

By Ed Rogers

Around 1976, my soon-to-be-wife (Edda Hofer) and I took a trip to Europe. Edda came from a very old family in Salzburg, Austria, which even has a statue of her great-great-great grandfather in its town square. Her mother, who was a twin, married a doctor who had been a member of the SS [the Schutzstaffel, a major paramilitary organization under Adolf Hitler] during the Second World War.
    Edda’s mother’s family also owned one of the large buildings in the old town. Edda and I went to Salzburg because her mother’s brother wanted to sell the building. Her mother’s twin sister – Edda’s aunt – had married a Jewish man who became the finance minister to the Queen of Romania. When the war came along, he took all of his money and goods and moved to England to ride out the war. At the war’s end, the uncle came back and settled in Vienna. When I met him, he owned 25% of the Austrian Airline and 100% of the Hertz Car Rental Agency.

    Edda and I did a lot of sightseeing while in Austria. We looked around Salzburg, visited Innsbrook, and stayed three days with her aunt and uncle in Vienna. We could see the Schönbrunn Palace from the balcony of our room at their house. We would sit on that balcony at night and smoke a joint. It had old paintings and posters six or seven feet tall on its walls. Our room had a bar with a jug of wine that dated back to 1565. To say I was impressed would not come close to how I felt.
    I sat one evening and shared with Edda’s mother a 200-year-old bottle of cognac that Edda’s aunt had broken out. I had never before, and haven’t since, tasted anything like it. During our conversation, I questioned Edda’s mother about the war…but that is a whole other story….

While waiting for the sale of the building to be completed, Edda and I decided to travel to Greece. Her uncle had gotten us a car from the local Hertz dealership. Its use didn’t cost us anything, but it had come from Yugoslavia and the deal was that we would leave it in Yugoslavia when we finished our trip to Greece.
    The drive through Yugoslavia was a nightmare. Coming across the border from Austria, the first place we stopped looked like a Howard Johnson. We had a steak dinner there that cost very little and decided to stay the night, but we were told they had no rooms and that there was another motel 10 miles down the road. At the motel 10 miles down the road, which also looked like a Howard Johnson, we were told the same story. After the third stop, we realized that these were not motels but truck stops! The closer we got to Greece they stopped pretending to be Howard Johnsons and took on the look of government stopovers. The main highway from the east had two lanes and ran right up the middle of Yugoslavia. It had no shoulders, and burned-out wrecks littered both sides of the roadway. We met five trucks every minute and took our lives into our hands each time we passed a really slow vehicle ahead of us.
    Having given up on a place to sleep, I drove on through the night. Somewhere toward the Greek border, there was a “Y” in the road. Seeing no signs, I went to the left, and we soon entered a long tunnel. Coming out of the darkness, we were confronted by two military tanks. At a roadblock was a large sign, of which the only thing I could understand was “Albania,” which I did know was not a place we wanted to go. We were able to turn around without incident and return to the road to Greece. When we reached Greece, I turned the wheel over to Edda. When I awoke, we were coming into Athens.

It was still early morning and we decided to try and find a dive master to take us out for a dive before we looked for a hotel room. We parked in what was then the old part of town and walked from shop to shop asking people as we went but no one knew a diver that could take us out. That part of Athens no longer exists. We were told that a man by the name of Economos might be able to help.
    We had booked four days on a Greek island by the name of Hydra, but we had a couple of days before we had to be there and wanted to get a dive in before going to the Island. You would think Athens would have thousands of dive shops. There wasn’t even one back then.
    The government had clamped down on driving because of people looting artifacts. If a diver found a jar or anything else, it had to be reported, and then that area was put off-limits to diving. So many places had been placed off-limits, that the diving business in Athens had closed its doors.
    We found Economos in a restaurant at the bottom of the hill there in the old city. We had three or four beers with him as he explained that he couldn’t take us diving for a couple of days. We told him we were due on Hydra the next night but when we got back we wanted him to take us out.
    Eco offered us a stay on his boat, since we still hadn’t found a room for that night. He also told us of a safe place to leave the car while we were on the island. We had dinner with Eco and he took us to his boat. He said if we were interested we could go out with him the next day. He was meeting a boat near the island of Crete.
    Edda was looking for a towel and opened a couple of drawers. What she saw suggested that our new-found friend was a smuggler. Aboard his boat, in every drawer, closet, and cubby hole, were cartons of cigarettes and bottles of Johnny Walker. Most people would have been shocked at finding this out. But anyone who has read my BOYSTOWN novels will realize that I had friends who would make Eco look like an amateur. Besides, when I was in the Army, I and a lot of other soldiers sold cigarettes and booze on the black market. So to me, it wasn’t a big deal; Edda was a little worried. But she was always up for an adventure. She was like my other half, only stronger. She was the best diver I have ever been in the water with. She crewed on sailboats during races and played a mean game of tennis. When you hear people speak of burning the candle at both ends, that was pretty much my life with her. Sex was more of a sporting event than loving and caring.
    Before leaving the States I had bought a cigarette rolling machine and rolled up and inserted filters into a pack of marijuana cigarettes. I put them in a Marlboro box and carried them in my shirt pocket during my entire time in Europe. So, Edda and I smoked a joint, had sex, and crashed.

Eco showed up the next morning with coffee and Greek pastry. He checked the boat’s engine and turned on the bilge pump. I threw the tiedown ropes off and we headed out to sea. He got us past the breakwaters and set a heading. He asked me to take the wheel while he went below deck. We could hear him opening drawers and cabinets, and I wondered if he was going to be pissed that we had searched his boat.
    In a few minutes he came back up and I stepped from the wheel. He said, “I see you’ve found my goodies.”
    I cleared my throat before saying, “I can assure you we didn’t take a thing.”
    Eco was almost laughing. “I could see that. I knew you would find it; I wanted to see how you would act after you did.”
    I patted him on the back and walked to the open deck at the rear of the boat. Edda was at a table with our coffee and pastry. It was a beautiful day to be at sea. The sky in the Mediterranean is the deepest blue I think I’ve ever seen. The wind was calm and a line of seagulls followed behind the boat. I fired up a joint and we had a couple of hits and relaxed. I believe it was that moment when I fell in love with Greece

    We had been out for maybe two hours when Eco asked me to take the wheel again. Edda and I both moved to the wheelhouse. While I steered the boat, Eco was packing cigs and booze into canvas bags. Shortly after taking the wheel, I saw a boat heading toward us and hollered at Eco. My enjoyable high had gone in a flash.
    Eco pushed three bags up from below decks. I shut the engine down and helped carry the bags to the open deck at the back. He told me it would be better if Edda and I stayed in the wheelhouse.
    The boat came alongside and tied up. Eco handed them three canvas bags and they handed him an envelope with money. He waved at the boat as it sped away. Then Eco came back and told us to go out back and enjoy the ride home. We finished the half-smoked joint and lay in the sun.
    We said nothing about what went down at sea and Eco said nothing – not that we all didn’t know that what had gone down was illegal. We promised to see him on our return from Hydra and caught the 5 p.m, ferry to the island.
    As for Eco, dealing in the black market isn’t that dangerous. Most people dealing in it know each other, and it is like most other businesses. You sell something to a person who then sells it at a higher price to other people. The danger comes at the low end, where the product goes out to the masses or you get on the law’s radar.

The Island of Hydra wasn’t much back then. But it did have a port where the ferry tied up. There were three other tourist couples on board who were staying in the small town that was built in a horseshoe around the bay. The only gas-powered vehicle allowed on the island was the garbage truck, so a line of little donkeys waited to carry people’s luggage. I had packed a trunk instead of keeping up with a lot of bags, and we had everything in the trunk. The time I write of was before airlines became picky.

    Our motel wasn’t in the main part of town and we had to catch a little motorboat out of the bay and down the coast a ways to another bay. We met a very interesting couple at this little motel. The young woman had been born in Florida and had come back to visit her grandmother, with the result that she fell in love with a pilot in the Greek Air Force. They married and she stayed. Her father (the man in the photo) had taken his family to the States and was not happy about his daughter moving back to Greece.
    The only reason that I’m brought readers to Hydra Island is the vase I found while diving the next day. I don’t know how old it was –vases are made the same way today as they were a thousand years ago. People also fish for octopuses the same way they did a thousand years ago. They tie a string of clay vases in a long line and drop them overboard. An octopus crawls into a vase and the fishermen pull it up. But old or not, I kept the vase as a souvenir.
    The first problem with the vase came real soon. We woke up to the smell of dead fish the next morning. We began looking for the source and it became apparent that the smell was coming from the vase. The vase was covered with dying crustaceans and, like a dead fish lying on riverbank, the odor was terrible. I set the vase outside.
    We had a wonderful time on Hydra. One night we took one of the motorboats over to the town for dinner. Coming back, the sea was brimming with fluorescent plankton. It was truly amazing to drag your hand through it and see the lights shoot into the night air.

Copyright © 2021 by Ed Rogers