Poor Greece

The wind is maddening and constant, and gets stronger as the sun falls under the horizon. The streets are lined with plastic and rubbish, the beaches covered with greasy bodies and sun beds, and ghastly music blasts away all day and night. Motor scooters without mufflers and cars choke the tiny roads leading to the center of town, where literally thousands of sunburned young people wearing expensive rags down tequilas with a thousand-mile look on their unshaven faces. Welcome to Mykonos, once a brothel of an island, now reverting to type after a 30-year period of being a gay paradise.

I am on a 125-foot schooner, the Aello, built in Hamburg, Germany, in 1921 by Max Oertz and commissioned by Anthony Benakis, a great Greek benefactor. She has been totally and perfectly refitted by her present proprietor, a Greek shipowner, and I have chartered her for a fortnight’s cruise with my son and grandchildren. The crew is splendid, all six Greek, who love to sail even under these stormlike conditions. Our one and only mistake was to come to this shit island, now overrun by nouveaux riches “cool” people, which means vulgarity like never before rules the roost. What is interesting is that average room rates for Mykonos hotels exceed those of luxury hotels in Monaco,