Late March

Long time no blog – have been busy with a play and – ye gods! – paid work, as in, like, for money. Since I last wrote, spring has come, gone, returned with a vengeance, then absentmindedly wandered off again – all very confusing, but better, apparently, than England. Preveza is gorgeous when the sun’s out – the tables take over the pavements, the light glows off the still waters of the gulf, everything slows. Greece as a whole just works better in summer (all the construction workers suddenly start working too – they’re digging up streets, painting things, even – optimistically, or perhaps as a joke – creating zebra crossings). A barbecue on our rooftop was a highlight: halloumi [not helium, whatever the spellchecker thinks, nor thallium] cheese and vegetable kebabs; swordfish steak, sardines and shrimp. (Or shrimps? Fish or fishes? Oh the joys of conversation with EFL teachers…)

Anyway…

Last Thursday was Greek Independence Day and yet another national holiday. Sadly, we had to do without another day of watching school children marching out-of-step and waving flags, as we were meeting Rachel’s mum from the airport.
Six a.m. is not a civilised time to get out of bed, particularly when normal rising time is about 11, but it’s a pretty journey as the sun is rising. The hillsides are yellow with wildflowers, and trees blossom in white and startling magenta. Some of the fields are so green you could almost mistake them for England.

The journey down to Antirio takes us through Vonitsa – a small town across the straits from here, with a fine Crusader castle – and along the lake-like coast of the gulf to Amfilochia, an appealing hideaway tucked under the hills at the end of a long inlet. The morning sun has given way to torrential rain as the road heads through a long, fertile vale with high green hills on either side, to the agricultural town of Agrinio. Passing through a towering gorge – partly blasted by the Germans during the war – we skirt past the lagoons of Mesalongi, where Byron died and part of him (his heart?) is buried.

We’ve seen two signs en route telling us that the Antirio-Rio ferry is open. The third one is more circumspect, saying ‘Antirio Open Antirio Closed’ – which has the advantage of never being wrong, though is also never right. When we get there, it’s closed of course. A narrow channel between two mountains opening out onto the sea, it’s an obvious wind trip. Hurry up and finish that bridge! (The Olympic flame, which is being lit at ancient Olympia this very day, is due to pass over the newly-opened bridge in early August. Though they’re making progress, they may yet have to employ a long jumper to run that leg).

So we have to take the slow though pretty route along the north of the gulf of Corinth, via Nafpaktos with its fortified harbour, through an endless olive grove (the largest in Greece, apparently) and up into the hills near Delphi. Annoying, this: Delphi is our intended destination for this evening – but there’s a small matter of five hours and 400km to pick Cheryl up from Athens airport. We climb half way up Mount Parnassus, then down to Thiva – ancient Thebes – where we join one of Greece’s very few motorways as far as the choked-up concrete sprawl which is Athens. Corinth, Delphi, Mount Parnassus, Thebes – a lot of mythological baggage for one journey.

Cheryl’s flight is on time; we’re not, having got lost on the Athens ring road. It’s a sunny day again now as we turn around and drive back to Delphi. We decide to spend the night in Arachova, a trendy skiing village a few kilometres east of Delphi. Arachova’s an attractive place built on a steep hillside in the shadow of Parnassus, stopping abruptly on the edge of sheer cliffs. The air is sweet with the honey-smell of almond blossom and noisy with bees and birds (a feature of this trip, the birds in particular – they’re busy shagging at the moment, and making quite a noise about it). Like Metsovo, Arachova sells itself hard, with rugs, wooden handicrafts, smoked meats and cheeses competing with the fashionable skiwear. Pasta appears to be another local speciality. Having driven 700km today though, I’m only really interested in sleeping.

To Delphi next morning, mercifully before too many coach parties arrive. If your interest in Greece is archaeological rather than [is there an adjective ‘pertaining to beaches’? Liminal, maybe?] then you should definitely visit out of season – far fewer people, not too hot for the considerable amount of walking required, and, at this time of year, it’s beautiful with the flowers and the blossom, and the snow-capped peaks in the distance.

Zeus released a pair of eagles from either end of the universe, and Delphi is where they met. It’s not a bad site for the centre of the world: two massive rocks rear up above, a deep wooded valley is spread out below. There is something magical about the place – those ancient Greeks certainly knew how to choose a sacred site.

In its heyday, Delphi must have been quite extraordinary. The treasures and spoils of war that used to line the marble-paved Sacred Way – gifts of thanks to the Oracle – have long been looted, but there’s enough left here for the imagination to work on: a few pillars of the Temple of Apollo, the Omphalos (the navel of the earth – the rock where the priestess sat, high on munching poisonous laurel leaves), a well-preserved theatre, the ancient stadium where the Pythian Games, as important as the Olympics, were held every four years. Further down the mountainside is the separate sanctuary of Athena, with the round tholos that you see on all the postcards. All the while you’re taken in by the scenery, left in no doubt that gods live on mountaintops.

We stop for lunch in the modern village of Delphi, about a mile from the site. It’s a great location, snow-capped Mount Parnassus behind, a glimpse of the sea beyond the acres of olives far below. Winding down to the sea, we follow the coast road west again, making a detour to Galaxidi. This serene little town sits on the end of a promontory looking back towards Delphi, a church tower peeking above the red roofs. It was wealthy once through ship-building, and there are a lot of tall, old houses of solid stone – and a refreshing lack of half-built concrete towerblocks. Cafes and fish tavernas line the sheltered seafront. It has an island atmosphere – something like Hydra or Paxi. Some Greeks come on holiday here, but remarkably it doesn’t seem to have been ferreted out by the upmarket ‘unspoilt Greece’ holiday companies, despite having beaches and Delphi nearby. So let’s keep it to ourselves, OK?

[To digress: Preveza still has a fair number of these old houses, the Venetian and neo-classical mansions. But with some exceptions, people don’t want to live in them. Many stand derelict, tumbledown – and rather than be restored, they’re more likely to be knocked down and something concrete built instead. Someone explained that this is because they’re unsafe in earthquakes, of which Preveza gets a few (we’ve felt maybe four or five little shakes – the longest one lasting about ten seconds, making the light bulb swing and your insides wobble). I don’t know. I think it’s fair to say that Greeks have less of an attachment to aesthetics than the English – despite inventing the word. Maybe it’s not fair to say that – I can imagine howls of disapproval and arguments that the English are all Philistines. But they do seem to have a higher tolerance of unsightliness here. And they probably don’t have a word for unsightliness. Earthquakes or not, those old houses would be the expensive des-res places if they were in the UK. We, after all, are a nation of barn conversions. Near to my home village in Wiltshire, an old converted barn recently burnt to the ground. The owners built a brand new barn conversion.]

Leaving Galaxidi, we carry on coastwards to Agios Nikolaos, where the map and a couple of road signs tell us there’s another ferry across the Gulf of Corinth. It’s a longer crossing than the Rio one – about three-quarters of an hour – but cuts out a good deal of driving. Agios Nikolaos is an unlikely place, making Antirio seem like Dover. But a ferry there is, ploughing its way back and forth between here and Egio, a much larger town on the Peloponnese. We make the crossing at sunset, though there’s no sun now, just a gloomy gloaming mist over the now-calm water.

Driving in Greece has generally been fine, and you learn to deal with the fact that the majority of other drivers are complete psychopaths. The Patras-Corinth highway, however, is not good for the nerves, particularly at night. It’s one of the country’s biggest and busiest roads, but is only dual carriageway in a few places. This is mad. With the tiniest amount of work, it could be a nice, sane dual carriageway all along. Instead, it’s a strange system of wide hard shoulders, and lines down the middle which are sometimes dotted, sometimes solid, and invariably ignored. The general system seems to be to position yourself somewhere between the lane and the hard shoulder, until some lunatic hares up behind you flashing his lights, at which you pull over as far to the right as you can, while they overtake you. As they do so, they normally have to stray into the oncoming carriageway, so those cars also pull over into the hard shoulder to make room. Unless someone also happens to be overtaking in the other direction. In which case there’s a high-speed head-on collision and a multiple pile-up. Remarkably, this doesn’t actually happen while we’re on the road, despite the continual overtaking on blind bends and the brows of hills – of which there are many. Whoever the Greek god or Orthodox patron saint of crazy drivers is surely has their work cut out.

Well, we make it safely to Nafplio, but this entry is getting long and there’s a lot left to say so I think I’ll break it here.