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On to Greece, There was a right wing military coup in Greece a few weeks before we left London, one edict issued by them said that any foreigner with a beard would not be allowed in to their country. Much to Mick’s annoyance I said I would not shave off my beard and if they didn’t like it I would give Greece a miss, I have had my beard since 1965. When we arrived at the Turkish / Greek boarder they didn’t take any notice of it. There were Americans in front of us but when the official saw our British passports he told the Americans to wait on one side and attended to us first, you can imagine how that went down with the Americans. I did get a bit concerned when we came across a large military exercise taking place a few hundred yards off the road we were on not long after crossing the boarder, wondering if we would be stopped and if so how would they react about my beard. They just carried on and ignored us. The military were in control until 1974, by all accounts a very nasty regime. On the roadside we saw many religious shrines, we found out later that they were not just representing where there had been an accident, there were many reasons for them. The other fascinating thing was seeing wild tortoises along the roadside as well as on the road. The Greek people were very friendly, one restaurant we went into realised the Greek language was all GREEK to us so they took us into the kitchen to show us what food they were cooking, another first, cabbage leaves stuffed with minced lamb and peppers, most enjoyable. The camp Site at Thessaloniki where we spent a few days was quite large, just off the beach, one of the few with marked out plots. It was a great site and the beach had cold water showers for you to shower off the sea water when you finished your swim. On from Greece back into Yugoslavia, to Skopje, again culturally very different, it made me realise that I had done the right thing 4 years earlier when I was on the brink of volunteering for the VSO but didn’t after Skopje had a bad earthquake with over 1000 killed and many thousand injured. Back in 1967 Albania was a place you could not visit so you had to skirt around it, hence using the route we did. We certainly hadn’t expected the Cakor pass the other side of Skopje to be a totally unmade road with no barriers to stop you going over the edge, some small lorries used it chained together to help them get over
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