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Overnight in Bodrum, our last night aboard the Aegean Clipper, after which Elaine and I spent another day in the town, among other things visiting the castle and its marine archaeology museums again. We also watched the Clipper refuelled with, reflecting on the carbon footprint of the entire enterprise.

We had been forced to stay over because we hadn’t been able to get an earlier flight. When, later in the day, we go to get our bags – whose custodian has vanished – we are saved by Peter Sommer himself, who we had met earlier in the day. When we get out to the airport, it is to find that our EasyJet flight has been cancelled. Elaine had turned her phone off for the trip, so the news had failed to get through to us.

A real problem, since I have to be back in London for a series of sessions, one in Helsinki in two days. Our travel agent achieved a miracle, finding us a different flight – but there was a slight wrinkle, It was from Dalaman, 170 kilometres away.

So, despite the protests of the information lady at the airport, I decided to get a taxi to take us there. We found a suitable driver and headed off into the night, catching another EasyJet flight that gets us into Gatwick in the very early hours of Monday.

Overall, though, an utterly wonderful trip – and the perfect introduction to the Dodecanese region. The fact that I would test positive Covid shortly after getting home, despite three vaccinations, and Elaine a week later, despite four vaccinations, is another story entirely.

It’s quite some time since we were last in Knidos, back in 2014. and when we got back to London we made a beeline to the British Museum to visit the missing Lion.

The site has evolved substantially since we visited last. The city flourished in Greek and Roman times, closely surrounded by the islands of Kos, Nisyros and Tilos.

In the afternoon, we sailed back to Bodrum, standing offshore for some time before our captain could find a suitable final berth, under the castle walls.

Symi proved to be delightful – its better preserved bits showing evidence of considerable past concentrations of wealth, but with a surprising number of buildings in various stages of dereliction. was struck here, once again, by the way that rackety scooters and motorbikes weave their way through people on the waterfront, and alongside the restaurants at night. Am sure this traffic has its charms for some, and is no doubt necessary, but would gladly do without the noise and risk to limb, if not life.

Meanwhile, keep plowing through books. In addition to Merlin, the story of the Rolls-Royce Merlin engine, books I have read during the trip include: Omar al Akkad’s What Strange Paradise; Mick Heron’s Bad Actors; Hervé Le Tellier’s The Anomaly; and Stephen Ambrose’s The Wild Blue, about the American B-24 crews in WW2, which I bought at the wonderful Le Flaneur rare book shop in Datça – where we went to have our passports stamped for entry back into Turkey.

Two books I have also been nibbling at are Ian Morris’s Geography Is Destiny and Antony Beevor’s Russia: Revolution and Civil War, 1917-1921. And then two other members of the group passed on books they had read on the trip: Barbara Gowdy’s The White Bone, a novel written from the point of view of elephants, and David Davis’s One River, an exploration of the medicinal plants and hallucinogens of Amazonia.

Then we sailed on to Knidos this evening.

I was last in Rhodes in 1959, the largest of the Dodecanese Islands, as the Elkington family returned home from our tour in Cyprus. What I remembered most were the huge fortifications and the stack of stone cannonballs. Nor did they disappoint as I had imagined they might, partly because the giant tour ships have been pushed away from the harbour, so they don’t dwarf what were equally gigantic constructions in their own day.

The scale of the tourist industry beyond the Old Town beggars belief, as we saw as we sailed in along the coast. A useful summary of relevant history of the Old Town can be found here. Elaine and I found a wonderful restaurant – the Café Auvergne – at the foot of the Street of the Knights. Highly recommended.

We were introduced to the ruins of Our Lady of the Castle, a rare Gothic church in the region, to pebble mosaics, and to some of the extraordinary defensive architecture created by the Crusader Knights. The palace of the Grand Masters is stunning, though owing a good deal to the rebuilding – and ambitions – of the Italian occupation forces in the 1930s. First time I think I had seen the dating series tracking time from the founding of the Fascist state.

At the end of our second day in Rhodes, we head for Symi, a neoclassical port town whose pastel-coloured buildings tumble down the hills on either side of its bay.

Spectacular panoramic views – including across to Rhodes – from an eyrie tracking back to the Knights of St John. The large settlement beneath the castle was apparently tucked away there to hide it from pirates. Delicious lunch by the harbour front. Struck again by hard the Covid-related lockdowns have hit tourism across the region.

One highlight of the visit: the pygmy police cars that seem to have followed the same evolutionary curve as the pygmy elephants of nearby Tilos. Then across to Rhodes.