... on, beside, in or under which is where we’ve spent the last fortnight. These two, mother and babe, were amongst some 30 or 40 dolphins that came to say hello as we cruised the Marine Conservation park, in the northern Aegean, about 10 days ago. They, and the staggeringly beautiful lesser Sporades, are the abiding and as yet unfaded memories of a beautiful holiday on Alonissos. The Marine Park was set up primarily to protect the remaining 300 Mediterranean Monk Seals - which we caught no glimpse of. They breed, the last few of them, on a tiny, remote island called Piperi, near which no boats at all are allowed. But we did get to cruise among the dolphins, to swim on the beaches of deserted islands, to see the delicate, rare white marine lilies that bloom in profusion on the beach of Psathoura - and generally to appreciate what a rare and fragile place we had fetched up in.
I sat, one morning after swimming, for an hour or more with my feet in the rocky water of the busy harbour at Patitiri, just gazing at the miniature wildlife garden around me. Those empty whelk shells, lying on the rock - surely they move? Of course they do - every one contains a tiny hermit crab, creeping around the crevices, fossicking for food. And the blue-black disks on that rock side? Little crabs, feeding with the delicate, almost fussy precision of a gourmet, on invisible water-born scraps - pincers as fine and polite as silver cutlery. Oh - and there’s a Blenny, stripe-camouflaged, easing its way across the bottom on elbowed fins between the glass-like shrimps. And around that rock wave, like medusa-hair, the water-woven tendrils of some sea-anemone. And these, only the animals whose names I know. Itinerant fish flash in and out of the scene, multicoloured tordepoes, or quivering, pale disks. All wonderful.
I never cease to be fascinated by the rich diversity of the world we inhabit - and I hope I never will.
In the harbour one day we saw the grim, black-robed, bearded form of an orthodox monk, waiting for his motor-boat to be fixed - presumably the solitary monk who lives, the only inhabitant, on Kyra Panagia over the strait. I felt sorry for him, stuck in a world that is not enough for him but only second best to some imaginary alternative. This one will do me.
