On an October morning warm enough to signal that we were in the stretch of fine weather that the Greeks call the Little Summer of St. Demetrius, I was sitting at a table beside the blue Aegean with a taverna owner who assured me I was crazy.

Why, he wanted to know, would I travel all the way to Astip¿laia, one of the least visited islands in Greece, and stay only a few hours?

"You come here, you need to stay weeks," he said, speaking the English he had learned, among other places, in what he claimed was his favorite American locale, Boston's now defunct adult entertainment district known as the Combat Zone.

I said that normally I would agree with him. But I couldn't stay because I, like Ulysses, was on an odyssey. I had come to Greece with a plan, a plan that required me to pick up my bag at the sound of every ferryboat whistle.

Actually the plan was a classic example of what happens when some people are left alone for too long with a good map. The map was Baedekers Greek Islands, and it showed that 62 of those islands could be reached by ferryboat. The idea that came to mind was simply to get on the first ferryboat that came along. And then the next, and the next.

I knew from the beginning I would not be able to visit all 62 islands. The one flaw in my plan was that while Ulysses had been able to convince his wife he'd needed ten years for pretty much the same odyssey, my wife made it clear that the most she would let me get away with was a month.

I did hope to visit more than 30 islands, some for two or three days until the next boat came, some for only the quarter of an hour the boat I was aboard touched at the landing. And when I reached my final island, which I hoped would be Ithaca, where Ulysses (or Odysseus to the Greeks) had returned home after his odyssey, I was convinced I would feel that I, too, had completed one of the ultimate island-hopping adventures.

The journey had begun in Piraeus, the main Athens port for ferryboats to the islands. Guidebooks almost universally describe Piraeus as a dirty and unpleasant place. And I suppose it is, especially if you have no particular appreciation for stores whose grimy display windows feature only such items as ship's fire extinguishers, or if you feel uncomfortable buying a newspaper from a kiosk that also sells John Wayne Sands of Iwo Jima commemorative survival knives.

I, on the other hand, liked Piraeus. And not just because my interest in maritime art led me to its naval museum, whose 13,000 exhibits include what is undoubtedly the world's largest collection of paintings depicting Greece's age-old enemy, the Turks, getting the worst of it in sea battles.

I liked the block after block of waterfront ticket agencies, each with a magic-carpet display board listing island destinations and departure times. I liked the tavernas and the fast-food joints, virtually all filled with young backpackers who were studying maps and guidebooks and listening intently to such freely offered advice as, "You've got to get to Ios. It's the party island."

What I liked best, though, was my hotel, a run-down, side-street establishment close enough to the harbor so that from my room I could often hear, over the ever-present din of motorbikes, the sound of ferryboat whistles. And it somehow added to my adventure to know that in the hotel's semi-dark lobby I could always count on finding a group of silent, rough-looking men watching a subtitled videotape of the American soap opera, "The Bold and the Beautiful."

I was less happy with my first look at the ferryboats. Modern, sturdy, not one of them appeared to be either so old or so poorly maintained that simply to ride it promised an adventure.

However, I did have some hope for the first one I rode on, the Kimolos. One of the waterfront ticket agents had assured me the Kimolos was one of the oldest of the more than 200 ferries that ply Greek waters. My hopes soared even higher when, as we pulled away from the quay late on a sunny but hazy afternoon, I noticed that more than one of the Greeks among my fellow passengers were making the sign of the cross, as if they might know something about the ferry that I and the horde of German backpackers didn't.

But in the end, I found it hard to accept that a boat built in the early 1960s - making it more than a decade younger than I am - falls into the category of interestingly ancient.

Except for the abundance of hanging plants that made its bridge look more like a greenhouse than a pilothouse, the Kimolos was typical of the many ferries I traveled aboard during the next month. Built in Holland, originally for English Channel service, it was a mass of white-painted steel 288 feet long and 4 decks high. It could carry up to 1,300 passengers and 140 vehicles, and in the summer it often did.

At landings the Kimolos simultaneously boarded and discharged passengers, motorcycles, automobiles, trucks, and, on occasion, entire fleets of tour buses through a single ramp in the stern. Which meant that in the 15 or so minutes the boat might remain backed up to the landing, the passengers who were not getting off could line the stern rails of the upper decks and look down on a spectator sport similar in some respects to football, except that the team on offense got to use vehicles.

The Kimolos and the other ferries I traveled aboard were a far cry from the vessels that floated through my original imaginings of Greek island-hopping. Those had been the rusty steamers that, in reality, are used almost exclusively in foreign commerce, and ca¿ques, the small wooden sailboats that were once the lifeblood of Greek interisland travel but are now used mostly for fishing and tourist excursions. Yet I discovered that Greek ferryboats, despite their generally unromantic appearance, do have much to recommend them.

For one thing, ferryboats allow a traveler to be wonderfully free of the tyranny associated with air transport. Unlike an airplane, a Greek ferryboat always seems to have room, even if, as happens in the madness of July and August, passengers sometimes get crowded into the bow and stern areas usually reserved for the heavy gear and machinery associated with docking and anchoring.

And tickets (whose prices are monitored by the government) cost pretty much the same no matter when or where you buy them. You can even buy them on board after departure, which meant that on Sk¿athos, for example, I didn't have to commit to going until just before the distance between the ferry landing and the boat's stern ramp became greater than I could jump.

And like most of the essentials of Greek island life - such as Greek coffee, souvlakia, and a room within walking distance of a beach - ferryboat tickets are cheap. So cheap, that if you start out for one island, and another island along the way suddenly catches your fancy, you can step ashore with no sense of guilt.

But the greatest advantage of a Greek ferryboat is that no other form of transportation is more ideally suited for adventures in conversation. What better opening gambit could there be, as you glide along through a Mediterranean blue sea, than, "Excuse me, but do you know the name of that island?"

It was a line I got to use often, because the one constant of a journey aboard a Greek ferryboat is islands.

From Piraeus, I hopscotched down the western side of the Cyclades, down to Santorini and An¿fi (whose parched brown hillsides and whitewashed, blue-domed churches help form the vision most tourists have of a Greek island), and then to Crete.

After two days on Crete, I journeyed east (via K¿sos, K¿rpathos, and Kh¿lki) to Rhodes, where, because of some oddball customs regulation, an incredible number of shops are devoted to the selling of umbrellas. From there I went even farther east to the almost forgotten (even by the Greeks) island of Kastell¿rizon, whose couple hundred residents take pride in the fact that they are the easternmost community in Europe.

I spent three days on Kastell¿rizon, my longest stay anywhere, because that's what the ferryboat schedule dictated. My stay included a brief, illegal voyage by c¿ique to the town of K¿as on the Turkish mainland, which was so close that the residents of the two nations can almost wave or thumb their noses at one another, depending on the political climate of the moment.

From Kastell¿rizon I headed north and west back to Rhodes and through the Turkish-influenced Dodecanese, then across to Astip¿laia and back up the eastern side of the Cyclades (stopping a second time at Ios) to Athens.

From there, I took a bus north to the mainland port of V¿los (near where Jason and the Argonauts set out in quest of the Golden Fleece), then a ferry out to Sk¿athos in the Northern Sporades, where I somehow missed, I later learned, what is said to be the best nude beach in the Greek islands.

I went back twice more to Athens, a city whose only redeeming social value is that it allowed me to add to my collection of foreign-language McDonald's place mats, and from there to the Saronic Gulf island of Aegina, which for my taste is way too popular with day-tripping package tourists who want to "do a Greek island."

Then, after a ride west to the port of Patras aboard a train that induced me to daydream about throttling Paul Theroux, I crossed the water to Cephalonia and, finally - my 32nd

island in 32 days - olive green Ithaca, where, in its Cornwall-like harbor at Vath¿, on a pine-clad islet that used to be a prison, I saw a sign in English and Greek that read: "Every traveler is a citizen of Ithaca."

While standing at one rail or another, with at least a handful of Greece's more than 2,000 islands and islets almost always around the horizon, I had conversations that numbered in the hundreds, ranging through every topic from why Greek plumbing is so bad to what America might have become with Michael Dukakis as president.

One of the first people I talked to was a second officer, who opined that the biggest drawback to working on a passenger ferry, especially in the summer months, was that it carried passengers. The worst passenger he could recall was a man who barreled his way into the pilothouse (which is off-limits to all passengers but those the crew find interesting to talk to) and demanded that the company compensate him for the physical and psychological damage done when another passenger got seasick all over his new suit.

Aboard the Milos Express, which I took from S¿fnos to Fol¿gandros in the Cyclades, I talked to a Dutch woman who explained to me, while she rolled what looked like a small brown cigar, that Greece is an excellent country for neophyte travelers, even solitary females, because the basic honesty of the people allowed one to make all the neophyte traveler's mistakes without getting into very much trouble.

"But the problem for people traveling alone," she said, as we gazed out at M¿los, where the famous classical statue of Venus de Milo was found in the early 19th century, "is that Greek islands were made for people in love."

Bound from Crete to Rhodes aboard the Rodanthi, I learned from theschoolteacher who stood next to me while we were tied up at K¿rpathos that the black-clad ladies on the landing were moaning and flailing their arms about because "the man is finished." The explanation became clear enough when a pickup truck bounced down the boat's stern ramp with a coffin in the back.

Aboard the smallish Nissos Kalimnos, while watching dolphins play between S¿mi and T¿los, I talked with a Greek Australian who had visited his parent's birthplace with the thought of returning there himself. But he'd already decided to return to Australia, he said, after witnessing on an Athens street what his cousin described as a typical Greek moment: two men, strangers about 50 years old, fist-fighting and head-butting in an argument over a parking space.

Between N¿xos and Ios, as the first officer of the Ios Express skimmed us so close to a wicked-looking clump of rocks that I imagined he must be determined to show it wasn't fear that got him assigned to such an insignificant boat, I fell into a conversation with a newly wed Canadian couple about the effect the fear of terrorism has had on travel to Greece.

"It does seem to keep people away," the husband said. "But what they don't understand is that they are infinitely more likely to suffer bodily harm here from a motorbike accident."

As the big, 2,000-passenger Superferry strained against its stern lines at the landing at T¿nos, holiest of all Greek islands, I communicated just fine with a young man, with whom I exchanged no words, about the vast numbers of worshipers, mostly older women dressed in black, making a weekend pilgrimage to T¿nos from the Athens back-door port of Raf¿na. All of them, it seemed, on the Sunday afternoon I arrived, wanted to get home on my ferry.

As I watched from the stern rail on the third deck, I could see that so many of the devout ladies were pressing against a near-to-buckling barricade that the ship's crew were letting them on in groups. When the gate in the barricade was opened, the pilgrims - many of them laboring under the weight of shopping bags overflowing with replica icons, plastic holy water bottles, and fire-hydrant-size sticks of incense - rushed toward the ferry in a turmoil of pushing and shoving that made me speculate they must be strong in their belief that God helps those who help themselves.

I thought that, perhaps, I alone was thinking unkind thoughts about the scrambling ladies, when I happened to catch the eye of the young man who was standing a few feet down the rail from me. Nodding at the thick crowd below us, where the half dozen speediest members of a newly released wave appeared as if they were going to reach the stern ramp in a dead heat, he turned to me and started making race-car sounds. I acknowledged his humor with a smile.

As we rolled from Athens toward Aegina aboard the landing-craft type ferry Athaia on a day that was too rough for the hydrofoils to run, I was enlightened by a group of schoolboys who explained to me that the best thing about U.S. automobiles was their ability to withstand the rigors of high-speed car chases.

On a smoky afternoon aboard the Myrtos in the Ionian Sea, I asked a young Greek woman the name of the high green island we were headed for. She answered, "The best island, Cephalonia, where I am from." The island apparently wasn't so fine that she was in any hurry to return there permanently from her job in Athens as a gymnastics instructor, however. "On island, the thinking is old," she said. "In Athens it is new."

There were times, too, when by choice I talked with no one. Instead, I would stand by the rail, marveling at the indigo blue water, the ancient brown islands, the unfailingly cloudless sky, and - until the end of September, when most of the tourists disappeared - the rows of young girls sunning themselves on the upper deck.

Of course, I did not do all my marveling and conversational adventuring from the rail of a ferryboat. There were also the tables at the tavernas by the sea. There is no real need, I discovered, to go in search of good stories on a Greek island. Sit long enough at the taverna nearest the ferry landing, sip enough coffee or retsina or ouzo, and sooner or later the good stories will come to you.

On Fol¿gandros, while sipping a metrio, a half-the-sugar version of sweet, sludgelike Greek coffee, served (thank God for small favors) in tiny cups, I listened for a long time to a hotel owner talk about how the island's lack of sheeps was hurting tourism. You can imagine my relief when it finally dawned on me that he was trying to explain a lack of ferryboats.

On Crete, while savoring the licorice taste of an ouzo, I watched a young boy beating an octopus on the harbor seawall. I was fascinated to learn from a waiter that when the boy had tenderized the octopus enough, by whacking it about a hundred times, it would be ready to sell to a taverna, probably the very one I was sitting in.

And on barren, butterfly-shaped Astip¿laia, I drank a half-bottle of retsina, renowned for having a flavor distinctly similar to that of turpentine, while a bartender told me his troubles. The bartender, whose name was Yannis, the Greek equivalent of John, said he had been trained as a mathematics teacher but was serving drinks because it paid better.

"But this job, I do not love it,"

he said. "When I am working, I am not Yannis, I am actor."

What did he want to do? Go back to teaching mathematics?

"No, I like to learn the saxophone."

On Ithaca, where I was served the instant coffee that regardless of brand is known in Greece as Nescaf¿, I struck up a conversation with a taxi driver, Lambros Maroulis. He in turn introduced me to an elderly widow who lived next door to his mother. After hearing, through Maroulis, the story of the woman's life (which included being abandoned by her father when he went to Australia seeking work in the 1930s), I asked if she would mind telling me how old she was.

"She says she is 67," Maroulis said. "And she says she does not mind telling you at all, because she is not looking to get married again."

And if you think that adventures in conversation, either at a waterfront taverna or the rail of a ferryboat, are pretty tame stuff compared to the kind of adventure travel that can bring you face-to-face with situations involving actual physical risk, let me tell you just one more story - about the two hookers I met on Andros.

While waiting for a boat, I'd settled in at a taverna for an afternoon frapp¿, the iced coffee in a tall glass that is the drink of choice in Greece for budget-minded people-watchers because it tastes so bad you have no trouble keeping it half-finished in front of you for hours on end. Not quite by accident, the table I chose was near two Greek-speaking women who were dressed in such low-cut blouses that other women were clicking their tongues in disapproval, and men were walking by on their tiptoes.

I won't give you the details of how I eventually ended up at their table, or what they said they did for a living, or why the one who spoke English, a brunette-turned-redhead named Mirela, put her hand on my knee for what seemed like the entire length of the earth's most recent period of global warming.

But I will admit that when Mirela said both she and the other woman, a brunette-turned-blonde named Elena, had something personal they wanted to ask me, I became very uncomfortable. It seemed that if I weren't careful I might find myself in the middle of a travel adventure that for physical risk ranked right up there with the time a drug-addled policeman marched me off at gunpoint to a North African jail.

As Elena watched me intently, and Mirela gave my knee an extra squeeze, and I sweated under the Aegean sun, here's what they asked: "What do you think of Bill Clinton?"

Luckily, just then, I heard a ferryboat whistle blow.