The street is dark and quiet except for the laughter of a group of climbers stumbling back from a bar and the far-off whine of a scooter. I hear the surf on the gravel beach of the Greek island of Kalymnos, a small, rocky outcropping in the Dodecanese near the coast of Turkey, and my thoughts are of steep moves on climbs whose names end in “-os.”
Omiros, Kerveros, Eros — the routes are tipped-back concoctions of pockets and tufas and stalactites, and my forearms remember them as a butt remembers a spanking. Listening to the night through the open window and replaying the day, I breathe in the cool air. Into my mind drifts the slogan on the hotel lobby poster: “A climbing paradise in the Aegean ...”
From the balcony I can see the silhouette of the even smaller island of Telendos, separated from Kalymnos 800 years ago, when an earthquake wracked this part of the island. This earthquake might have exposed the limestone cliff line that now looms over the narrow strip of beach towns where the climbers stay. With a dozen sectors spanning several kilometers, this unbroken cliff band is one of the largest single sport-climbing crags in Europe, but surprisingly few people have yet heard of it. Though Kalymnos appears in Homer’s Iliad for deeds done 3000 years ago, it has been known to climbers only since 1996.
For the past week, life has been idyllic: coffee at one of the cafés that line the town’s one and only through street, head to the crag for a half day of fantastic sport climbing until we can’t close our hands or the sun hits the rock, hit the beach for a while, maybe do a few more routes in the late afternoon, then walk the main street looking for someone we know at the open-air bars, stroll to a restaurant for a late dinner beginning with fresh calamari or feta followed by mousaka or fish, maybe back to a bar, avoiding teh Ouzo, and try to make it to bed in time to get up and do it all over again.
In addition to the main escarpment behind town, there are a dozen other crags scattered along the road that follows the island’s northwest coast, and more remote sectors on the flanks of inland mountains or along roadless stretches of coastline. This week, a French group has chartered a boat from the port town of Pothia and sailed up the coast to put up the first climbs in a huge, stalactite-filled cave far from any road, camping there for several days. Similar grottos exist farther along the coasts — not to mention what you might find if you actually set sail. One Swiss climber, in fact, has arrived in his own boat. His sloop is under repair in Pothia, but in the bar in Masouri he tells of unclimbed limestone on a remote island chain, lost at sea not far away.
Yet after over a week on the island, we have barely escaped the sectors that are walking distance from our room. Every time we take a different approach trail we encounter another day’s worth of routes. The greatest local hazard is a Greek named Manellis, the friendly bartender next door to our hotel. As I fall asleep, I am thankful that tonight we slipped by before he could lure us in with a disco mix and some new concoction from behind the counter.