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Ever dreamt of sleeping on a Greek beach for the summer, sitting round a fire listening to scratchy rock' n' roll under a starry sky? You're not 40 years too late. Ben Mallalieu finds a tiny island where the 1960s never quite came to an end
TODAY is Saturday: I need to write that down, because my phone is dead and my watch has stopped - perhaps appropriate on an island where time and the outside world hardly impinge but mighty inconvenient when I have a ferry and plane to catch on Friday.
I can roughly tell the time of day from the shadow of a stick in the sand, but there is no easy way of telling the day of the week other than by keeping a record.
This morning there are no new human footprints on the beach, but a cat has added my tent to its silent nightly round.
An old man with an impossibly long white beard dances along the shoreline, greeting the sunrise. His philosophy of life is very simple: "Everything is easy."
If you are eating, he has the initially disconcerting habit of helping himself uninvited to your food, but after a few days you cease to notice. I have some new friends who live in the woods and I cannot walk past their camp without being offered tea or food, which is almost embarrassing until I realise that this is how life ought to be.
Gavdos is one of the places that claims to be the island of Ogygia where the goddess Calypso kept Odysseus prisoner, although the supporting evidence is slight: in terms of flora, fauna and geography, it fails to tick almost any of the right boxes. I like to think of Gavdos as Ogygia because it is, perhaps more than any place I have ever been to, enchanted.
And, it is certainly difficult to escape from: ferry connections are unreliable and you can be marooned here for days, sometimes weeks, if the wind is blowing in the wrong direction.
Gavdos is a small dot on the map 50km south of Crete; it is the southernmost of all the Greek islands and possibly the southernmost point of Europe if you don't count the Canaries. Its permanent indigenous population is around 35 with a similar number of 'outsiders'. It has no hotels and fewer than 100 apartment beds for tourists, so most of the 1,000 or so summer migrants sleep on the beaches or under the trees, which was usual on Greek islands 30 years ago but is now usually frowned upon, not to say actively discouraged, by the police.
The island is inevitably changing, but only slowly and not necessarily for the worse. The road has been paved in the past year, the harbour at Karave enlarged; there could even be proper electricity soon. New houses are being built on the road to Agios Ioannis, but the road stops at Sophia's taverna, from where it is a half-mile walk over the rocks, through the trees and far away from the 21st Century to the beach where I live under a juniper tree.
The sea juniper, Juniperus oxycedrus macrocarpa, is the ultimate beach tree, and the tiny island of Gavdos has possibly more of them than anywhere in the world. Mosquito nets and hammocks are strung between the branches like cobwebs or moths' nests and decorated with flotsam and jetsam, treading the thin line between art and litter. The people have blended into the landscape to become almost invisible, with lean bodies the colour of the sand.
Today is Monday.
Maria is Greek with a very Minoan beauty; she studies modern dance in Paris and spends her summers on Gavdos.
Walking round the headland to Lavrakas beach, I see her standing up to her waist in the sea, bending forward and dipping her hair in the water then slowly swinging her head and body round to make catherine wheels of water in the air.
Gavdos is 200 miles from Athens - it is closer to Africa in fact - and at night there is no light pollution.
Today is Tuesday.
Lili and Sara are Spanish students who live under the tree next door and separately remind me of two friends from when I was travelling 30 years ago. In the morning, we go for a walk guided by a gentle young Greek with long black hair and beard; we would never have found the path without him, a very hard climb under a hot sun and a 200m scramble down the side of a ravine.
Journey's end is Potamos, surely one of the most beautiful beaches in the world, with half a mile of the best golden sand gently shelving into safe, clear water. Apart from us, it is entirely deserted.
After one of the best and most refreshing swims of my life, I sling a hammock between the branches of a sea juniper and fall asleep listening to the waves, the cicadas, the bees in the thyme, the occasional bleat and tonk of a goat, and Lili and Sara laughing in the sea.
Today is now. Tomorrow never comes.
Editor's note: For more information visit gavdos-online.com
