A Land of lost dreams

Having left the Adriaric and returned to Britain it seemed only logical that we should now return to Greece, that place where European civilisation is said to have started, well Crete I think, but that is part of Greece anyway. So it was, then, that on the morning of last Saturday we again look to that clouds, this time with Aegean Airlines and landed in Athens in time for an evening drive into the city. Now Mrs Currin does not like fast driving but it seems our driver did so, and in what seemed no time we were at the hotel and after a nice meal on the rooftop took to our beds to recover our composure and prepare for the next week or two.
Sunday morning and we were picked up for a tour of Athens, this centred naturally enough on the acropolis  but included other sites such as the temple of Zeus. One can but wonder at the amazing engineering involved in building these ancient buildings without the machinery and tools of today. The Parthenon alone must have stretched their knowledge to almost breaking point. We are so used to seeing these ancient monuments a we see them to today that it is almost impossible to think of them in their brightly painted colours that they enjoyed in antiquity. The whole is explained and shown in great detail in the museum of The Acropolis nearby.

The theatre atop the Acropolis.

The Temple of Zeus

Modern Olympic Stadium (1896)

Statuary in the Acropolis Mueseum

Some of it can look quite realistic

A note here about Olympic stadiums, there being four of real note in Greece, the original from the modern Olympics of 1896 in Athens, the original ancient stadium in Olympia, the ancient stadium in Delphi and the one from the Athens games more recently. I can now say that I have visited all of the above and been duly impressed by them all.
If I may digress here just a little I had thought that I had a fair grasp of the Greek alphabet but when trying to actually make some sense of signs etc. in Greece they take on a while new life of their own. By the time we left the mainland for our cruise it was starting to come together a little. Must try harder.

There are many ancient theatre.

Some allow little girls to fulfill their dreams.

Being a Sunday, Greece does not function at its fullest with only food and suchlike shops being open, never mind an early night won't do anything harm.
Monday and the real fun begins, we are loaded into a tourist coach, along with God knows how many millions of others, and first stop is at that triumph of engineering, the Corinth Canal, first mooted in something like 1800 B.C. but not completed till 1800 something or other A.D., it contects the Gulf of Corinth with the Aegean thus joining the Ionian  sea with the Aegean and  cutting some 450 km off the trip. The resulting canal whilst still functioning is a little on the tight side for modern shipping and none to deep either.

The Corinth canal.

Now, the gulf of Corinth has two openings, one at either end since the completion of the canal. It is the end that opens into the Ionian that posed a problem, but the French once more had the answer. You see the Ionian sea end is quite wide , allowing shipping to transit freely, but not so road traffic, hence a 2.5 km bridge in the style of the famous Milau bridge. It is now the pride and joy of the area and is the only one of the great bridges where I have been able to climb on top of the toll bridge for photos.

Gulf of Corinth Bridge 

And, yes, I did scale the toll bridge.

The title of todays blog might seem just a tad obscure but springs from the observation that there seems to be an inordinate number of incomplete and abandoned buildings and I am not talking of the ancient ones. Also the rubbish is obviously more easily left to rot on the roadside than to have it collected . We were given an explanation for the rubbish which included something to do with the amalgamation of local bodies without defining just who was responsible for what . Ah well I guess it could be that.

Rubbish seems to just pile up.

The tour from here on is like a whose who of Greece, Athens , Corinth , Midea, Olympia , Delphi, Sparta, Meteora, and Thebes to mention the most obvious. I would have to say Meteora with it's monasteries perched precariously atop thousand feet high rocks takes some beating, the paintings which adorn the interior of the chapels were all done by one man over a period of years and are of impressive quality.

An assortment of Monastories and the lower one, a Nunnery.

(note the stairs cut into the rock second one up. Access can be a bit of a challenge)

It was at a lunch stop at the nearby town of Kalambaka that I suddenly realized that I no longer had my camera. It had been playing up a little and I had been out in Athens and purchased a small can of CRC and given it a squirt....... only to make it worse. We had decided that maybe a new camera was on the cards once we got back to Britain, but to my joy, the next morning the camera was working the best it had for some time so all was well. Now the camera was lost.  The bus was stopped for me to retrace my steps but to no avail. Our companions aboard the bus offered to give me copies of their snaps and an hour or so spent working out whether we had the correct cables etc to make these copies on my tablet. It was then that one of the young Asian ladies ( one that I had thought was a boy) tapped me on my shoulder and proffered the lost camera. It seems that it had somehow ended up on the floor beneath my seat on the bus and had gone unnoticed till now. Mrs Currin claims my face went red but I deny that. Needless to say the Aussies aboard thought this great sport. Now a pair of these said Aussies befriended us and proved to be amongst the most mean people we had ever met. We called them the Maussies which seemed quite fitting as they were actually quite annoying.
Anyway I had been reunited with my camera and felt quite pleased with myself. We have made many friends on previous tours and on the recent Adriaric one had become very good friends with a couple from Berkshire , he an architect and she a magistrate, with whom we enjoyed several happy evenings, but we are not good at maintaining these friendships much beyond the end of the tour. Must try harder again.

Back to Greece. The tour proceeded and each stop produced more spectacular archeological sites than the previous and I would be hard pressed to pick a winner.
We returned to Athens on Friday after covering around 1500 km and quite tired from it all, but wait there is more.... and so on Saturday it was an early start being picked  and deposited at the cruise ship warf ready for the next highlight, a short cruise around the Aegean, calling at Mykonos, Ephesus, Patmos, Crete and Santorini. This will get us back to Athens on Monday and a flight back once more to Britain. Now Mrs Currin is not the best of sailors and was never too keen on making her home on the sea however briefly this may be for. Well there has been this hurricane crossing the Mediterranean and the remnants are currently slap bang over the Aegean sea, just where we happen to be taking this wee cruisey thing. Bit of a slop, big ship but still rolling around a bit and Mrs Currin is not a happy camper. Nothing to worry about says I . Too rough to stop at Mykonos says the ship. Told you so says Mrs Currin.

Mrs Currin's worst nightmare.

First stop now Kusadasi for Ephesus.

Ephesus remains one of the world's great Greek...Roman archeological sites and although far behind Pompeii for completeness it is still just as interesting . We included a tour of the Terrace Houses in our overall tour and this was magnificent.

Public library, ancient Ephesus.

I think that I will have to leave things about now , we are at the airport in Athens awaiting our flight to Heathrow.

I mentioned earlier the people on the bus, the "Maussies" well on the some bus was an Islamic fellow , Hooshdil from *******astan, and I would greet him Each morning with "Salom Hooshdil" and he would respond with "Kia Ora David".  He approached me one day for a bit of a serious chat about why us kiwis and Aussies were always having ,what he thought, were arguments. It took quite some time to convince him that we were really friends and it was all harmless banter, it's just what Aussies and Kiwis do.

I had diner the other night with an american Indian Chief... had a picture of himself in full regalia on a visit to Washington. Last night though took the cake, another Islamic fellow and wife, food spread all over the table, encroaching on our half. I can understand them not eating pork , it would be cannibalism..

On that thought I shall leave you.

All the best and stay careful

David