It was exciting to return to the Athens and see the Parthenon coming into sight across the water. We’d been on sleepy islands and small villages for a month so to be back in the city was exhilarating. We didn’t know then just how much so!
First we went up Lycabettus Hill at sunset where there is an incredible view at 1,000 feet across the entire city where we had pasta looking out at the Acropolis.
We then got the funicular down and walked through the streets back to the hotel where we were surprised to see large numbers of riot police. We went to our room only to find that the aircon didn’t work and it was very hot. Reception said there were no rooms left in the hotel and we’d just have to cope. (Now we discovered why it was a surprisingly good deal for an Athens hotel). We opened the window and suddenly there was massive shouting, honking horns and explosions. It sounded like a coup d’etat but reception then explained that Greece had just won the European basketball championship…against Turkey…and that the noise would go on all night. Luckily after midnight they found us another room which had no window and did have aircon.
From there were reunited with the Wildervan and drove North West across the impressive Antirrio bridge at Patras.
And on to Ioannina on the shores of Lake Pamvotida. We camped on the lakeshore with a couple of families of geese and walked into the old town the next morning which has the remains of both its Byzantine and its Ottoman past. Suddenly after four weeks of dry islands with their white washed villages there were big trees and very different architecture.
We then drove up into the Pindus mountains to go walking in the Vikos Gorge. The mountains are huge and stretch in every direction covered nearly entirely in beautiful deciduous trees and empty. The Vikos Gorge is up near the border with Albania and is 32 kilometres long on the southern slopes of Mount Tymphe. Its depth ranges from 120 to 1,350 metres and the width ranging from 2,500 metres to only a few metres at the narrowest. It is the world’s deepest gorge in relation to its width. And it’s spectacular.
We walked down a very steep and rocky 350 metres and along the bottom of the gorge intending to do 12.5 kilometres but it was hard and unpredictable walking so when a terrifying thunder storm started to break with rolls of thunder booming round the cliffs and we met a woman who’d come from the other direction who said that the ladders and ropes at the other end had “helped”, we decided that the better course was to retreat! This still involved walking a total of 10 kilometres and climbing back up 350 metres. These show how relieved we were to have got back up.
The next day we did an extraordinarily beautiful drive first stopping at some of the many bridges across the rivers in the gorge.
And after that we wound up about 30 hairpin bends up to Papigko, a high village at the end of the gorge under imposing cliffs called the Towers of Astraka (very Lord of the Rings).
This drawing is not by us but it was on a paper mat in a taverna we stopped at. I liked it and there are bears in these mountains.
On the way down we saw four tortoises crossing the road and in one village (where we’d happened to take a wrong turning) we saw ten storks nests on telegraph poles with twelve storks and their babies. Real fairytale stuff.
From there we landed up back at Igoumenitsa where we’d arrived five weeks earlier when the huge sandstorm had hit Athens and the islands and we thought we were going to have to turn back. This time the sun was shining and in 90 minutes on the ferry we were in Corfu Town and driving up to Kassiopi in the North of the island where we’ve met up with family for a week in a pretty cottage by the sea. Here is Alex’s drawing and below that the new map.
