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A commute with a difference
Taking the bus home in Crete
I have just finished Vivian Gornick’s The Situation and the Story and, as I was reading the short Conclusion section, an image of a bus journey from many years ago flashed into my head. So I’m going to share that.
I was living on Crete. My girlfriend and I had both taken courses back in the UK to give us the certificates needed to teach English. It was my girlfriend who landed the job in Crete and we travelled by Magic Bus to Athens and then on to Crete by overnight boat from Piraeus.
The woman who ran the language school in Heraklion had a friend with a school in a village in the hills near the Lasithi Plateau. It was decided I would visit there once a week and teach the children in her school.
It was a bus journey of well over an hour to Arkalochori. The road started to climb not far outside Heraklion and then the bus groaned and strained its way round bends and up ever more steeper inclines. This was over thirty years ago and the buses were old even then. I was usually one of only a few passengers on the trip into the hills.
The return trip at the end of day was very different.
It was often recently dark when the bus stopped on its way down from even further south and I climbed aboard. Often, some of the children from the school would walk me…
