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The sound of invisible crickets fills the air. It’s our first morning in Greece, 35 degrees, and we are set to board our mystery voyage around the Aegean. My 67-year-old dad and I are in an Athens nail salon I selected from Google for its name: Alexandra Nails. He insists on staying in the salon and watching the process, suggesting I go with “a flesh tone to match all your outfits.”
A holiday together seemed like it could be just the tonic for my recently divorced father and his only child. Though we’d traveled together with various arms of our family over the years, it had been 30 years since we’d gone just he and I—and it felt like the right time to reflect on the past year’s turmoil, after my father’s chronic health problems escalated to a major surgery and he overcame the challenges of a marriage ending in his mid-60s. He’d survived the sickness, survived the heartbreak, and now, there was a lot more free time on his calendar.
As we prepared to set off on our voyage, I thought back to our first overseas adventure. I was five, and he rented us a room in the beachside home of an old Spanish couple. I remembered the deafening sound of crickets and my dad rejoicing in all these new sensations, telling me they were each six feet tall hiding behind the trees. He guided my first swim in the sea, diving down below the waters when I dropped my glittery jelly shoes, fed me salty foods and sickly sweet churros with chocolate sauce, brushed my salty hair and paid to get a colorful braid, and carefully bundled a feverish miniature me onto the plane home when I started showing the first signs of chickenpox. It was a perfect first holiday.
This time around, to try and recapture that magic, we settled on Greece—whose waters I was pining after, and whose islands I’ve heard my dad wax lyrical on over the years, though we’d never been together. The boat we’re boarding for one week, sailed by Variety, is beautiful: with just 36 cabins, it’s a 69-meter vessel designed in muted palettes and features only one restaurant and one bar (not a ghastly casino or fetid hot tub in sight). The mega yacht’s exterior in white, chrome, and glass, and a private top sun deck, is understated but still feels a little like something out of music video. On deck, the cava is flowing and guests are acclimatizing to the heat and waves. I spot an ultra-glamorous Greek family moving around the ship: rich natural tans, lithe limbs, jet black hair, regal noses, heavy kohl eyes, gold dripping, precious stones glinting. There’s a baby on board, and I learn her name is Odyssea: four months old with a thick mop of shiny raven hair, her eyes are the same color as the Aegean. It turns out she’s also the granddaughter of the ship’s founder.
The voyage we’re on is a family affair, in many senses. The fleet of ships was launched in 1949 by Diogenes Venetopoulos, a historian who looked to the future in the aftermath of the war that had ravaged some of Greece’s most treasured sites, and his descendants are on board this week—from his jovial CEO son Filippos with his new wife (a lawyer and ceramicist) and their extended families; the ones I’d been captivated by when boarding. Never had my dad and I imagined adventuring up close and personal with a Greek yachting dynasty. Odyssea’s parents, who I get close to yapping about cinema over the week, are Filippos’s brother (a passionate, bespectacled documentary filmmaker who runs the company’s green and queer initiatives) and his partner Nikos who works with the Onassis Foundation when not dancing me dizzy at the deck parties.
These days, I don’t really think of my dad as an extrovert. But as I watch him talk to our fellow guests, I’m reminded that he does have some stories: he’s worked as a bookbinder, mechanic, tattooist, reptile shop owner, and now gig promoter. Everyone is asked to introduce themselves at the inaugural captain’s dinner. My dad is the last to receive the microphone, and I can tell he’s nervous. “My name’s Gordon,” he says. I love reptiles, beer, and tattoos.” I remember that I used to be the shy one out of my and my dad. Now the roles have reversed.
As we settle into conversation with our fellow guests, we’re asked about our Anglo-Indian background—aside from the typical “But where are you really from?” questions, our ethnic ambiguousness also sparks some new ones: “You must be Greek!”; “Where do you get your shades from?”; “What do you identify as?” They are versions of questions we are used to, but to which we are always finding new feelings and answers—and I realize that somewhere else is often where my dad and I often feel most at home. He’s never been back to his birth city, and I’ve never been to India.
We don’t know where we’re going, but we know it won’t be boring. Filippos assures us each island will be unexpected and off the beaten path. Little tender boats will take us ashore each day whenever we’re docked. Exploring places neither my dad nor I have a connection to, and relinquishing control of the future plans, feels familiar. From picking out random towns to visit together during his summer vacation days on long drives, or meeting at gas stations between his house and wherever I had moved to (some 15 with my mother, followed by various cities in England and overseas once I grew up). I realize that a lot of my bonding with both loved ones and strangers has taken place in sort of no-man’s lands.
As someone who has sailed to both poles of the earth to write about it, I begin to make sense of my love for the sea’s mystique and endless waterways, even though I grew up nowhere near it. And while my dad dislikes getting into the water, he’s always been fascinated with marine life, having kept his own vivariums since childhood before working at an aquarium his entire teens and then running his own reptile and tropical fish shop throughout my childhood. I knew enough; that he got the shop as an incentive for me to want to travel to visit every other weekend, and that he got the shop to make a living and appear like an upstanding citizen in the face of a grisly custody trial.
“There are good parts of the sea, there are bad parts of the sea,” says Captain Orpheus the next morning, a cheeky, all-knowing figure aged fifty-eight in snappy gold-buttoned whites. His young cadet Marieta, her cherry red hair in a plait, happens to be from Tinos, the first island we land at after a swim stop at the white pebbled beach on Aspros Yiallos. She is animated when explaining the spiritual energy that courses through its many villages, from Volax to Pyrgos.
Once a center of worship for Poseidon, Tinos is a mystical land of rumored fallen stars. There’s the folkloric tale of a meteorite hitting the island creating its meadows of round granite mounds; today, it’s a place where you’ll find the hunting of wild goats, wild artichoke ice cream, and calamari fishing by moonlight. Yorgos Lanthimos shot his short film Vlichi here, and apparently owns a house on the island and can frequently be found at dinner with locals.
After one such dinner we have enjoyed on land, we village hop and land at the stroke of ten in Tino’s chora. The older generation is still front and center of any panagiri, the traditional community party thrown typically in August to honor the year’s harvest. Opposite the middle-aged acoustic guitar players and singers—succeeded by a hunky chain-smoking violinist in a camel suit—is an octogenarian with all his teeth missing. Decked in double denim, he sings from his gums with glee, delighted. Surrounding him is the throng of long-limbed, bronze goddesses.
Back on the boat the next day, there’s a feeling of unforced wholesomeness—something I never thought I’d find on a cruise—as everyone settles into their daily rhythms. Opt-in activities, roving mealtimes, conversations around the boat with the extended family; chatting with the Andalusian-Norwegian swimmer couple who competed in the 1984 Olympics, a smiling Greek philosopher with two extremely polite teenage daughters, the gushing German boomer full of earnest compliments for everyone. The older teenager is reading Moby Dick on the sun deck most mornings. Studious and doting with her family—basically the opposite of me when her age. Every morning, a chiseled Greek model leads yoga and meditation. Seeing my dad in the lotus pose, one eye peeking around at the silent deck, cracks me up. “I found it really difficult to hold my breath for five seconds,” he mutters afterwards. As we pad around the boat as a little twosome, I find myself dressing in matching colorways to him, like we did on special occasions when I was little.
On one of our final nights, we head to Thimena, the second largest island of Fourni archipelago, with only one village. As we strangers land, the spirit of filoxenia (friendliness to a stranger) at the one tiny taverna is palpable. Plates are smashed, circles form, and Everyone’s dancing: first to traditional songs, then to Abba. An old Greek lady in leggings does somersaults over the smashed plates. Aging mahogany men toss their canes aside and slut drop. The music changes again and the Egyptian crew dances the shaabi.
Psara is our final port of call, where bees hum loudly as they pollinate their beloved thyme. I spot a flag that translates to: Freedom or death. A fierce spirit of resistance and belonging is the lifeblood of the people here. In 1824, Psara’s population was almost entirely massacred by Ottoman troops. Now, some 450 residents watch out over the Aegean from Psara and its remaining relics plus the modest nature of what has been rebuilt make up a small and lonely island, somewhat of a time capsule.
It’s the last day of our adventures and these distant civilisations and bottomless seas have made us headily nostalgic. The boat moves through a barren archipelago: dry Martian landscapes, flat taupe and black, a rugged beach unpopulated. My dad is thinking out loud, which I know means he feels at home. His eye wanders across the landscapes, and he turns to talking about the original Star Trek series. “Very positive for mankind,” he says, quietly. Clearly, we are both a little forlorn at the trip coming to its end.
Being in a position now in adulthood to take my dad away on a holiday—especially as we’re both currently untethered to others—feels like a full circle back to those earlier years. Out here in the heart of the Mediterranean, we somehow found ourselves closer than ever. We disembark with rapturous hangovers, ogling the superyachts at the port—and begin planning a winter getaway.