Carnival - now Lent. Late February, then.

Maybe it’s being a Protestant country – whatever, the pre-Lent carnival in England amounts to little more than a few pancakes. It’s a different story in Greece, where the shops have been full for the last few weeks with masks and costumes, kids throwing bangers everywhere and a general air of excitement and celebration. Smokey Thursday, two weeks ago, was scary – it’s a sort of Hallowe’en night, where kids in costume go around setting off fireworks and hitting strangers with baseball bats and the like. We barricaded ourselves into the internet café, since EFL teachers’ already limited disciplinary powers clearly wouldn’t have been much protection.

Preveza’s main carnival day was the following Thursday, consisting of a long, long, long parade along the seafront of school kids (and a few communists) in colourful costumes – kind of like Oxi day, but with better visuals, and the military music replaced by loud, Latin-tinged pop blaring out of the speakers. It’s amazing how many times one can hear ‘Mambo Number Five’ in one weekend, not to mention the eternally ludicrous Boney M. Ra Ra Rasputin. It was a shame how he carried on, indeed. Perhaps this is actually intended to drive listeners a little insane, thus creating the requisite liminal, ludic mindset in which carnivalesque communitas thrives. Or perhaps I spent too long at university studying carnival from a post-Bakhtinian cultural materialist perspective.

Literally every single person in Preveza is at the carnival, including, luckily, the burglars, if such there are. Pretty much all of them go out to dinner afterwards, too. A long time before we’re able to squeeze into Kaixis, six of us round a two-person upstairs table. Kaixis isn’t a favourite taverna – the food’s not great, and Sharon in particular objects to the over-friendliness of Tasos the proprietor – although he does seem to have got the message by now, and still sends us free wine. They often have live music though, which makes for a great atmosphere (carnivalesque communitas etc.). Tonight, two young guys and a gal are singing and playing guitar and bouzouki, and everyone else in the taverna (a young, studenty crowd – in fact, I think we’re about the oldest in there) singing along. More drinking among the Greeks than normal – carnival license – so not too long before people in fancy dress are dancing on the tables. There’s also the dangerous-looking capering the Greek men do: one man kneels on the ground, clapping, while his friend makes slow, bobbing movements, occasionally flailing out with wild kicks and jumps. They also dance with arms round each other’s shoulders. Greeks in general and young Greek men in particular are much more physically affectionate with their friends than the English. Interestingly, they also apparently believe that all English men are gay. (Despite the fact that nobody from my drama course has come to visit yet.)

Greece’s biggest and best carnival, though, takes place in Patra – the country’s unlovely third largest city, about three hours’ bus ride from here on the NW coast of the Peloponnese. Accommodation is impossible to come by over the last weekend of the carnival, so we decide to head down on Saturday, simply do without sleep and get the first bus back Sunday morning.

The streets are thronged with people, the cafes spilling out onto the pavements. Stalls on the streets sell feather boas, big felt hats, whistles. Loads of whistles. There’s a constant shrilling in the air, like a referees’ rave. More music and Boney M pumping out of outside speakers. A lot of people in big hats, masks or full fancy dress.

As for us: I have a fantastic parrot hat, which I’m wearing all the time, though mainly to keep warm – there’s a bitter wind. As it’s so cold, Rachel barely wears the beautiful batik peacock costume she’s been spending the last week making, and buys a feather boa to keep warm instead. Sharon and Craig have hats which wouldn’t look out of place at Ascot. Melanie has a mask and a blue wig, while John surpasses us all with a tartan miniskirt and tights, and a lot of make-up. Jody goes for a minimalist approach, with glittery nail varnish on one finger. We blend in pretty well.

I read somewhere that the Patras carnival is the largest non-commercial carnival in the world. It’s certainly hard to imagine a similar-scale event in Britain without scores of sponsors and ways to lose your money. Here, a certain snack-food company are giving out trial-size packets of their new black pepper flavour crisps (and very nice they are too) and a certain mobile phone giant has a tent where people are playing twister, and giving out helium balloons. That’s about it.

There’s little in the way of organised stuff going on. Turns out the big parade is actually tomorrow (I watch the highlights on TV – looks pretty impressive, with giant floats, George Bush effigies – the works). The one organised event tonight is a salsa band from New York, playing on a stage by the docks. There’s about 15 of them in all, and they’re excellent – we, at least, are dancing, although the bottle of vodka and orange probably helps. That and the absinthe.

After that, it’s bars, clubs and walking the streets for a while. By about half-three we’re hungry: everywhere’s still open, and we’re able to have an excellent sit-down meal of freshly-made pizza, gnocchi and pasta. The espressos that follow aren’t enough of a pick-me-up to make me want to go out dancing – stronger stimulants would be required by this point – although plenty of people still are: 5am and people are still arriving at clubs, not leaving. We find a café that isn’t charging an entrance fee, and sit there zoning out for a couple of hours as it starts to get light. A chill-out place would be good: instead, we get Fat Boy Slim and occasional bursts of heavy metal, which seems to suit most of the crowd.

There’s a surreal feel to the early morning streets. Stragglers stagger past, still fancy-dressed. Street sweepers are out already, cleaning up litter of streamers and fag butts and deflated balloons. Café owners hose the spilled beer off the pavements even as the dancing continues inside.

We get a bus to Rio, which isn’t as exciting as it sounds, since Rio in this case isn’t the Brazilian carnival capital but the small town on the Gulf of Corinth from where we need to catch a ferry over to the other side of the narrow stretch of water. They’re building a suspension bridge here, and very impressive and elegant it is too, although at the moment it doesn’t quite meet in the middle. It’s something they’ve been planning for about a hundred years (honestly – no exaggeration) and building for the last seven, at a cost of about 700 million euros, most of which has presumably been embezzled. Like many construction projects in Greece, it’ll be finished by the Olympics, honest.

In the meantime though, a fleet of rusty car ferries plough to and fro. Except when it’s windy. Like today. Damn. So instead of a ten minute ferry ride and a couple of hours on the coach and being home in bed by midday, we’re faced with the prospect of having to go back to Patra to catch a bus to Athens (three hours) and then take another bus from Athens which would have to go the long, windy mountain route across to Preveza and should get us in at midnight if we’re lucky. It’s extremely frustrating to be defeated by a strip of water only about a mile across. The Greek car drivers clearly share this frustration, periodically honking their horns, as if this will somehow calm the sea. Some people are blowing their carnival whistles too.

Just as we’re about to get on the bus, though, they send out a first ferry, and when it doesn’t sink, they finally start sailing again. With cars facing every which way, and everybody determined to be on the first ferry across, it’s going to be mayhem. Luckily, as foot passengers, we’re able to sneak on the first boat across. Which isn’t such a great thing, as it just means longer to wait in Antirio, on the other side of the gulf, a village which is little more than a car park, and which will presumably die, unmourned, when the bridge opens.

We’re assured there will be a bus to Preveza at 3pm. Obviously, we don’t hold too much faith in this information: you should take all information you’re given in Greece with a pinch of salt, especially when it has to do with public transport. Partly, Greek people, some of them, would rather tell you what you want to hear than give you bad news. Partly they just don’t have a clue. Anyway, by half four no buses have arrived at all. Eventually, though, they start coming across on the ferries. We strain to read their destinations as the ferries dock. The first one is going to Ioannina. The second one is going to Ioannina. Bloody hell, so is the third.

It begins to take on the quality of a frustrating dream. You’re stuck in a limbo town. You have to get a bus. One by one, boats turn up, carrying buses. And it’s never the bus you need. We try to get on a couple which are at least going in the right direction, but are turfed off by the driver, who tells us the one from Preveza is just behind, two minutes, on the next ferry. Which it isn’t. Maybe because we haven’t slept at all, and because this wind is bloody freezing, this is getting almost unbearably infuriating.

Eventually, we catch a bus to Lefkada, and get off at Vonitsa, the next town to us on the Ambracian Gulf, where we’re finally told that, no, there are no buses coming to Preveza at all.

Good luck with the Olympics…