If you also followed the first series of Race Across the World, where teams travelled overland from London to Singapore, you’ll know that the first checkpoint was at Delphi, Greece (the centre of the world, according to the ancient Greeks). We took our time getting here from London (17 days versus the six days that the winning team took) and any budgetary woes we had paled into insignificance compared to the £1329 that each competitor was given to get all the way to Singapore. However, we obviously saw much more on our way to Delphi and we’re still convinced that we could have won the series if we’d taken part!
We had fewer than 24 hours to spend in this little town, but we were glad to have broken our journey between Patras and Athens here. We arrived late in the evening after our marathon 36-hour journey from Matera, but got up bright and early the next morning to beat the crowds and visit the famous archeological site, home to the Temple of Apollo and the mysterious Oracle. For me, the setting on Mount Parnassus was the most impressive part, particularly as all the most interesting finds from the site had been relocated to the local museum.
The sceptic in me thinks that this has a lot to do with being able to charge a higher entry fee to visit both the site and the museum, but perhaps it’s actually more to do with preserving the finds in a climate-controlled environment. Either way, we visited both and managed not to spend all day in the museum by setting ourselves a strict “only look at two things in each room” rule.
Our bus to Athens wasn’t until the evening, so we spent the afternoon writing and travel planning while sitting on a terrace with the most incredible view over the Gulf of Corinth.
Cat count
Greece has delivered on cats and the cat drought of northern Italy is a distant memory. I’m already regretting deciding to keep count and we’ve had to set up a tracker! At time of writing, we’ve seen 68 cats.