Greek Odyssey — 1
Peloponnese
As a part of my European tour during my student years in France, I had decided to culminate my trip in Greece although I hadn’t worked out the logistics of it. However, upon arriving in Italy after nearly a month of travelling, I was quite exhausted not merely by the vagabonding but by the chaos I encountered there. A good piece of advice to anyone touring Europe; and a lot of travellers would agree with me, would be to first visit southern countries like Italy, Spain and Greece before going to the more developed Germany, France and Scandinavia.
One gets so pampered by the punctuality, efficiency and organisation in the northern countries that it is a culture shock of sorts going to central and southern Italy. All this coming from an Indian should not be taken lightly!
After Tuscany and Rome I had planned to go to Venice and then take a ferry to Greece. By now, I was getting a bit annoyed at trains running late and the lack of information so I decided to skip Venice and head to Greece via Bari on the east coast. Since it was high season for tourists I wasn’t sure of getting a boat, and with the Bari port being notorious for thefts and other crimes, I had no intention of spending a night there waiting even though I belong to slightly more adventurous category of travellers. I finally abandoned the whole idea and caught a night train to France’s Côte d’Azur.
In 2010, I was back in France on work and I planned to spend a couple of weeks in Greece and a month in Turkey at the end of my contract. For months I studied maps of Greece and Turkey and drooled over all the destinations on offer. I wanted to see everything! In Greece, I was keen of visiting Athens, the Peloponnese, Delphi, Meteora, some islands like Santorini, and Crete really drew my attention. But Crete being far and big was a bit out of reach so, with a heavy heart I cut it out and retained everything else. As for, Turkey, I had planned one month there so the idea was to span the length and breadth of this fascinating country. I was in for a set of unpalatable adventures, which wouldn’t deter me from travelling, but on the contrary would leave me yearning for more…
Arriving in Greece
If there could be anything sweeter than the juicy, sun-kissed oranges of Greece, it has got to be the people, for despite the economic recession, the Greeks proved to be extremely friendly and generous.
I landed in Athens from Paris after a sleepless night at the Orly airport and caught a bus to the Kifisos bus station where a friend from home would be waiting for me. My friend was supposed to buy tickets to continue to Olympia but since I took so long to arrive at the station, he thought it would be wiser to just wait. Once I got there we realised that there were no more tickets on the first bus and had to wait a few hours for the next one. We finally arrived at around 9 pm and found a hotel for the night.
The next morning we went to the ancient site of Olympia to try our hand at imaginary discus throwing and the famous 100 metre race at perhaps the oldest stadium in the world. Unfortunately we had to do all this under an unending drizzle from an overcast sky. The museum has a very good collection of artefacts and visiting it gave us some respite from the rain.
After an unforgettable visit, we went back to our hotel to pick up our bags and caught the bus to Pyrgos and then onward to Nafplio via Corinthos. Things did not go exactly to plan as the bus to Pyrgos was late by a few minutes and as we pulled into the bus station I saw the one to Nafplio leave. We quickly went to the ticket counter and asked for the next bus to Nafplio and found that we had to wait a couple of hours and change at Corinthos. We decided to eat something and walk around Pyrgos, which was nice enough.
As much as Olympia seemed artificially created for tourists with its straight main street lined with hotels and souvenir shops, Pyrgos was an authentic, living Greek city. It has electronic shops, cafés, gyros shops, a main shopping street, bakeries, pastry shops and of course, churches. After a quick exploration, we decided to eat some gyros in a kebab shop run by Albanians, something we would come to get used to. On the way back to the bus station we made a quick stop at an empty pastry shop to taste my first baklava in Greece. As we had a lot of travelling to do, I decided to buy just one baklava instead of a box and my friend picked up a chocolate pastry.
We asked the smiling shop owner how much we had to pay and she cheerfully said something in Greek that did not correspond to any of the numbers that I had learnt in my guide book, and when faced with our looks of incomprehension, she started gesticulating wildly while seeming even happier than when we walked in saying “No money!”.
That’s when my friend and I realised what she was trying to say, leading to our protests and insistence on paying. All in vain as she refused to take our money. This was another experience that we were soon going to come across over and over again. We thanked her profusely and walked out in high spirits appreciating the generosity of the lady. We were also left slightly bewildered, since from all that we had read before going to Greece, the country was reeling under a severe economic crisis. This increased our admiration for the shop owner who, despite sitting in an empty shop with no customers decided to give us free sweets.
Nafplio — the former capital of Greece
We boarded our bus, crossed the Corinth canal connecting the Gulf of Corinth and the Saronic Gulf in the Aegean Sea and reached Corinth bus station. There, we found ourselves waiting once again for a bus to Nafplio. Later that night, we finally reached Nafplio and found ourselves a little “pension” or hotel in the older part of town. It was a wet night with nothing much to do.
The next morning saw no let up in the rain but we decided to visit the city anyway. It did not help that everyone kept telling us that the weather had been brilliant a week earlier. We climbed up to the Palamidi fort in the chilly wind, geared with our rainproof windcheaters. This fortress was built by the Venetians in 1714, passed on to the Ottomans and finally to the Greeks. The contribution of the French engineer Lasalle to the rebuilding of the fortress is still appreciated by the Greeks — the French do not pay to enter it.
I was a teacher in France at the time and had a French ministry issued “Education pass”. This got me into the castle for free while my red-faced friend paid the 4 euro entry fee. This was a thing he would have to get used to.
From the top of the fortress, the view of Nafplio is impressive. There is a wild, natural coastline on one side and red-roofed buildings on the other all surrounded by the sea. This city was once the capital of the Peloponnese peninsula and then of Greece itself before Athens. The objective of coming to Nafplio was not to visit the city itself but to go to the famous amphitheatre of Epidaurus. This would have happened had we not missed our first bus at Pyrgos. After briefly visiting this chaotic yet charming town we took a bus to Athens hoping the weather in continental Greece would be more clement than in the Peloponnese.
Two and a half hours later, as we drove into Athens, we were lashed with a downpour; the weather in Athens was apparently worse than everywhere else. Mercifully, this was just another stopover in the city and we had a night ferry booked for Santorini. Athens and its bad weather would have to wait. We just wandered around the Acropolis area on my insistence because it was too much for me to resist. My friend having arrived in the city a day before me, had already familiarised himself with this area. I was out of breath and pumped with adrenaline upon just catching a glimpse of this ancient monument.
Hi, I am Prajwal Madhav. I hope you enjoy my posts.
