Wallace Newsletter, October 2001

Robert & Ritsa Wallace

You might have been wondering to yourselves: "I wonder what happened to the Wallaces, Rob & Ritsa, Natasha and Jacqueline, and how are they getting on?", particularly if you haven’t heard from us for a while, not even a Christmas card last year. Well, here we are to redress that oversight - keeping in touch is very important to us at this time in our lives, and this letter will go out as an email attachment to everyone we have an email address for, and snail mail to the rest (if you have an email address, please let us have it, that’s the easiest way to communicate these days). For those we have been corresponding with recently, please bear with us, there will be a certain amount of repetition.

The reason we didn’t get around to sending Christmas cards last year was that we were busy selling our house in Rosebank, Cape Town. In fact, we did sell the house just before Christmas; that sale fell through, but we found new buyers immediately and on March 1, we left our home of 18 years, where the girls went through almost their entire school careers at Rustenberg Junior and Senior schools, right around the corner, and then to UCT on the hill, where both graduated in 1997. It was hard leaving a very happy home, a very peaceful and convenient neighbourhood in a wonderful city, and some very nice neighbours. But Greece was calling; Ritsa’s mother is getting old and frail, and our seaside property left to us by Ritsa’s father on the beautiful island of Zakynthos was crying out for development, and was under threat unless we were here to do something about it. We have been mulling this over since 1998, when we had an extended trip in Greece, Turkey and Scotland to celebrate our 25th Anniversary, and on a few subsequent trips to tie up some of the legal problems.

Consequently, we came over to Greece in early April, were in Athens for the Greek Easter, and on Zakynthos ever since. Our intention is to begin the development by constructing a Beach Bar next to the beach, to take advantage of the existing lucrative market being serviced out of a little caravan kiosk by Ritsa’s nephew, Dionysis Paraschis, who will be our partner, along with his English girlfriend Charlotte, in operating the bar. We thought we would be in business by the middle of summer, but things don’t work so quickly in Greece! Plans were drawn up, and submitted in January, but because of various incomprehensible bureaucratic hassles, we still don’t have a building license. We went ahead and built the structure on a verbal approval from the town-planning consultant in Athens, but stopped at the end of July when it became clear we would not work in 2001. We’ll add the finishing touches early next year, and be in business when the new season opens on May 1 2002.

In the meanwhile, there has been plenty to do on our neglected property, and we landscaped and planted grass alongside the beach so that we could place additional sunbeds and umbrellas from which we make a modest income renting them out on a daily basis to beachgoers. After the bar is in operation, and generating some cash flow, we will look at what we can do in subsequent phases.

Jacqui and her boyfriend Rory are over here with us, and have evening jobs at a nearby hotel, the Alexandra Beach, where they are saving money to travel and/or study in the winter. Natasha has a small cottage in Kenilworth, Cape Town, where she has been employed on the editorial side of STYLE magazine, a well-respected lifestyle magazine in South Africa (all you South Africans, rush out and buy a copy now!). She was doing really well and enjoying it, until the publishers decided to close their Cape Town office, and she was retrenched. She is now living the precarious existence of a freelance writer, doing work for STYLE and a few other publications. She is getting itchy feet, and may well join us in Europe next year.

What is life like for us on the island? Well, we live simply, in a very basic beach-side cottage, with the sound of the sea lapping on the beach 30 metres from our verandah, surrounded by tall poplar trees which sigh and rustle in the northerly breeze which keeps us cool most days, even when it is very hot elsewhere. Zakynthos, in common with the other Ionian islands (on the western, Italian side of the mainland), is very green and fertile, with very high winter rainfall, and abundant crops of raisins, wine and olives. It is a very beautiful island, with good beaches on the southern and north-eastern coasts, and wild and dramatic scenery on the mountainous western coast. Although devastated by an earthquake in 1953, the architecture still shows the heritage of many centuries of Venetian occupation, as does the dialect and culture of the people, being known as an island of poets and singers.

Zakynthos is a major destination for the package tour industry, particularly from the UK, but also Germany and Holland, and the charter flights fly in and out daily, some days as many as 12 or 15 flights, directly from a variety of destinations. This business has its downside, but it has brought prosperity and development to what was a very poor village when we first started coming here, and the development has been in keeping with the traditional style of building, so it is visually pleasing. It also means we have all the convenience of supermarkets, bars and tavernas close at hand, satellite TV in many of the bars so that I can follow international sport such as the Trinations and Super 12, and of course, it brings us our potential customers. Now that the summer season is almost over, and the numbers have dropped off, it is peaceful, idyllic, and the last few days we have had really beautiful weather conditions, calm and still with hardly a ripple on the sea, sparkling clear air and warm, gentle sunshine.

For transport, we have bought ourselves a brand-new, bright red Piaggio Liberty 150cc scooter, and find that it suits our needs perfectly; with a pannier on the back, and a hook in the front, it carries a surprising amount of grocery shopping, and it is a most exhilarating experience riding on the country roads through olive groves, vineyards and mountain passes with glorious views of the sea and neighbouring island of Kefalonia. We’ve got to know the island a lot better than on our shorter, more static holiday visits in the past. We’ve got to know the people a lot better, and got more integrated into the culture and customs of the island. As visiting Rotarians, we have been making up frequently at meetings of the local Rotary Club, and have met some very nice people and made useful contacts.

We will be packing up here in a couple of weeks, spending a short time in Athens, and then flying back to Cape Town for a few months of summer there. We still have our house in Vermont, on the coast outside of Hermanus, but it is let out at the moment, so I guess we will be itinerant for a while, until we return to Greece in February or March next year.

Finally, we have put together an on-line photo album on the web, which you can visit to get a visual impression of where we are, and what we’re doing. The URL is:

If you would like to be on an email list of regular news from us (sometimes), send us an email and I’ll include you.

Lots of love to you all