1971 First Time Leaving Athens: Goodbye Victor Von Volkswagon

Victor Van Volkswagon 1971 Amsterdam to Athens over the Alps

Ok fast forward a few months to the decision to fly to the next destination rather than risk driving through Turkey and further east. I soon found a potential customer for our van in Piraeus after posting a “For Sale” sign on a youth hostel notice board. A Scottish couple were headed to Glasgow, more or less retracing the way we had just traveled in reverse. After dickering over a price which was close to what we had purchase the van for from a Canadian couple in Amsterdam, we headed to Athens Customs and Immigration to transfer it from my passport to his. It was a daunting gloomy big gray building with hundreds of clerks, armed policemen and heavily rifled young soldiers (at the time the a Junta of “Colonels” ruled the country).

From desk to desk we worked our way through the processes of transferring the ownership, signing document after document which, I can’t help but say: was all Greek to me. Taking nearly the entire day, including afternoon tea, coffee and staff breaks, we swam slowly in humidity just barely breathable despite all the high ceiling fans. No air conditioning of course. Just as daylight was beginning to fade and we were approaching our goal, one of the customs officials introduced the notion that to complete the transfer all that was left was to calculate and then pay the transfer tax. Of course no one had mentioned this tax before. Unexpectedly the country or maybe just that clerk needed some of my cash then and there. Protest was futile. Incredulously I watched our clerk and two others working out how much to charge. It was like Moe, Larry and Curly. The calculation involved multiplying the German Z license plate number by my birthday times the date of the month plus some other numbers seemingly pulled from the sky. Of course, it was a scam but I was powerless to protest. I wanted out of Greece as soon as possible and that meant clearing the van off of our papers. I vowed take revenge by writing to “Ripoffreport.org” in thirty years but paying could not be avoided at that time.

OK, the transaction paperwork was complete and the passports were about to be being stamped but then they hit us with a Catch-22. My buyer was told to make the payment to me in front of the government official in Drachmas! The local currency. Drachmas! (A tightly controlled currency that had little or no value outside of Greece.) To accept the Drachmas and then leave with them would have been useless since they couldn’t have been converted back to Dollars at any decent rate of exchange outside of Greece. And to convert the Drachmas back to Dollars in Greece I would have needed to prove how the Drachmas were obtained…which I could have done with the document detailing the selling of the van except that the bill of sale was taken away by the government clerk who attached it to his files leaving me nothing to take back to the foreign exchange bank to reconvert them into Dollars. In that contest, the final score was a Win by the Government; a Loss by the Traveller.

We did find a loophole around that “Catch 22” by using the Drachmas while still in Athens to purchase unneeded airline tickets from Athens to Tel Aviv and New York. Because the world wasn’t as sophisticated or computerized back then it was possible to find a sympathetic travel agent who recommended and obtained approval for a full refund at our next destination.

Years later it took almost a six months to obtain a simple UK work permit. Keeping the U.S. Passport was a decidedly easier project.

(building a biographical novel block by block)