gasping

We land at Poros island and cycle straight to a little beach where we can camp in an olive grove.  The island is tiny but hilly, as we discover the next day.  We know there are other nice beaches and find a good dirt track that takes us on a traverse above the coast and out to a little cove of a beach.  It's down a footpath and quite isolated.  It's perfect.  It's paradise. 

We are only just getting settled when an older Dutch couple arrive.  They both strip and the man starts padding around the small beach collecting rubbish.  He also has a rake and a shovel and while I can't bring myself to look at him, in the eye or anywhere else for that matter, Gayle cheerfully engages him in conversation.  They live here.  He is the unofficial caretaker of the beach. He is bothered by the dead goat caught on a rock in the water.  He drags it to the beach and bags it into a black bin bag.  "It isn't a goat", he shouts out, "it's a cat!" I look up in horror, the stench of the bloated carcass wafting over, just as the naked man walks past carrying the bin bag to a dump.  Perfect? Paradise?  What a fool I am.  There's no such thing.

these hairy caterpillars live in the dwarf oak trees and are toxic.  The roads on Poros were covered in their trails.  Friends tell us only the leader can see.

The next day we ride the ten minute ferry over to the mainland and set off up the coast.  We're looking for a little road that cuts inland around the back of the ancient Greek site of Epidavros/Epidaurus.  We want to avoid the main roads where we can.  Mid-afternoon we come to the junction and look up at a mountain.  Somewhere high above we can see a road sign.  This indicates where the road is heading: up, up, up.  It's a vicious and steep climb softened by occasional hairpin bends.  Halfway up a man stops in his car near to a house and tells me he used to cycle this road three times a week, as part of a loop.  Why did he stop?  He's young, but rather portly.  Children, he explains.  Not feeling like hardcore fitness fanatics, we continue up to a village resting on a saddle.  Some children playing in a park show us the tap to collect water.  And then we scoot away and find a lovely little camping spot in a grassy clearing above the road.  Sleep well.

looking back on our climb from the coast

trying to find the back way to Epidaurus - in the end we go via the road

 Epidaurus is famous for its theatre, which is still used for festivals of ancient Greek theatre.  It seats 14,000 a Spanish woman tells us, as we sit up in the cheap seats.  She has a guide.  We don't.  We watch as different tour groups arrive and take seats as their guide then stands centre stage and claps loudly to demonstrate the marvellous acoustics.  It's unoriginal and a bit repetitive and frankly, for 6 euros, I was expecting a better show.  It turns out that the theatre was merely the entertainment for the patients who came here in search of a cure.  It seems the place was really a kind of health spa resort.  

 Out beyond the car park (a recent addition) are the ruins of the main complex, with baths, temples, stadium, fountains and wards for the sick.  Fascinating stuff - there was only one other such complex, an Asklepion, and it's on the island of Kos, dedicated to the healing powers and cult of Asclepius.  Strangely I enjoy the ruins much more than the theatre, which has survived well.  On our way back from the ruins a man hurries up and looks over our shoulders, asking desperately "Is there anything to see?"  How do you answer such a question?  "Nah, it's just a load of stones." Instead we smile mischeviously, but answer honestly. "Everything."

It's downhill to Nafplio in the morning - a reward for all our climbing in the previous two days.  The town is a little touristy and we decide to stay a night because it has a pretty old town.  We wonder if there are are many such towns left in mainland Greece.  It sits on the eastern side of a large gulf and is overshadowed by a large fortification on the prominent hill next to it.  We cook our tea in the bathroom of our guesthouse.  So decadent.

the high life - pasta a la nafplio

Around the unintersting shoreline of the gulf we find our road into the main mountains of the Peleponnese.  We know it veers off the main highway to Tripoli but two farmworkers bar our way.  Behind them we can see the valley we want to take, but they are adamant that we should not go on.  We tell them names of villages on the road ahead.  Soon the younger one phones someone, maybe his boss. A friendly vpoice asks where we want to go.  I tell him a village name.  He tells us to go back to the main road andcontinue three hundred metres to the next turn off.  I give the phone back to the farmhand and we thank them for saving us a wrong turn.   The correct road is a delight.  Barely any traffic, it follows up a valley beside an old railtrack and then climbs steeply and swiftly.  A woman on a road bike cycles past.  She's not Greek, but we guess she lives here.  

After numerous switchbacks and plenty of huffing and puffing we stop at a stream.  We are surrounded by steep mountainsides terraced with olives.  It's a terrific sight of human endeavour.  Somewhere someone is pruning the trees with a chainsaw.  We pass a sign indicating the olive groves are organic and push onto one of the terraces to camp.  We love olive terraces.

dirty old town

Athens is a funny old place.  It has the strange air of a dying city, shuttered up shopfronts, graffitied buildings, empty pavements, inordinately long queues at the bus stops.  Unloved and unkempt.  But at the same time it's teeming with tourists. And at the moment it's Spring Break in the States so this might explain the presence of so many young Americans wandering around.  You hear them before you see them.  The tourists are naturally only in the tourist hotspots around the agoras and the museums and the acropolis parks.  Up by our rented appartment, not far from the archaeological museum, there are shops and restaurants run by Bangladeshis.  When we arrive we eat a good chicken and rice meal - enough for four - in a cheap place advertising Afghan food and then waddle over to a museum that's free on Thursdays and open till late.

note the hipster beard

We walk everywhere, happy for a change from the bikes and happy in the March temperatures.  Not hot, not cold.   We visit museums we haven't been to before - the Benaki and the aptly-named Byzantine museum, the latter requiring much form-filling to enter and entailing a complicated route through its exhibition space. Before we start we want to use the toilets.  At the ticket counter they point us towards another building across the courtyard.  There we are redirected to the building opposite where another attendant refuses us entry, referring us back to the first building, until we start screaming in frustration (and desperation) and threatening to pee in the central fountain.  

In need of a new bottle cage and some socks we hunt out the Decathlon sports shop that appeared on google maps.  It turns out to be an architect's practice called Decathlon.  Only in Athens.

On a sunny day we explore the ruins of the Greek agora set in remarkably peaceful grounds.  The cherry on the cake is the only wholly surviving Greek temple in Greece, the Temple of Hephaestus.  As usual we are exploring at a very slow rate.  There are probably 20 Must See Places in Athens for anyone visiting over a long weekend but we will have to return another time to see a few more.

Retracing our route back to the docks at Piraeus is easy to remember while it's fresh in our minds.  The only tricky bit, after taking a bike path down to the coast, is crossing the big highway that separates Piraeus from Athens.  We have spotted an underpass by the football stadium which leads to a park and then a ridiculously steep climb over the highest part of the Piraeus hill to swoop into the port.

dodecanese to cyclades

Our island-hopping continues apace.  Subject to winter timetables and weather, of course.  It is a lovely calm day when we sail north from Mastichari on Kos to Kalymnos.  We spend a bit of time at the harbour when we arrive soaking up some sunshine.  

The place has an untouristed 'real' feel that we felt Kos lacked somehow.  We opt for an anti-clockwise route around the east side of the island and head off along a steadily climbing road around the steep hillsides of the south-east corner, finally pausing near some radio masts.  The ground everywhere is rocky.  The whole island has no flat earth or space for a tent unless a human has dug it out, cleared it.  And so we set to work on a little 'gardening' of our own, cutting out spikey plants, thistles and digging up sharp rocks behind the stone wall of a goat herder's shelter.  It works.

On a sunny morning we descend to a little harbour tucked into a fold of the coastline.  Reaching out beyond it is a narrow green valley full of farms.  We ride up through it until we reach the foot of a climb to a pass.  Here there is a nice little church surrounded by overgrown olive trees and two or three large mountains surrounding it.  We opt for a flat spot beyond the church for the night.  We have cycled about 12 kilometres.  It's tough work this.  In the night a thunderstorm rolls over and keeps us awake.  For every lightning flash there is an extended kettle drum roll echoing between the mountains around us.  It's loud and annoying and almost frightening.  Surely this sound is not natural.  What awful destructive work is at hand?  In the morning the clouds roll back and the sun re-emerges.  All is well again.  

We cycle over the pass and down to the sea on the north side of the island.  At a church we stop for water and are gifted cake and 'special' bread from the folk who are all gathered after the Sunday morning service for a brunch.  We continue to the last village which has a little but lovely beach.  The wind is back but Gayle goes for a scout and finds a sheltered spot near some ruins of Byzantine baths just behind the beach.  The ruins have prevented any development at this end and our friendly stunted olive trees provide us with shelter and cover from prying eyes.  Except who will pry?  Of the hundred houses in the village there are only lights showing at about ten.  As with many island villages, many of the homes are only used at holiday times.

The next day we ride back to the main town where we have to wait for the ferry that comes just before midnight and spits us out at Astypalaia three hours later.  We awake in the daylight to the sounds of occasional vehicles passing by our not-so-private spot by a roadside chapel.  It was the best we could find in the dark.  The road leads on to the main town on the south coast, which has no deep harbour.  Here we are enchanted by the castle and traditional Hora village on the ridge above the harbour.  It's a stunning sight.   In the afternoon we head up a dirt track towards a windmill on a ridge and continue along the ridge until we get to a point where the track splits.  There's an old ruined stone shelter with a flat spot for the tent so we stop there.  The following day we complete our little high circuit of the hills in the west of the island and return to the main town before continuing on to the eastern side.  A dirt track to a church seems like a good place to find a camping spot.

It's a 5am ferry that we catch to reach Naxos.  We've been here before and we are only stopping here to save money on our ferry fare.  We remember a good spot to camp just out of the town and spend the day soaking up the rays.  This is the biggest island in the Cylades and we really ought to explore more, but we've booked a place to stay on neighbouring Paros and catch a smaller ferry over to that island the next day.   

We spend a few nights in Paros.  Bad weather is coming so we're prepared to sit it out.  While it's sunny we can take a look around the old town and the little village of Noussa nearby.  It seems much quieter here compared with Naxos, but that suits us.  This is the first rain we get since we've left Kos so we've done pretty well.  Spring is really here now with all the wild flowers out.