As predicted, it's taken me ages to get to the third and final installment of my Greece photos [
post 1,
post 2], but here it is! We start this last third of the trip in Dimitsana, yet another incredibly charming mountain town. Greece was nothing if not charming. But first, as always, my favorite image from the set. You'll hear more about Mystras below.
I left off in the also-charming also-mountain town of Kalavrita, on Christmas Day. When we got back down the mountain, we hopped in the car and took the ride over to Olympia, where we stayed at the very hospitable
Hotel Pelops (highly recommend!). But it was Christmas Day, and everything was closed. Likewise December 26, which is also a holiday in Greece. Our hotelier suggested/basically told us we must drive around the nearby mountains to see the towns of Dimitsana, Stemnitsa and Andritsena.
These were very lovely places, but the incredibly windy, narrow roads to get there were downright terrifying. When driving through town, there was often just enough space for our tiny Panda to get between the sheer-cliff-dropoff on one side and the ancient-stone-cottage on the other. Not to mention hoards of Greek tourists and insanely fast-driving Greek motorists attempting to access the same roads. This was pretty much our experience with Greek mountain roads generally - they are all insane. Greek driving is insane. But we lived!
The aforementioned Greek tourist crowds. Greeks flock to the mountains for Christmas, it would seem.
The Christmas holidays complete and having spent two nights in Olympia but not actually visiting the site, we finally made it to the very atmospheric and interesting Historic Olympia. Let me again plug Rick Steeves, who does a brilliant job of making history accessible and engaging. Most of these sites are pretty piles of stones without the background provided by a good guidebook. It's a must - the signs around the sites are generally not that informative and almost universally boring. Here's George making like a discus thrower.
Some helpful Australian tourists asked for their photo in this spot, so we did a swaparoo. I don't know why George insists on doing that weird hand thing. We stand together all the time and never do that unless someone is taking our picture (hm, sounds familiar...) Anyway, this is Phidias' workshop. He made one of the seven wonders of the ancient world - the giant Zeus statue that used to stand in the temple here. It disappeared, alas.
Inside the Olympia museum - this was a really neat sculpture that Rick Steeves had a lot to say about and all of which I've forgotten.
Crappy, motion-blur, overexposed picture of one of these crazy mountain roads. I mean, there are tunnels on regular roads - but this just looks like somebody hacked a narrow passage through a mountain with a pick-axe or something. If you look on the right side of the frame, you can see another part of the road where there is no support for the rock - you just drive under this terrifying ledge. Also, there was definitely not enough space for two cars in the tunnel and it was a super-blind curve.
Most of what we saw in Greece was really old - like really, really, really old. Mystras was one of the newer sites we visited - from the Byzantine era, cerca 1200 CE. It's an enormous site and used to be a big fortified town and one of the most important places in medieval Greece.
Naturally, there were cats. These are nunnery cats, so I think that's why George was ok with them crawling all over him.
The clouds rolled over the site while we were there - really cool.
Finally, finally, we were back at the coast and back in warm weather. Here's our balcony at our super-amazing-awesome mini apartment in Kardamili. I think we got a big upgrade because it was the low season. We had a kitchen and everything, not to mention a balcony straight overlooking the Mediterranean.
Kardamili is a beautiful little seaside village, but there's almost nothing to do there except hike, so we did. The town sits on the sea but it abuts mountains, so the only thing to do is hike up up up for most of the day. When we reached the peak of the cliff, we found this really wonderful and seemingly abandoned town. I have no idea what it's name is, and Google doesn't either. There were maybe six or eight houses perched on the edge of the cliff.
We continued our ambling walk through this enormous olive grove. The point was to get to a town on the other side, but we never made it. We got seriously lost in the olive grove, and then tried to trek through what eventually became just dense vegetation, and had to work our way back to the road and the tiny village.
But there were sheep! Always lots of sheep.
At one point, we could see where we came from. Here's the entirety of Kardamili.
And it turned out the town wasn't abandoned after all! This gentleman and someone I take to be his wife were overseeing the tiny courtyard around which the houses were clustered.
I was really taken with this definitely abandoned (for real now) house. If you look closely, you can see that it's number one.
Back in town. Cats everywhere.
On the left, we have an abandoned olive oil press! George and I had gone to the Olive and Olive Oil Museum in Sparta (nothing special to mention about Sparta, it's a really nondescript place), but because we saw all the old technologies and things, we were able to identify this piece of machinery, long since put out of use. It was really cool to see it and recognize it for what it was.
The Kardamili harbor - once bustling, now just used by small-time fishermen.
Sunset on our last day by the sea.
In the morning, before we left, we took a wander around town to visit some of the places Rick Steeves mentions in his book. (He is freakin' mad in love with Kardamili - goes on and on and on. My Lonely Planet book barely mentions it.)
We made another animal friend, this one a super-happy little guy that followed us through town. We took him out of the town limits and were walking along the olive groves when we spotted a bunch of sheep. As soon as we turned our attention to them, he goes running off towards the sheep. "Not our dog! Not our dog!" we muttered as we turned away quickly and scrambled back towards town. He bounded back up to us a few minutes later looking self-satisfied. We then dropped in on this brilliant and ridiculously over-priced "local products" store. Apparently the owner had tried to take the dog up to his farm earlier in the day because he "needs a farm dog" but the dog wasn't having it, though he did seem to be perfectly comfortable sleeping on the floor of the store. We tried to get the dog to go with the owner-dude, but he followed us back to our hotel instead. We had to drive off with him basically watching. Tear.
Karadamili still, just sitting by the ocean before it was time to get a move on. The water really looks like that. It's amazing.
A small market store in Aeropoli. A cute enough town, big for the mountains. We stopped there to have a really delicious lunch.
The big draw for this day was the Diros Caves. We saw two caves in Greece and they both blew any caves we've seen in America straight out of the water (all that limestone makes for some rad formations.) But these caves were really special because they are flooded and you take a boat through. Also, there was this amazing, tiny white beach next door.
Back in Aeropoli for lunch, with a cat eating a hunk of bread.
That night, we stayed in Monemvasia - a Byzantine-era fortress on a big-ass rock. This fortress was never breached during any of Greece's long upheavals, but it was besieged and eventually folks had to walk out of it. What's so great about Monemvasia is that the town is only semi-recently become a draw for tourists, so it retains scads of charm. Also, the more attractive locations have been built up for tourists but lots of the rest of the enclosed fortress is still just ruins - so you have perfectly safe houses right next to shambles. It's really impressive. Up at the top you can see the now-totally-in-ruin upper fortress.
We came into town after dark, so we didn't get the full effect until morning. But we did walk out to the sea (the "beach") that night and looked at the stars. It was damn romantic, y'all. And the fortress, which doesn't have that many streetlights of its own, faces out to the Mediterranean, so the stars were very bright. And it was just the sound of the ocean waves lapping at the rocks below.
In the morning, it was very cold. The cats were huddling together for warmth. Seriously, you guys.
Monemvasia from up above in the fortress. It was mad windy up there, so we didn't really stay too long. But it was a damn impressive site.
Next we drove up the coast to our second-to-last destination: Nafplio. Nafplio was Greece's capital up to about 1900, when some important dude or whoever moved it to Athens, which at the time was a tiny provincial place of 5,000 people or so. Nafplio was a great town. We were there for New Years and more or less randomly picked a restaurant in which to be for the turnover. At midnight, they turned the lights off and everybody sang and they passed out a champagne toast (for free). It was a really pleasant way to end 2013.
This is one of the three Venetian fortresses that guarded the city.
These cats are having sex.
We hit up Mycenae on the way to Athens. This is a very famous tomb that has been robbed basically forever ago because it was never covered over by rocks and sand and things - someone has been maintaining it always. I didn't take any good pictures of the rest of Mycenae, but it's a really fascinating place because it predates everything around it. The Classical-Era Greeks used to visit Mycenae and marvel at it as an archeological site of their ancestors. It was a pile of stones then and that was 2000 years ago. Not too much is known about the people of Mycenae, but they sure could build some rad tombs.
Finally, we made it to Athens. After such a long trip, we were a bit let down by the National Archeological Museum. But the Acropolis Museum was fan-freakin'-tastic. And the site itself was pretty great, too.
A 16th Century church just hanging out under an apartment building.
There's a much-better preserved temple than the Parthenon in the Agora, next to the Acropolis (the hill on which the Parthenon sits). It doesn't get as much attention because it's not as great a work of art and wasn't as richly decorated (or as large), but it's still pretty damn impressive. I was amused by the contrast of the temple and the subway, which runs right next to it.
We did plenty of stuff in Athens, but I didn't take so many pictures. I was tired, y'all! But we managed to meet up with one of George's colleagues and his Greek girlfriend, who actually took us partying until 3am (we did it! We partied like Greeks for one night!) She explained lots of things about Greece, like why the french fries are so bad (pan-frying vs. deep frying - all the fries in Greece are soggy disasters), and why everyone drinks so damn much coffee and why everybody stays up til 5 in the morning, but businesses open at 8am (Greeks are crazy and never sleep was the dumbed-down answer.)
So, in sum, Greece is super mega awesome. I would go back in a heartbeat. And I'll need to in order to see the islands - the part everybody else sees at the exclusion of the mainland. Even in winter, it charmed the pants off us. A good place.
The Zagori is a very special place. Many of the villages weren't connected by road at all until the last 50 years - the most remote ones not until the 70s. Used to be the only way one could get between the villages was by "goat trails" built into the mountain, and cross the rivers by bridges like this one, built in the 1700s. It's hard to tell from this angle, but that bridge was *enormous*. Also, a brisk Arctic wind was blowing through the riverbed. It's easy to forget you're in the mountains when the sun is shining, but the Zagori reminded us when we got to the valley and the shade.
In fact, Greece was colder, on the whole, than I'd hoped. Its climate, in the North, is not so different from DC. We had 40s and 50s for much of the trip.
This photo is staged, but based on fact. I turned around to see George looking at this sign completely perplexed. We got where we were going, no worries.
This is a "votive church". They are everywhere in Greece. Eventually, we realized that they seemed clustered at hairpin turns in the road. Rick Steeves, the handy guidebook guy, later informed us that they are erected either as memorials to people who died in accidents or erected to thank God and such when people narrowly miss being in an accident (or dying in one, or something). This is a bit of a ramshackle one. We saw mini palaces and really lavishly decorated tiny altars and things. Probably most interesting and unfathomable is that probably half of them had candles burning. They are clearly actively tended.
So we hiked straight up from the town of Kipi, over another bridge and up up up the mountain to the next town - Kapesovo. (Really, if I knew how to read a topological map, we never would have done this.) Our exertions were rewarded, however, as Kapesovo was one of the most charming places we visited the whole trip. On approach, a whole bunch of cows were crossing the road.
And then we arrived at The Most Charming Store in the World. Called "Sterna" because it's built on a really old cistern (water storage), this store was filled with stuff Elli and her family *makes*. She does all the crafts and her various family members cook pastries and sweets, can jams, gather wild herbs and mushrooms, distill liqueurs, and make all other manner of thing. We dropped a lot of coin in this store. Actually, what happened is, since we were on foot, we couldn't buy a thing at the moment, not wanting to carry it on everywhere. Elli arranged for us to get a ride back to our car so we could shave some time off the return trip. In the meantime, we got to see another town.
On the way back from the second town where we got a ride from local politicians distributing fliers (yes! that happened!), we came across this itty-bitty church at the top of these cliffs. Someone had been there just before us, because a candle was burning inside.
Turns out George loves heights and tempting fate.
Another one of these really old bridges. I wished I had my 24 with me. Also, check the ice on the river. It was damned cold in the shade. In the sun, though, especially if you've spent an hour and a half hiking straight uphill, it was quite pleasant.
We got the car and drove back up the mountain to get to the "Beloit" - or "lookout" (that's a Slavic word - here we're very close to the border with Albania). The cows had wandered back up the hill and were all over the road.
The Vikos Gorge is the deepest in the world. It's very difficult to see the perspective here. I tried all kinds of compositions and I just have to chalk it up to being an otherworldly place that refuses to reveal itself completely with photography. In any case, it's really, really deep. So deep you sort of aren't scared anymore because you have no concept of how far down it is.
We got out just before sunset. That was such an exhausting day! But it wasn't over. Elli at the super-cute store had "invited" us to come back to town for dinner, and we had one of the best meals we had in Greece (George's favorite, I think). Elli's sister cooked and I believe we were the only customers a the restaurant. She let us order half-orders of everything on the menu and her food was so good. After that, Elli took us to the store and we dropped like 50 euro on jam and herbs.
This is my husband.
No trip to a European country could escape being filled with churches. They are everywhere in Greece and most of them are very pretty and still in active use.
From the Zagori, we cut our drive to Delphi in half by hitting up the coast for a night. Preveza was a delightful sea town with a Christmas carnival right in front of our balcony (overlooking the gulf) that played U.S. dance tunes all evening. We also got into a somewhat heated political discussion with the hotel clerk / owner, who eventually revealed himself as a proselytizer. At that point in the trip, though, we seriously needed to have a conversation with someone other than each other, so it was all good. We popped open some wine from one of the monasteries in Meteora and bopped to Katy Perry at the kiddie carnival.
Nafpaktos, home of the World's Cutest Venetian Port. It's about the same size on the other side and, as you can see, the yacht in the far middle is about the largest boat you can fit in here. On the left side, you can see where all the cafes and restaurants line up. We had a coffee and a sweet and just watched the port be outrageously adorable. We were only in Nafpaktos for a couple hours, but it was one of the most delightful places we saw.
And then we finally made it to the big guns - Delphi (and we would later hit all the places you've heard of).
The world seems to think the Oracle at Delphi was inside a circular thing (see below), but that was a completely different area and site. The Oracle at Delphi was actually ensconced in this Temple of Apollo.
And hey, they knew I was coming! I pointed this out to George and he goes "did you carve that!?" - into the ancient freakin' tablet. Um, no. Oy.
As always, there were friendly cats about.
Here's a reconstructed piece of the circular thing everybody thinks the oracle was in. It's a cool site, but not Delphi. This is the Tholos at the Temple of Athena, just a bit down the road from the main site.
We left Delphi on Christmas Eve. The town itself was super-adorable and we had amaaaaaazing gyros there. I could have eaten those gyros for every meal... but unfortunately we had them as our last dinner and they weren't open for breakfast. The town has a speaker system, and each night they blasted Christmas music through the streets. It was ridiculously romantic. On the morning of Christmas Eve, little kids went around to all the stores and restaurants "caroling" - they had a triangle and would sing and then the shopkeepers gave them some coins. Extortion! They were singing to the tune of Jingle Bells but something about the triangle - trigona, trigona, something something Greek.
We spent that night in the crap town of Diakofto. It was the only place we went that wasn't clearly marked from the highway. The only reason anyone goes there is to ride the Odontodos train up to Kalavrita and that's exactly what we did, because every other thing I looked at was closed on Christmas.
These are the old tracks. Glad they updated! This train was really something special - the scenery we passed through was brilliant as we climbed up the mountain...
...to find that apparently all Greeks go to the mountains for vacation at Christmas. This town was packed full of people. It was the only time the whole trip (outside of Thessaloniki) that we went to a restaurant and it was full. It's a super-touristy place, but still charming, and the main strip with a bunch of gift shops and things still had amenities, like this butcher shop, nestled between a restaurant and a souvenir shop. Mr. Deer does not approve, but Mr. Pig don't mind.
One more to come!
I'm breaking this post up into at least three parts - partially because I don't want to write it all at once and partially because it would make an enormous post.
We start in Iraklio (or Heraklion, or any other number of crazy combinations of letter choice.) I'm the travel planner between the two of us, and I figured it'd be easier to just get all the flying done ahead of time, so though we passed through Athens after 16 something hours of travel, we had yet one more one-hour flight to conquer to get to Crete, the largest of the Greek islands. Almost immediately, we were taken with Greece's seemingly unending supply of delights - small, unexpected things, constantly surprising us. For instance, within about half an hour of arriving in Iraklio, we saw a wedding arrive at a historic church.
Here is George at the Palace at Knossos. The Minoans were one of the earliest advanced civilizations - this site dates to something like 3,000 BC. These people were on it before anyone else. Also of note, T-Mobile decided it was going to offer an international unlimited plan just a few months before the trip. We qualified and it was a huge resource for us to have internet during our travels. Yay, T-Mobile! (And that is something I never thought I would write.)
Our stamina for archeological museums was quite high at this point.
We're still in Iraklio, looking out into the Mediterranean. The skies would darken considerably in the following days.
The water in the Mediterranean is unbelievably clear.
Just one photo from Rethymno, from the fortress overlooking the city. Greece went back-and-forth between many hands in the centuries following the end of the classical era (400 BC-ish). Romans, Turks, Venetians, barbarians all had their time controlling the lands, and they've all left their marks on the architecture of the country. Many cities have fortified palaces or fortresses atop hills overlooking them.
By the time we got to Chania, there was a full-on storm raging. You can see the lighthouse which marks the end of the sea wall enclosing this tiny Venetian port (many Greek sea towns have Venetian ports). The water inside the ports is normally glass-still, but big dramatic waves were washing up and into the businesses this day. We were told Crete sees a storm like this maybe once a year. As an example of delights, we took shelter from the blustery winds inside the clear tent of a restaurant - just barely in the doorway while the waiters set up for the day. One guy called us over, and asked if we wanted some free coffee and a warm place to watch the storm. Of course we agreed, and he set up a table and a heater and brought out coffee for us. Greek people are very hospitable, even to strangers.
I know this image is hard to make out, but if you look closely, you can see the waves splashing up towards George. He got quite wet after that one hit.
Cats are the undisputed rulers of Greece. They live in the ruins. People feed them. We learned from a tour guide in Thessaloniki (see below) that it's not uncommon for people to just take stray cats into their homes and keep them there, if they like them. The street animals in Greece are, for the most part, clean, well-fed and friendly.
Here we are avoiding the storm and drinking this 1.5L of wine for $2.75.
Finally, the storm passed.
One of the remarkable things about almost everywhere we went in Greece is that there are ruins everywhere underfoot. They can't just level entire cities to excavate, so every time a parking garage or an apartment building goes in, they do these extensive digs and preserve things as-is, in a sub-level. You have amazing archeological ruins right in the midst of downtown.
One more plane to take us from Chania to Thessaloniki. I believe that's Mt. Olympus, but I'm not totally sure. We would eventually see it later in the trip (though I didn't take photos).
Thessaloniki is one of the best cities I've visited. There are awesome archeological ruins everywhere and lots of sweet Byzantine churches sunk into the street, but the city also has a great vibe and seems to operate regardless of tourism, which is always nice for tourists. Naturally I sought out the modern art museum.
Here's another great example of spectacular ruins right in the middle of busy urban areas. This is the Galerius Palace. I don't remember the whole story, but Galerius was a Roman emperor or sub-emperor or however they do it. These ruins are massive, and occupy an entire city block, with big apartment buildings on all sides. The ruins go on under the buildings.
More cats, living in the ruins.
Here's George waiting in front of some meats and cheeses. This was one of the best meals we had in Greece.
Greek people eat lunch at 3pm and dinner at 10pm, a habit we tried to develop while we were there but struggled with all the time. Normally if we had a big lunch at 3, we wouldn't be hungry for dinner at all, and then be ravenous the next morning. If breakfast wasn't provided by the hotel, we'd then end up eating lunch at noon like we're used to and be alone in the restaurant. Other than this obstacle, we found Greek food to be absolutely fantastic. We had only one or two truly bad meals the entire time we were there, and most often we were delighted by how tasty everything was, even though we frequently ate the same dishes. There are a number of "standard" dishes every taverna offers up and, honestly, we didn't mind a bit - Greek food is simple, but delicious.
This is one of those Byzantine churches I was referring to. Built somewhere around 1,000 AD, the streets have since been raised, but the churches preserved, such that most of them sit in a little sunken pit. Most of them are still in daily use.
We spent our fourth wedding anniversary, and took the bulk of our pictures, at the amazing site of Meteora, in central Greece. The area consists of a number of monasteries built on top of these amazing rock formations. Back in the day, monks used baskets on ropes to move people and supplies up and down the rocks. Nowadays there's a road connecting them. The photo at the top of the post is from Meteora. The image below is of St. George's monastery - no longer in use. Every year on St. George's Day, locals climb up to the ruined monastery and hang clothes - I don't know why. We walked right up to it, but I couldn't figure out for the life of me how they get up there.
This dog actually belongs to somebody, but was super-friendly nonetheless. She bounded up to us while we were on the trail to the first monastery, and continued with us up up up all the way to the monastery door, where we had to tell her to go away.
This is George excited because she's come back to us after having run off to go do dog things for a while.
Here's our escort #2. This dog stayed with us for the entire rest of the day - hours - as we walked between the various monasteries. Up the mountain, across the roads, and even waiting for us outside while we went into the monasteries. We really liked this dog.
We saw a few tourists, but mostly had the places to ourselves. We had to get a we're-in-Meteora picture for the anniversary, though.
Our dog friend finally left us as we headed down the mountain and back into town. We were worried he was going to follow us all the way back to our hotel and we would have to figure out what to do with him. (It even crossed both our minds that we might take this dog home with us.) Turns out, he's a hustler and does this for a living. When we went to visit monasteries that weren't open the next day when they were, he bounded right by us and onto some other tourists. I'm glad he was our friend for the day, regardless.
Look, a wall of skulls!
And that will about wrap up installment #1. This takes us to about 12 days into our trip. More to come.