European Cycle Tour 2005

Yassas from Greece!!
We rode from Matera to Bari and then caught an overnight 16 hour ferry to Patras on Tues 23rd. The photos below are from our ferry ride. We arrived around midday on the Wednesday and then headed off as you will see from the next blog . . . . .

Our first day in Greece we started on our anti-clockwise loop of the Peloponese - our cycling guide book described these 14 days as "murderous hills and magnificent scenery".
From Patras we cycled south to Kato Ahaio (first picture shows the scenery) and found a lovely campground that had this bar/cafe at the base of it. We gave into temptation and dined at the camp restaurant under the shade of the 1000 yr old wild olive tree and enjoyed the first of our many, many delicious greek salads.
John - check out this roadside produce stall . . . . . . .
We stopped at Olympia to have a good look around - they still light the olympic torch here prior to each Olympics
Lining up for the 192m dash - Sandy won after using underhand tactics.
Once Carl stopped crying from losing the race he took this photo of the hippodrome . . .

Because I beat Carl at Olympia I let him win a round of 500 at the lovely seaside town of Kiparissia.
We have passed many lovely seaside villages like this one in Lembestena - lots of lovely water everywhere. It is very hard to keep biking because the water is so inviting that we keep wanting to jump right in!
En route to Methoni we found this cool place and were very tempted to stop here - Pilos is the third picture
Methoni is also on the sea (are you seeing the pattern??? ride, swim, ride, swim . .) and has this fantastic fortress.
From Methoni we headed toward Kalamata over a BIG hill (pictured below - looking back at the hill we climbed) - and we stopped for lunch at this lovely fishing village Koroni - see last 4 photos

From Kalamata we headed south down the coast and then over the hills to Gythio. En route we passed through Kardamyli, an idyllic pelopennese village. We fell in love with Kardamyli, it is quite an unspoilt (untouristed) part of Greece.

The first picture is of the town of Kalamata. From there we climbed a rather large hill, where we passed through a small village (second picture), at the crest of the climb we had this awesome view of Kardamyli (we also had a great feed of water melon kindly provided by a bus load of German tourists).

The 4th picture is the view of the coast south of Kardamyli. The next is of a small bay (near Stoupa) right by our campground - the water here was awesome!!!
Finally the last two pictures are of the barren hills on a big climbing day from Kardamyli to Gythio, we rode up through the smalll village pictured and the next photo is of the same small village after we had passed it.

From Gythio we cycled back inland over some hills to Sparta and ultimately to a wee Byzantine village outside Sparta called Mystras. The very kind campground manager drove us up to the top to save us having to wait a long time for a bus and having to walk 3km up a steep hill after our day of riding . . . .

This first photo is taken from the top of the ruins (from the castle) looking back toward Sparta.

Next we have Sandy's arty shot of an arch through an arch up near the castle.

From on high we could look down over the Palace and you can see the old and the new - they are restoring the palace.

Sandy likes to take shots of Carl at city gates and archways, so here is another one.

The Lonely Planet reckons Napflio to be the prettiest city in Greece. We couldn't get a close enough shot for you, but it was a lovely city. You can see in the distance the hilltop fortress with 1000 steps up to it, but after 100km with some 40km of climbing we didn't feel like it . . . . You can see the sea was a bit rougher that day, so the swimming wasn't quite so enticing . .
There is also a small fort on an island in the harbour and you'll see this in the second photo. Behind us is the range that we rode over to get to Napflio.
From Napflio we rode to Epidavros, home of the great Ancient Theatre. The acoustics are astounding - photo 4 is a chap dropping a coin on the stone and we could hear the sound very well from the top tier. You could also talk from below to above in a normal voice and be heard quite clearly.
The last photo is of an activity that we have enjoyed immensely in Greece . . . .

We enjoyed our time at Ancient Corinth, though modern Corinth was fairly average! This first photo is taken in a street in Ancient Corinth with a fort called Acrocorinth in the background (top of Hill). The Temple of Apollo is next - awesome!
Our bike is sometimes able to stand on it's own two wheels . . . . the plastic bag hanging from Sandy's handle bars is filled with food and is affectionately known as our "nose bag".
Mainland Greece and the Peloponnese are joined at an isthmus so some bright spark has built a canal to allow ferries and other boats to pass between the Gulf of Corinth and Saronikos. Trains and vehicles can travel overhead as shown at the far end of the photo.
The last two photos are taken with Corinth in the background as we left a few days later.

We had read in a cycling book that the road from Corinth to Athens might not be very appealing, so we stayed camped in Corinth and took the train for a one day trip to Athens. This is a very BIG city! Of course we visited the Acropolis, from where we had a fabulous view of the vast city. The second photo is just one angle of view of the city - there are many more!
Further down you'll see Hadrian's Arch and the Temple of Olympian Zeus, followed by the Temple of Hephaestus.

From Corinth we headed north rather than east toward Athens. We climbed toward Cape Ireo and this first photo is our reward after quite a few hours of climbing - a nice downhill into a place called Schinos...
This is the lovely sunset from where we camped for the night, and then third is the view back toward our camping bay - Kato Alephori - the next morning.
That next day we had our hardest climb of all - what we are calling our "heart-thumpingly-steep" climb. It was only a very short hill (5km), but a few times we had to stop to get some more air into our lungs. Photo 4 is when we were gloriously close to the summit, and we looked back with some pride (more like relief) to the switchbacks. Just after the summit we took this photo to show you an example of the shrines that we have seen all around the roads in Greece.
A local recommended this lovely cake at a cafe so we had to indulge him!!!!!
Now THIS is the type of sign we like to see after we've done some climbing - 10% grade - going down!