The island of Crete is home to so many layers of culture throughout time. From Bronze Age Minoan ruins to the place where Icarus and Daedalus took flight to escape King Minos in Greek mythology, it’s a fascinating place. This time of year the coastlines are littered with empty holiday homes, hotels and apartments that give a stark reminder of how the fashion of buying a place to escape the ratrace for the holidays has created a different layer of existence that both supports and usurps the local way of life. I roll through in our van, meet other transient nomads living a similar existence and ponder the strangeness of land ownership. It makes me question how we can have empty houses or how some people can have more houses than they could ever live in when there are so many refugees and homeless people in the world. I’ll stop the anti-capitalist rant there, but this isn’t an issue unique to Greece. In Wales’ costal towns young people are priced out of the property market by affluent second home owners. Out of season these places are ghost towns, and although travelling through at this time is quite lovely because of the quiet, it’s probably not great for the local economy or community. Perhaps selling everything so as not to own a house or land might seem drastic to some but I felt that moving into the van was one of the ways in which to view our settled culture from a completely different perspective and for me that can only happen through real-life experience. Anyway, today we visited these Neolithic caves in Matala where Joni Mitchell lived for a time with the hippie community during her nomadic phase. Hence the song lyrics ‘The night is a starry dome. / And they’re playin’ that scratchy rock and roll / Beneath the Matala Moon.’ It’s amazing to think how these basic caves have been inhabited over the centuries. Sometimes I think I could live in a cave -as long as I had 4G and could stack some solar panels on the walls somewhere ?. #alternativeliving #matalacaves #crete #tinyliving #tinyhome #homeonwheels #homeiswhereyouparkit #ontheroad #timetravel #minoan #bronzeage #greece #traveller #hippies #nomads #jonimitchell #explore #exploretocreate #slowtravel #slowlife
No Comments