The pilot book describes the anchorage. It gives the coordinates, the holding quality, the depths, the hazards on approach, and in the better editions a brief description of the facilities available ashore: the taverna, the small market, the water tap on the dock.
What the pilot book does not describe is the village above the anchorage that is reached by the path behind the taverna that no sign indicates, that takes forty minutes to walk and that contains a community whose relationship with the sea below it is the primary relationship rather than an incidental one.
The pilot book cannot describe this because the pilot book is a logistics document: it tells you what you need to know to arrive safely and provision adequately and depart correctly. The village above the anchorage is not logistics. It is the place itself, and the place reveals itself only to the boat that is still there after the logistics are complete, after the water and the provisions are aboard and the depth is confirmed and the hook is set correctly and the rest of the day belongs to curiosity rather than to management.
The Path Behind the Taverna
I have walked the path behind the taverna in the Dodecanese, in the outer Tuamotu, in the Banda Sea, in the Seychelles outer islands, in Lombok, and in a dozen other places on the Naora route where the anchorage sits below a hillside that contains more than the pilot book’s description suggests.
The path is always different. The village at the end of it is always different. What is consistent is the quality of what the village contains: the specific knowledge of the place that the community at the top of the hill has accumulated across generations of living above the water that the visiting boat arrived in and that the community has been in permanent relationship with for longer than most of the visiting boats’ nationalities have existed.
In the Dodecanese, the village above the anchorage is the village whose men fished the same water whose octopus we bought at the dock. The women in the village square know which boats are in the bay below without having been down to look, because the sound of the engines and the pattern of the dinghy traffic tells them everything they need to know about the visitors before the visitors arrive.
The coffee that arrives without being ordered is the coffee that arrived for every visiting sailor for sixty years, and the quality of the welcome it represents is the quality of a community that has been receiving visitors on its own terms for long enough to have developed a welcome that is genuine rather than commercial.
The Invitation
The invitation to stay for the meal is the invitation that the boat that arrives and departs the same day never receives and that the boat that has been in the bay for three days sometimes does. It is not offered to every boat that stays three days. It is offered to the boat whose presence in the bay has communicated something specific: that the people aboard are interested in the place rather than using it as a backdrop, that they have walked the path and drunk the coffee and asked the questions in whatever combination of languages was available, and that the specific quality of their attention to the village has been registered by the village as the attention that deserves the response of the meal.
The meal at the table in the village above the anchorage is the finest meal available on the Naora route, not because the food is the finest available in the world, though it is sometimes extraordinary, but because the context is not reproducible by any restaurant in any city.
The food was grown on the hillside above the table or pulled from the water below it. The people at the table are the people who grew it and caught it and who know every specific thing about where it came from that the organic certification and the farm-to-table narrative attempts to approximate and never quite reaches. The village that is not in the pilot book is the village that the Naora voyage was built to find.
