After fleeing the nutter, I explored an area I’d heard was cool – Plaka. It may well have been cool in parts, but the bit I saw of it looked a bit touristy – lots of shops selling little statues of Athena and blue ‘evil eye’ talismans. Plenty of cocks too, for some reason – wooden bottle openers shaped like dicks – and T-shirts with Socrates wearing sunglasses.

Before leaving, Estelle had told me of an interesting neighbourhood she’d found named Anafiótika. ‘It feels a bit like you’re walking into people’s houses,’ she’d said. ‘It’s very strange and beautiful’. I’d read about it in an article before flying out actually; the internet showed quaint, sleepy streets, all tiered and white like Santorini – not that I’ve ever been – with gnarled orange trees and painted blue doorsteps.

I followed my map there. There’s no real entry point to the windy corridors of Anafiótika – you just pick an arbitrary sidestreet and duck off the main path; the sound of the streets drops away quickly as you navigate the pretty white alleys. It’s not a very big area – the whole place covers a couple of hundred square metres. Walking as the crow flies you could cross it in half a minute, but the twists and turns and higgledy-piggledy steps create the illusion of wandering deep into a strange and beautiful warren.

That said – it really does feel like you’re walking into people’s houses, mostly because you essentially are: the turns within the network of alleys are so hidden by vines and nooks and sun-dappled shade that it’s easy to think you’ve accidentally wandered into someone’s private garden, rather than a public walkway. It was not the sort of thoroughfare that would cope well with a lot of foot traffic, and I found myself wondering which guidebook or influencer had recently put the place on the map – and whether they ought not have. It’s the same old problem across the travel industry: someone finds a cool place, they tell all and sundry about it to make a fast buck, and the world flocks in to take their chunk of the beauty, thereby ruining it for the locals and throttling what made it so charming in the first place. I’d bet my left shoe that ten years ago the locals of Anafiótika saw at most one tourist per day.

I watched an unshaved old man exit one little white cottage and shuffle across the narrow street to enter another door – presumably he owned both – locking the door after him from the inside. I felt guilty at the sight; this didn’t seem like the kind of area people would have had to lock their doors historically, and I could only presume this was a learned behaviour after one too many roving visitors had poked their heads inside for a quick look.

Hurrying along the alleys seeking to finish up my tour quickly and get out of the local’s hair, I turned a corner and bumped into a blonde, middle-aged woman. I smiled a hello, and she stopped to chat to me in the shade of a lemon tree, in a courtyard the size of a ping pong table.

“Oh my god,” she said – she was English. “I’ve been lost for ages. Isn’t this place amazing?”

I told her it was.

“You know, if you’re looking for something fantastic, I really recommend continuing up the hill,” she said. She sounded well-educated, and had a bright-eyed and slightly breathless look to her. “It takes you up and to the right. Most people turn back near the top – but don’t. If you follow it, you can walk along the secret slopes of the Acropolis. I’ve just been up there. There’s a little spring – the ancient people of Athens used to drink from it and use it as their main water source. And further along you can see the caves where the native Greeks thousands of years ago first lived, before the city was built. There’s nobody up there at all. Oh my god, honestly, I can’t believe I just found that. I’m still stunned. All this wild grass growing and little pink flowers, and this great cave mouth – I felt like a nymph, like I had travelled back in time six thousand years to see the dawn of civilisation.”

This is an abridged version of what she said: we stood for about 15 minutes and I said about three words. I found her flustered, unabashed enthusiasm quite charming. She was clearly reeling from the same genre of semi-holy revelation I’d experienced earlier in the day. I suppose the Acropolis is just that sort of place, if you’re a sensitive sort.

Promising her I’d follow her guidance and seek out the mystical caves, I set off up the hill filled with gleeful curiosity and sudden passion – and got immediately lost. There was a fence in the way, a big metal one, and she hadn’t looked the sort to either climb over or slither under. Her directions had been vague –  ‘go up and right’ – but this was quite obviously impossible, and I soon found myself confusedly travelling down and left. A few minutes later, I was right back where I started. What on earth had she been on about – secret slopes?

Quietly cursing the happy woman for leading me astray, I followed the road past Anafiótika, and soon found it led me right back to the Acropolis entrance. With it being free for the day, I was able to re-enter on the same ticket and cut across the entrance path to veer off across the northern slopes. It was close to closing time; there was nobody around. As I followed the path up, a man in sunglasses stepped out of a guard hut.

“You can go up,” he said, smiling, “but we close this area at three. You go five minutes, you come back.”

I checked my phone: 14:52. Enough time to find the mystical caves, I hoped. The security man’s warning seemed to imply I’d be locked in if I wasn’t back in time.

I found the spring early along the path – I’d been expecting a gushing magical torrent – but it had long since dried up, and was now… well, a spring without water is just a hole, isn’t it. With only six minutes remaining until I was bolted shut in the ruin for the night, and no sign of anything remotely cavelike ahead of me, I began to run: shambling along with my backpack, hateful and muttering breathlessly to myself while, to my left, the endless white rooftops of Athens swept away to the horizon.

“Bloody… stupid… hippy… making me set off to find… stupid… magic… cave. Why do I listen to… every lunatic who… crosses my bloody…. path.”

Anyway, I found the cave eventually: right at the furthest end of the slope path. I didn’t have time to do my usual ‘stand still and imagine things until it registers on an emotional level’ trick, however; after 30 seconds of staring at it, I had to run straight back to the entrance again – uphill this time. I didn’t get to think many thoughts in those 30 seconds. I didn’t really know enough about it, to be honest – I hadn’t known the cave existed until 20 minutes prior, nor that ancient people many thousands years older than the Greek empire had inhabited the site. I pictured people living in the cave – the benefactors of an entire civilisation – but I didn’t have any real points of reference to make it come alive. I didn’t know what they’d have looked like, how they’d have dressed, or anything, really, other than that people slept in those caves once, a long time ago. In retrospect it’s actually still very cool – I’d love to go back armed with a guidebook – but at the time I was more worried about not getting locked in and having to sleep on the boulders amongst the stray cats.

It was a shame; I’d been hoping to experience some hair-blowing–back moment of euphoria in a similar way to the starry-eyed woman I’d met – but of course it doesn’t work that way. You can’t piggy-back someone else’s transcendence.

*****

I ate a weird kebab thing in a restaurant with a glass of beer, then went back to the hostel for a nap. At 6pm I went to the hostel rooftop to watch the sunset. After a while sat alone, a young Asian guy passed me. I said hi and invited him to join me – his name was Alan, and he was a 23-year-old American on his first trip outside the States post-college.

I liked Alan, and felt relaxed around him quickly. His turn of phrase at certain points reminded me of Annie, and I found I could veer between crass and serious with him easily – he got my jokes. He’d visited Portugal, Spain, France and Italy, and Athens was his final stop before flying home after 2 months away. In Italy, he told me, he’d worked with his uncle at the Olympics, trading pins.

“Pins?” I said, baffled.

“Yeah dude. There’s big money in it.”

“Like… a badge pin?”

“Yeah. You can get collectors’ ones with, like, Snoop Dogg on them and stuff.”

I’d never seen anybody wearing a pin. Who wore pins?

“And you don’t sell them, but rather you…”

“Trade them, yeah. For other pins. Because we didn’t have a license to sell them for money at the Olympics, but trading is legal. Then you sell them when you get home.”

“And… wait, so… members of the public carry pins with them, on the off chance they find somebody to trade with?”

“Yeah dude. Honestly, it’s a big niche.”

“Pin-heads.”

“Yeah.”

I looked at the horizon, perplexed.

“So, why… how did your uncle get into pin trading?”

“Him and his buddies went to an estate sale. They found this collection of 1.2 million pins, and they pooled their money and bought them all. They sell them online. And every time it’s the Olympics, they go and trade them. It pays for the whole trip.”

I laughed.

“Many ways to make a living.”

“Here,” said Alan, opening his backpack and handing me a dozen ornate metal pins. “Take a few. I don’t need them anymore. But don’t take the airplane ones. I give them to the staff when I take a flight, and they always love me after that.”

This is what I like about hostels, you see: weirdness. Olympic pin trading?! I’ve been in London for so long now, where everyone works in either media or finance, that I’d forgotten these career paths weren’t the norm for most people on the planet. And, as an office worker deeply unsure whether he wants his future to lie in office work, it gives me real hope. I’d like to run my own business one day – I just don’t know what, or when, or where. But such stories lift my spirits. Opportunity presents itself in all sorts of ways.

We drank three or four beers on the rooftop, discussing everything from marriage to mental health. I spoke a little about my concern at being 32 – whether it made me too old for the things I still enjoy. Alan was very sweet about it; he told me I seemed much younger, that if he’d had to guess my age, he’d have said late twenties – rather arbitrary, but it made me smile. We spoke about Alan’s education, and he told me of the pressure commonly put on children by Asian parents. He’d recently gotten engaged – so young! – and when I talked about my own romantic life (or rather, lack of) he questioned whether he was missing out on something by settling down so early. I laughed at this. Trust me, I told him, feeling the familiar ache somewhere in my chest: if you’ve found someone you love, and you’re happy together, you are most definitely not missing out. Hang onto her.

It was a lovely conservation – and I felt warm to remember how conducive this type of living and environment is to friendship. A sunset, an empty schedule, a couple of drinks, a sense of wonder and a city below – that’s all it took. So simple, so fulfilling – and yet so bafflingly hard to find at home. There are hostels in London too, of course, but I can’t exactly go skulking around looking for deep chats. But where else are people so breezy, so sincere, so completely and utterly open? Sometimes I look at strangers on the Underground to whom I will never speak, would never dream of approaching, and I think about how, if we checked into the same dorm in a hostel, it’d be a different story. We’d be friends. People transform on holiday – and how frustrating it is to know that we’ve all got that inside us, the capacity for it. Our environment dictates our warmth. You can rally against it, of course – bring that breezy holiday spirit back home with you – but it always seems to simmer down eventually. You’ve got to go away again to get topped up.

After a couple of hours we went downstairs and played Uno with some Americans. There was karaoke on, and Alan sang Come Together by the Beatles (very well, I must say), and I, quite drunk and excitable by now, hugged him after shouting ‘my boy!’ Later on, after a lot of dancing and carousing, the hostel emptied as people headed out to a club. I got swept along in it, not wanting to seem a bore. We crossed the city in a rabble, coming to a stop outside a giant boxy building in an industrial area called ‘Beat’ or ‘Pace’ or something silly. At the back of the snaking queue, with Alan and a Finnish girl we’d met named Emilia, we took stock.

“So… I guess we’re going in then,” said Emilia.

“Yeah… this queue’s pretty long,” said Alan.

In the end I decided to call it.

“To be honest, I can’t think of anything worse. Do you guys want to get food?”

The relief was immediate and palpable – “Yes!” – and we left the queue and wandered back across the city, weaving between high-rise flats and ancient ruins on our homeward hunt for gyros.