Today it was time to leave Athens and start the land tour. Kill me now because I don't actually remember what we saw today, even though I'm only writing this one day later. But it started with rocks and ended with more rocks and that was about it. Don't get me wrong - the history behind the rocks was fascinating, and I got some great shots. We also visited some giant theater (the oldest in Greece), where, thanks to its design, the acoustics were so magnificent that when people perform concerts and plays there they don't need microphones or amplifiers. There's a small spot in the middle of the 'stage', where if you stand facing the theater, your voice is carried at perfect pitch to the 50,000 seats surrounding you. Pretty cool. After Darryn had a turn on the spot, singing some aria, it was back on the big bus where we were carried off to the giant Corinth Canal, where we saw some cool coloured water. Lunchtime was conducted in this restaurant that was supposed to excel in Greek specialties, but after a cold plate of spaghetti with cat hair we soon realised it was just another tourist trap. The ten or so tourist buses outside the joint should have given that away but we must have been too tired to notice. Then we came to another realisation: these tours are all the same. They all promise an 'authentic' experience; what they really give you is fabricated shit made especially for tourists. Food, souvenirs, hotels - it's all specially designed to look like the real thing and you pay an arm and a leg for it thinking you're getting some sort of experience. But you're not. You're getting broke and an upset stomach. Darryn and I decided that this would be our first and last tour - next time we're doing this on our own. We have much more fun anyway and we are young and cool enough to get by without the help of some crappy travel agency. Something that fits in here that I forgot to mention: the other night we payed 52 euros each for an optional excursion to an 'authentic' Greek restaurant in Athens where we were promised real Greek food and real Greek dancers doing real Greek dancing. Instead we got microwaved frozen meals and a couple of dancers that looked like death. By this I mean you could tell they would rather have been anywhere else but there, dancing in ridiculous costumes for a bunch of tourists who don't give a shit anyway. Dude, they weren't even smiling. Anyway we both got the shits with that, since we worked out it was the most expensive dinner we've ever payed for in our lives.
So anyway, we made it to the hotel at our last stop, Nafplion, at around 4.30pm or something, only to find out there'd been a massive earthquake not 50km from where we were (6.7 on the Richter scale) and there were all these houses that had collapsed and people had died. We counted ourselves lucky and one woman in our tour bus reckons she felt the tremor, but I think she's a bullshit artist. The hotel was pretty damn awesome. It had a Jane Austen feel to it, with massive French doors and windows opening out into a beautiful garden and a huge swimming pool, where the hotel staff were setting up for a wedding. We decided to make the most of our swimmers so Darryn and I held hands and jumped into the pool together, where we frolicked about for half an hour before dinner. It was a lot of fun actually, especially with Darryn doing his whole 'Spiros' thing. The Sweet Home Alabama family was there too, their three daughters looking at us with furrowed brows, for whatever reason.
During our rather satisfying and awesome dinner we sat at the table with the other Australian couple on the tour - a bar owner and her husband from Melbourne. They were great dinner conversation and they told us all about their trip to Egypt, convincing us that yes, we should totally go there, and soon. We also talked about religion a little (the woman is a Serbian Orthodox) and life on the road. After dinner Darryn and I took a cab to the centre of town where we discovered the most wonderful, beautiful and enchanting little town that I've ever come across, with the exception of maybe Rimini in Italy (but I've since decided that this was better). The whole town had streets made of small blocks of marble - marvelously clean, shiny and colourful. It was a joy to walk on. There was a town square (like in the old days in England) where children were playing hide and seek, riding their bikes and eating ice cream. I got a couple of beautiful shots of them. We walked the narrow streets with little pink flowers blowing everywhere and discovered shops far removed from the ones we've seen so far (tourist crap). Shops selling hand-crafted children's toys, unique wall clocks, quaint lamps and heaps of other awesome stuff. Darryn had to drag me out of each one to save me from spending hundreds on fairy lights and the like. We were both in awe and decided that this was a place where we could both live one day. We wandered the streets some more and watched the people who loved life. It was great. Around 11pm we called a cab to take us back to the hotel, only to discover that our cab driver was a raving lunatic. He was driving whilst watching a soccer game on a mini TV installed in his cab. Yep. Kept his eyes on the TV the whole bloody time. I was watching him (and the road, simultaneously) and I can honestly say he only took his eyes off it just once - when he turned a corner. But hey, this is Greece and that was soccer, so who can blame the guy, right? I mean, it was Euro 2008.
No comments:
Post a Comment