In my 20s I travelled to Cyprus to meet a Colombian girl who promised to meet me there.
I spent a week living in a cheap hotel before I was thrown out because my wallet was empty.
Then I spent another week living on the beach eating stolen figs and reading The Iliad before she eventually turned up looking nonchalant and beautiful and mysterious.
We spent a magical week together visiting ancient ruins, including a temple dedicated to Apollo and built in the eighth century BCE.
There was nobody there.
It had no car park, no toilets and not even a McDonald’s.
I sat among the sun-baked stones and thought about Apollo, the god of light, while looking into my girlfriend’s mysterious brown eyes.
Would I do that today?
Probably not.
My supply of mysterious women has dwindled to a septuagenarian gardener who grows weird tomato varieties.
But I do still like a bit of an adventure.
So we decided on a winter break in the Yarra Ranges, where I’d been told the grapes grow like Cypriot figs, wild and intoxicating.
The day before we left, we watched Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster film The Odyssey starring Matt Damon as the tortured, wily hero Odysseus who spends 10 years trying to get home after a big adventure which destroyed a civilization and killed most of his friends.
Of course, our trip to the Yarra Ranges was nothing like Odysseus’ journey.
We didn’t have to outwit a man-eating cyclops or escape a race of angry giants or a six-headed monster or a raging whirlpool.
Nevertheless we did have to negotiate a whirlpool of twisty forest roads packed with giant angry trucks trying to push us into the woods.
When we got to our holiday cottage, I had to battle a terrifying old wood heater that burnt my fingers and ate logs and refused to throw out any heat because it had no fan.
Next came a confusing array of wall switches which promised light and comfort, but which were impossible to find at night in the freezing dark.
On the way home, we were nearly swallowed whole by a hundred-headed fog monster which chased us all the way to Seymour.
It was only three days, but it felt like 10 years since I’d seen Ithaca with its grand verandah and verdant waterlogged bushland.
I realised that Homer’s Odyssey is not really about Odysseus and his monsters.
It’s not even about swords and ships and helmets.
It’s about me and you and the journey we are all on, however big or small, to find ourselves and the things we truly love despite getting knocked off-course by things we encounter.
The monsters in Homer’s Odyssey are not real monsters; they are the things inside us and out in the world we have to fight to stay on our own path.
The distractions, the setbacks, the failures, the ugliness and the ignorance we face every day.
Finally, The Odyssey is about the changes we all have to undergo to get back to our own Ithaca.
I’m already planning my next adventure.
Mt Major is looking good.
John Lewis is a former reporter at The News.
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