Pt2 - 13:

ON THE MAINLAND

Mycenae is famous as the seat of Agamemnon, the aggrieved king who led his troops on a ten year siege of Troy to avenge the kidnapping of his wife Helen by the Trojan warrior Paris, and we all know how that turned out. This morning Mycenae was under its own siege by busloads of chattering schoolchildren. I’ve decided when I get home I’ll invent a spray for this. We hacked our way through the hordes up to the Lion’s Gate which offered a spectacular view across the Peloponnesian Plains. It was a peerless day to be at any sort of altitude but, alas, the infestation of school kids and the growing invasion of German tourists destroyed any enjoyment of the moment. With the drive to Olympia on the western coast ahead of us we cut our losses and returned to the car. There were a hundred tour buses choking the carpark, and I’m not making that up! It took us longer to negotiate our way out to the road than we’d actually spent up at the site.

The next few hours were a Greek comedy during which we saw far more of this part of the country than we cared to. The first mistake was trusting our map, which suggested that by continuing north for a few kilometres to the village of Dervenakia we could link up with the expressway to Tripoli and save some time on the run to Olympia. Naturally, this was spectacularly wrong; not only was Dervenakia on the opposite side of the valley to the expressway but when we finally managed to find our way across to the other side the expressway was fenced off with NO ENTRY signs everywhere. Frustrated at the waste of precious time we paused at a monument above Devenakia to collect ourselves. The silence and the view combined to soothe our spirits enough to push on in a more positive frame of mind.

With little option but to retrace our route we headed for Argos, where the map clearly showed a main road diversion to Tripoli. We didn’t realise we’d missed the unsignposted turnoff in Argos until we found ourselves back outside Nafplion. Half a day and a hundred kilometres and we were still only 4kms from where we started! We turned around yet again and eventually managed to get ourselves onto the road to Tripoli after more stuffing about in Argos; by now any hope of arriving in Olympia early enough to visit the archaeological site had evaporated. It was a luminous day, the light like highly polished glass, so we may as well enjoy the rest of it just for the drive, and enjoy it we did.

Once out of Tripoli, notable only for being able to say, “When I was in Tripoli…” so everyone thinks you’ve been to the Libyan capital, the road resolved itself into a series of gently undulating curves through verdant woodlands, ancient olive groves and fields of every hue of green stitched together in a breathless mosaic of vibrant wildflowers. It wound through charming villages like Karitenia and Andritsena, every turn drawing gasps of wonder at the display of colour; dainty purples and mauves shyly peeping through explosions of yellow bright enough to blind the eye and here and there sprays of blood red poppies. Strange trees with purple flowers where the leaves should have been appeared along the verges. Wheeling along with the windows down, I with my shirt off, it seemed like the perfect day. And it was. We rolled in to Olympia at 6 and not twenty minutes later were settled in room 15 at the Hotel Praxitiles above the taverna. With another crowded day on the agenda tomorrow we retired early.

*

For the first time in all our travels we beat everyone through the gates of an archaeological attraction. By 8 we were wandering around the sanctuary of Olympia in the clean morning air and the bright morning light. Riffing seamlessly on yesterday’s theme, wildflowers burst through every crack and cranny; I remembered Olympia as a peaceful place and so it was now. Although soon the carpark would be crammed with tour buses and the ruins submerged in a surging tide of tour groups we emerged into the ancient stadium totally alone, there was literally not another soul to be seen. It was a pleasure rare enough for us to briefly flirt with the idea of stripping off and running naked around the track in honour of the occasion, but we couldn’t be confident we’d get hallway round before a horde of German tourists descended on the site so we mosied on to the fascinating on-site museum. Shields and helmets don’t float everyone’s boat, but what tickles my fancy about the armoury of the Greek warrior is how small it is. The helmets particularly are schoolkid size; it’s hard to shake the vision of the Greek battlefield as a seething scrum of rowdy youths, not too far removed from the rugby games we played on the oval at Ryde High School, only with spears.

At ten we were on the freeway to Rio via Patras, a boring but fast road which took us just seventy-five minutes to cover. The technical guidebook term for Patras is “dump” so imagine our joy when the freeway took us straight through the gridlocked centre of this dreary city. Worse still, Rio was so badly signposted we were forced to stop every few ks to ask directions, pretty dumb considering it’s the main terminal for this end of the Gulf of Corinth. For the race who invented logic, modern Greeks aren’t particularly adept at common sense. They packed us onto the Rio car ferry like Chinese blocks for the 15 minute crossing to Antirio. A quick coffee to gather ourselves for the run to Delphi and we were back on the road.

And what a road it was; one of the great unsung drives of the world in my book. Hugging the northern coastline of the Gulf of Corinth, we passed through postcard white villages with terracotta tiled rooves on tranquil blue water bays amid olive groves right up to the foothills. At this time of the year it is afire with strange little bushes that look like exploding suns; every shade of red, orange and yellow, they form a dramatic contrast to the barren rocks above and blue waters below. Truly spectacular, they dominated the vegetation from Monasterakio right round to Galaxidi where they abruptly disappeared. At Itea we turned inland and climbed up into the mountains towards Delphi.

Much of Greek history and mythology is tethered to Delphi in one way or another. Although Ancient Greece wasn’t a country in the modern sense but a loose confederation of city states, Delphi was considered the centre of culture common to all Greeks. Zeus determined the location of Delphi by releasing two eagles; one flew east the other west, and where they met, Delphi, he decreed the centre of the world. It’s the home of the famous Oracle, which answered every question with a riddle. When Oedipus sent Tiresias to consult the Oracle on his future he was told he’d murder his father and marry his mother. Just for fun the Oracle forgot to mention Oedipus was a foundling and the couple he thought were his parents were actually his foster parents. Sophocles wrote a play about the consequences of that little joke; Oedipus ends up plucking his own eyes out, goes down in history as an incestuous parricide and has his name forever enshrined in Freudian psychoanalysis to describe men with unnatural fixations on their mothers. The Oracle’s sanctuary, the Tholos, still stands, flanked by gnarled and twisted olive trees said to be more than 4000 years old. Above it, the ruins of the ancient city spill down the slopes of Mount Parnassus where legend has it Aesop was thrown to his death for insulting the Oracle. Personally, I think Aesop got it right - the Oracle was a wanker.

By 3:30 we were installed in room 1 of the Sun View Pension in Delphi. The south-facing balcony gave out over the rugged cliffs right down to Itea on the glittering coastline of the gulf. We made straight for the ruins and scaled up to the stadium at the very top of the site. Everything was precisely as I remembered it from 1977, important for two reasons: 1) it was good to have my memory validated and to know I hadn’t idealised the detail out of all reality, and 2) I was planning to repeat a daring feat Ilene and I got away with back then and I needed to confirm that it was still possible now…and it was.

In the shadow of Parnassus we worked our way gradually back down to the centrepiece of the sacred precinct, the mighty Temple of Apollo. By now it was late afternoon and hot and we suddenly hit a wall of fatigue; the cracking pace of the last few days caught up with us and we had to retire to the Sun View for a rest.

About 9 we went looking for a place to graze, and here’s where the present diverged wildly from the past. The small village of twenty years ago had morphed into a tourist sump riddled with restaurants called Zorba’s and hotels called Xenia. The prices were foolish and I quickly tired of fat, rosary-fiddling touts yelling in my face. We drifted to a quiet little place right on the edge of town where we settled for reheated spanakopita and a bottle of red furniture polish. Tess was exhausted and did the smart thing, she went home to bed. The worse for the shitty wine, and possibly addled by the three-quarter moon, I set off alone to recreate the magnificent folly of that January night in 1977...

Next week: In the silver silence...