Vai Palm Beach - Cholera kills!

The postcard version of Vai, home of the Bounty advert

My photo, from the hill overlooking the fantastic bay

Summer is Heaven in 77........as if!

We'd just been visiting Knossos and camped at Ag Nik (which you'll never get away with now) and, after visiting Siteia, arrived at the fantastic Palm Beach of Vai at the far eastern tip of Crete. Only one tiny taverna and a stretch of coastline out of a fantasy book. But, unbeknownst to us, Crete was in the grip of one of its worst cholera outbreaks. And we were walking straight into a hygiene trap. Cholera loves water and we were refilling our drinking water-bottles with infected liquid.

Worse still Vai is remote. And in those days there was no real hospital on Crete.

Two days later we're in Hierapetra and I start to feel.....not so good. We decide to leg it back to Heraklion which takes several hours on the service bus, just in case. Luckily, two people who had been in Vai joined us to look for digs. One was a trainee-doctor from Switzerland and the other, his girlfriend, a nurse. As we wandered up into Heraklion, I started to keel over. It wasn't the 40 degrees of heat.......

My travelling mate, Dennis Ichikawa (from Canada), & my two new friends got me to the only medical facility in the city, St.George's Clinic. As soon as the clinic's authorities know I'm insured, they boot an old man out of a bed for me and put him on a bench! I'm gutted but in no position to contest the cultural iniquities and, being the nth person to succumb to the dreaded typhus-cholera strain engulfing the island, am immediately placed on a saline drip. I am naked and shot to bits, but in the bed next to me is an Indonesian who is drifting in and out of consciousness. I guess I'm not doing so bad, after all!!

After a few days I was back in Athens with a stack of magic tablets and free to continue my travels, but it was scary. Many died in that epidemic. I just got the stomach bug!!

One final note: bureaucracy....your passport is taken off you till you pay and you can't leave the clinic. But you can't pay till you have your passport at the bank!! Neat.....that's how Greece used to be......and often still can be.

When I see the travel brochures now for Vai and think of the massive development in Heraklion, particularly the new hospital, my mind always goes back to that tiny clinic.