Tuesday 10th May – The start of our 3 Day Classical Greece Tour
Early to bed early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise or so the old saying goes. Anyway up at the crack of dawn, a shave and hot shower and down to breakfast. I guess for the next two and a half weeks this is going to be us as we are going to be on tour.
Our bus arrive bang on time and as it blocks the whole road we are rushed onto it. There are already a handful of people on board but as we don’t appear to be all doing the same thing we realise they are just gathering us up. We get to Syntagma Square we are on the correct bus and others get shunted off. More people pile on and we have 16 in total on a 54 seater. Plenty of room to spread out and with the people in the front seat getting off Margaret and I grab that seat above the driver. The drivers console is like what I would imagine a plane to look like, Switches, dials and gadgets all over the place.
First stop the Corinth Canal, 90 minutes away. 6,000 metres long 79 metres down to the water which is 10 metres deep and takes ships up to 10,000 ton. It was built in 1892 and they must of taken a few wheelbarrows of dirt out. It had very steep banks and was quite an impressive canal. They even had a Bungee jump on the bridge we saw it from.
It was then off to the theatre of Epidaurus. This was a Greek theatre which could hold 15,000 odd people in the middle of no where. It is supposed to have the best acoustics of all the ancient theatres but it didn’t have the echo effect I got at the Rhodes one. You are supposed to be able to hear a whisper from any seat in the place but it didn’t work for me. To many lawns cut with out my ear muffs on me thinks.
We are off again stopping at Nafplion which apparently used to be the capital before it shifted to Athens for a quick photo shoot of 3 castles, One impressive one 900 and something steps up a hill, One less impressive one on a lower hill and one out in the water. Something about where Greece had its guillotine for a short while when they copied the French. We were then off to Mycenae. Here we learnt that Acropolis actually means fortified hill. More ruins and piles of rocks but we did get to go in he Tomb of Agamemnon. The poor guy had been out fighting the wars, came home with his mistress only to have his wife knock them both off. His tomb was inside a hill and quite huge. When they had finished they restored the hill to hide the tomb. We then had a 3 hour drive through to Olympia. The driving today was through some really nice and interesting country side. We drove through olive and orange groves and along some beautiful costal routes. Some of the olive trees were apparently over 200 years old with very large trunks. There were heaps of tunnels yet the traffic seemed very light.
Our Hotel for the night was the Antonios Hotel in Ancient Olympia. It was interesting we were dropped at this hotel. All the others were taken to a “Higher Class” hotel. For some reason they were on a 4 day tour considered First Class and we were on the 3 day tour obviously of a lower class.
Our hotel was great anyway and the bus driver came back to ours.
Wednesday 11th May – Olympia to Delphi on our 3 Day Classical Greece Tour
We were being picked up at 8.30 this so no big rush. Breakfast not so hot as there was no bacon but it filled a hole. The bus driver was ready and waiting for us at the appointed time and we were off to pick up the first class passengers. They weren’t very complimentary about their hotel so that made us feel better. We would probably give ours an 8 Renee. Good and roomy but lost points on the shower, meals and lack of wi-fi in the rooms. It was a short ride to the archaeological site in Ancient Olympia. Apart from all the tourists I found this place very serine. It had a nice feel to it set amongst the trees and grass. The legends and stories that George our guide was able to spin had you sticking close to him hanging out for more I would say more but I would never get the spelling right and Andrea would laugh even more at me. I guess mostly the bad spelling is me Andrea but sometimes bloody MS Word puts in the wrong words for me. As you should have guessed this is where the Olympic games had its beginnings and ran every four years for something like 900 years. We saw the Stadium, similar to the other stadiums we had seen at just over 200 metres in length. There was no seating at this one and everybody was equal and sat on the grassy slopes. Just like the Basin Reserve. The men competed naked and anointed in olive oil. This is probably why no women were allowed in the stadium.
We then went and had a look around the museum. This was a really impressive display of stuff that had come out of the ruins. Apparently some of the best stuff had disappeared to Berlin as the Germans had done a lot of the excavating back at the end of the 19th Century, still very good though and I guess a lot of jig saw work fitting all the pieces together.
We went off and had an extremely nice buffet lunch. I would have been more than happy to have called it dinner with a very large selection. Again my spelling (and my memory for these unusual names) stops me from describing it all to you but it was yummy yummy yummy. Back in the bus and around to the customary souvenir shop. The good news was this one was disguised as a wine tasting stop. The wine, ouzo and olive oil was really good and they didn’t hold back on the samples. When the guy left we were able to help ourselves. Really good and I don’t think Margret brought anything so was on a real winner there.
We were then on the road to Delphi, a three and half hour drive. We went through one of the larger potato growing regions, over a really flash long bridge at or close to Patra and we were now back on the mainland. We drove around the coast before heading up in the hills for Delphi. We went through what was supposed to be one of the largest olive plantations in the world with over three million trees. It must have been a hell of a job picking them as apparently it is all done by hand. A larger tree can produce over 100kg of olives. We went up the mountain on a zig zag road just going up and up. We crossed an aqua duct that apparently provided all the water to Athens several hundred km away. It didn’t look that big.
We were dropped outside the Hermes Hotel in the middle of Delphi at 5.40 and told to be in the lobby by 8pm to be taken to dinner. Dumping our bags in our rooms we were off to explore the town. For us blokes that took about two minutes. We found a 2litre bottle of red wine for E6 and headed back to our rooms for a tipple. The girls were quite a bit later getting back so Doug and I got a good share of the wine. It wasn’t too bad either. Dinner was at a hotel a couple of doors down the road. It was average but we had a real enjoyable night with a Singaporean couple, their daughter and an Australian lad.
Thursday 12th May – Delphi on our 3 Day Classical Greece Tour
Breakfast was the worst so far. Not much to chose from between dry bread and cakes. I had cornflakes and peaches(I’m sure they were Watties) and that was about it. A 6 on this hotel Renee although the view from our rooms probably put it up to a 7. It was a fantastic view with a mountain you almost felt you could touch and a view down to the sea and 3 million olive trees. I am sure the photos will not do it justice. Oh the shower you had to hold up with one hand while you tried to wash yourself with the other.
This time the first classers picked us up and they obviously scored with a much better hotel this time. It was only two minutes down the road to the Ancient Archaeology site. It was really a cool mountain day and glad we had wrapped up. We went to the museum first while it warmed up. Delphi was the place everyone came to ask the Gods advice on what was going to happen. Apparently it was said they had two rules. No one was refused and if they ever got it wrong they would shut up shop. This must have been the start of shifty lawyer as they never got it wrong. It was all in the way you interpreted the words and of course that was your job until you tried to get your money back. This again was a pile of old rocks but the stories and legends were good. You could relate a lot of them to stories we already knew and words we use today in every day speech. I even went and spoke where Socrates’ and Pythagoras had supposedly shared there theories. It was all good.
Another lunch where I had some really nice stuffed tomatoes with chips and then we were dumped on the side of the road to wait for another bus to take us back to Athens while the four day people went on. We waited nearly 2 hours in the cold Renee, we weren’t impressed. Then we got mixed with one day people which mucked us about and the day got worse. We got into Athens and the traffic was bedlam because of some rioting. The main square and surrounding area was shut down and we had to drop a truck load of people at their hotels. We did see a bit of the rioting and were glad we were in the bus. Guess who was last, just us and the bus driver even the bloody useless guide didn’t say good bye. We got to our hotel at about 8.30 to find ourselves in the middle of a whole bus load being dropped off. When Doug showed them how to work the lift they thought he was the porter and were handing him their bags. If you know Doug you can imagine how that went down. We managed to push our way through and get served as this was our third time to the King Jason and we were now regulars.
Renee you will be please to know we have upgraded this to a 8 or 8+ and consider you have done us pretty good on your choice of hotels for us.
We broke our rules and headed off to the Chinese restaurant we had enjoyed so much the other night. A mistake, they must have had the No 2 chef on as we weren’t as impressed however it did fill a hole and we went back to our rooms to polish off another 2 litre bottle of wine that Doug had brought in Delphi as we couldn’t easy take it into Turkey tomorrow. Thats going to be even more fun.
