Drunken Brits find sun, sex and ... sex

By BRONWYN SELL

LONDON - Vast white beaches, a turquoise sea and 28C make the Greek resort of Faliraki a paradise only a four-hour flight from London.

But the thousands of young Brit holidaymakers aren't there just for the sun. In fact they could easily miss it as they stumble straight from the clubs to their beds (or someone else's bed) and back.

It's at night that this place comes alive, with mini-skirted and cleavage-popping Essex girls and Manchester lads so drunk they can barely lurch from bar stool to toilet.

As young Englishman Chris Jones staggers along Pub Street, swathed in red and white and grabbing at tanned girls on the way, he tells a reporter that the attraction of Faliraki is simple.

"I'm here for the birds and the booze. I've only been here for three days and I've already had sex with two girls."

Police on the island of Rhodes are sick of the hedonistic excesses of the Brits and are cracking down on their sex and alcohol-fuelled antics.

They have arrested more than a dozen British revellers in the last fortnight for lewd behaviour and drug offences - a record for the town which not long ago was considered sleepy.

Even baring buttocks can end in jail - as six English lads, aged 19 to 24, found out last week. They now face the choice of a £710 ($2225) fine or four months in jail. Another was landed with a £400 fine.

More seriously, the British Foreign Office is warning young British girls travelling to the island to be careful, as the number of reported rapes of tourists increases.

Date rape drugs have been suspected in some cases but police are also concerned about the cheap - or often free - drinks offered by the local bars to teenagers who can't always handle them. Perhaps the biggest drinking problem stems from the famous fish bowls of Faliraki, huge plastic containers filled with alcoholic punch, which groups drink with straws.

In one case, a 20-year-old from Scotland said she was raped by a middle-aged Greek taxi driver who suggested she give him sex in return for a taxi ride.

She told police she had been too drunk to resist.

British journalists who have flown to Faliraki in the last week to report on the hedonism tell of scantily clad girls lying barely conscious on the streets at night, wearing tiny T-shirts with slogans such as "Easy Emma" and "Raunchy Rachel".

Cathy Panteli, who runs Kelly's Irish Bar on Club St, said holiday representatives did not always watch out for their young clients.

"For many of these young kids, it's their first time abroad without their parents and they should be better protected. In the past I've seen girls so drunk that they end up naked on the ground all alone."

But Kerry from Doncaster told the BBC the "loud and leery" English lads were worse. "Everyone's saying stay away from the Greeks, but to me the Greeks have been really friendly and really nice, and I'd feel safer locked in a room with a Greek man than I would with an English guy."

The island has become as popular as the British clubbing mecca Ibiza, in Spain. More than 300,000 British tourists making up 80 to 90 per cent of the visitors are expected to take up cheap packages to Faliraki this northern summer. The average age is about 18.

It's a 30 per cent increase, and it's being credited or blamed on a fly-on-the-wall television series filmed on the island and screened in Britain. The programme, Club Reps, showed vomiting teenagers, public sex, brawls and semi-naked hordes of Brits and the holiday business boomed with people believing their airline ticket was also a passage to free and plentiful sex.

One slurring young British man in a club in the resort said he was behaving just as he would at home, but that the climate was better and the girls were wearing fewer clothes.

BBC correspondent Johnny Diamond, in Rhodes, said the behaviour was perhaps more shocking because it was incongruous with the streets of a small Greek town.

"There's certainly a lot of crude and lewd behaviour here, but it's nothing more than you'd see in the average British town centre on a Saturday night."

One of the men arrested for showing his buttocks said the police were too heavy-handed. Simon Topp, aged 20, and several other men pulled down their trousers to welcome a new coachload of British tourists to the resort town.

"The next thing I knew, I was grabbed by three Greek policemen, handcuffed and put in the back of a car. I was taken to a police station, blindfolded with my own necklace and verbally abused by the police, after which I was held in a filthy cell without food, or even water, for more than 12 hours."

However, Donald Holder, consul at the British Embassy in Athens, sympathised with the police and was supportive of the crackdown. "There has been some bad behaviour in Faliraki and it's not unreasonable that the police are taking a firm line."

Panos Argyros, director of the Greek National Tourist Office, is trying to be diplomatic - the young Brits, after all, bring millions of pounds into the country.

"Young people go abroad, they have a drink, they want to have fun, I understand all these things. But they have to behave a little bit, to respect the customs of the area and they have to ... just not cause problems."

Topp, the bottom-barer, has now repented. Back home in Surrey, he said he understood the reasons for the police crackdown.

"I think Faliraki has been portrayed as somewhere for louts to just go and get drunk and behave very poorly.

"The lessons from my experience are when abroad behave as well, if not better, than you would at home, and other countries have different values in matters of taste and decency. Let my experience be a lesson to all other young tourists."