Sunday 6th June
As it was our last night in Kos we had gone a bit silly on the cocktails on the Saturday night. I woke up around 11am feeling a little under the weather. I attempted to pack my luggage and then gave it up as a bad job and went to the beach. This turned out to be a mistake - I should have stayed until I was happy everything was packed!
A couple of friends from Bradford, Kim and Andy, had landed early in the morning - so we got in touch to see if they wanted to join us for a meal in the evening. I went to pick them up but it took ages to find their appartment so by the time I got back I was out of time for packing. I ended up just throwing everything into the luggage that was around and loading the bike, forgetting to pack my sun-cream and book.
We had a very nice meal and then Daz and I set off to the docks. Howard, Barbara, Anke, and Jane followed in the car to see us off. While we were waiting at the docks lots of activity started to happen. First a lot of army folk arrived and then lots of police. The ferry arrived at around 9pm and they let people off, but they didn't let anybody on. Then they unloaded everybody off the ferry and had them stand on the docks, while the army went on and searched the boat. To me it looked like they'd had a bomb threat but nobody was saying anything.
Eventually they let us on at around 10:30. We were very tired, had a single beer and went to bed.
We'd been in bed for around 30 minutes, I was just dropping off to sleep, when there was a knock on the door, the door opened and two blokes walked in. Both Daz and I sat up and put the lights on a asked them, quite bluntly, what they thought they were doing. We lept out off our beds and pushed them out of the room, Daz taking their key off them as they went.
I went out to explain it was our cabin and there must be a mistake, but unfortunately the blokes were Greek and didn't speak a word of English. I motioned for one of them to follow me to reception to sort it out (remember we were experts at international sign language by this time!). In the mean time the other bloke was knocking on the door, but Daz stood firm and didn't let him in.
It turns out that the norm on Greek ferries is that when you book a cabin, you are actually booking a bed in a cabin, not the full cabin! If you go back to Tuesday 25th May then you can just make out the letters above the beds in the cabin. These two poor Greek blokes had every right to be in our cabin and we'd just chucked them out. I tried to appologise as best I could on the way back to the cabin, and we had to spend the night with these two complete strangers. I slept on my passport and money!
Looking back I bet our cabin on Ancona to Patras was a shared cabin, but nobody else was in it because the ferry was fairly quiet. It would have been interresting if me and Daz had come back to the cabin after a skin-full of beer to find two strangers sleeping in our cabin!