Sara – Page 31 – Nearly Neutral Travel

Everything but the apocalypse

I should probably explain that I’ve spent the last few days desperately trying to convince Oli that the Acropolis is actually called the apocalypse. (“Shall we get dinner after the apocalypse?”) Sadly, it didn’t catch on.

This was our first visit to Athens, so we had a lot of ground to cover. On our first morning, we followed a Lonely Planet walking tour, which is our favourite way to get our bearings in any new city. This took us past the changing of the guard at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, where the soldiers perform a slow motion march in their pom-pom shoes and then have their brows mopped in a strangely tender manner by another soldier. It was a very hot day but still, it was a little odd to watch.

Next, we passed the Roman Agora, with its 64-seat public latrine (going to the loo in front of that many people is surely the stuff of nightmares!) We also walked through the pretty Anafiotika neighbourhood, which sat just under the Acropolis but had the feel of a peaceful village. Here, we saw our 50th Greek cat (hidden Where’s Wally? style in one of the photos below).

We took full advantage of being in a capital city and enjoyed the international food scene – coconut curries at the buzzy Dara Thai Restaurant, south Indian cuisine at Dosa House, and a seriously, seriously good lentil moussaka at Veganaki. I would honestly revisit Athens just to eat the vegan moussaka again, and until then it will haunt my dreams.

These were the small dosas. Just imagine how big the “family dosa” must be!

We perfected the art of peering through fences at Roman ruins. I say art – there’s obviously not much to it really. Oli is helpfully demonstrating below, while saving on admission to the Archaeological Site of Kerameikos.

It was only a matter of time before Oli dragged me along to something energy-related, so we visited a disused Coal Gas plant that had been converted into an events space. I was envisaging something like Coal Drops Yard in Kings Cross and perhaps it would have been a bit more buzzy if not for being a grey Tuesday afternoon. Anyway, it wasn’t a wasted journey because we took a look at some of the exhibits, met another cat and had a go on an enormous adventure playground.

Finally, we spent some time touring some of the best street art in the city. Athens has become known for its graffiti (much of it expressing dissatisfaction towards the government’s handling of the financial crisis) and these street art projects have been an attempt to channel that creativity into something a little more structured.

We definitely only scratched the surface of this great city and would love to return to explore it more (and eat more vegan moussaka).

We made it to the first checkpoint!

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.

🎵 Diamonds are Matera 🎵

We honestly didn’t choose to go to Matera as our last stop in Italy just because it appeared in the most recent Bond film, No Time to Die, but it was definitely a bonus when we realised it had been the filming location of the opening sequence. We re-watched the film while we were in the city and our B&B host also showed us a fascinating video of how some parts of the sequence had been filmed.

The cobbled streets were super slippery, as Oli can attest – sadly I don’t have a video but it looked a bit like this:

So, the stunt co-ordinators used about £55,000 worth of sticky, sticky Coca-Cola on the streets so that the Aston Martins and motorbikes had enough grip to drive at high speeds. In order to protect the facade of a church and other buildings around a piazza during filming of one of the scenes, they recreated a new concrete cast to cover the buildings that replicated all the original features. So essentially, what you see in the film is in Matera and looks just like the real thing, but isn’t at all.

On the face of it, Matera is an absolutely gorgeous hilltop city where many of the traditional dwellings are carved out of the natural caves. It’s one of the longest continually habited areas in the world (since approximately 7000 BC!), but was described last century as “the shame of Italy” for the poor conditions in which residents were living. From the 1950s, the whole area was cleared, with residents forcibly moved to new accommodation in the new town. However, in 1993, the Sassi districts were declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and in 2019, Matera was named as a European Capital of Culture, so its fortunes are changing. There has been much renovation work in recent years to bring the cave dwellings to modern standards of habitability (still in evidence as we wandered the city).

We were lucky enough to get a reservation in a cave room at La Dolce Vita (one of the few bits of advance planning we did before leaving London) and it was certainly the best accommodation we experienced during our whole Italy leg – it’s not every day that you’re delighted to be given a windowless room!

Our B&B host urged us not to take things at face value as we toured the city (good advice for life, I guess), and we spent a lot of time trying to imagine how this beautiful, clean and easygoing city could ever have been anything else. I suppose that if you add poor sanitation and a lack of electricity to living in a cave, things could go downhill fast. We did actually visit a recreation of a traditional dwelling, but my main takeaway from this was that families seemed to have found some pretty ingenious places for storing their many children, since there wasn’t sufficient space for beds for the whole family.

As always, we spent most of our time exploring on foot and sampling the local aperitivo scene.

On our final morning, we set our alarms for 5am and hiked across the ravine to watch the sunrise with a view over to Matera. This was a gorgeous way to end our time in Italy. I imagine the view would have been even better at sunset as the sun would have gone down behind the city, but we wouldn’t have had the viewpoint to ourselves and that glorious feeling of smugness at being the first there was so worth the early alarm!

I’m not sure that it’s clear here, but there’s a huge ravine between the city and where I’m standing to take this photo

The next part of our journey involved a 36-hour stint on a train, overnight ferry and two buses to reach our third country, Greece. We were excited about taking the ferry, although we didn’t get a huge amount of sleep at first as it was so busy (instead, we upheld the British reputation for drinking by sharing an Italian red straight from the bottle as we couldn’t find any cups).

Thankfully, most people disembarked in the middle of the night at Igoumenitsa, so we were able to spread out to sleep and then spent the next morning watching the Greek coastline drift by before docking at Patras port around midday.

We had a long hot walk into the city and then another long wait until our evening bus (which we mostly filled with exploring every bus station in the city before eventually discovering that our bus would depart from a ferry terminal – obvs), but we were immediately struck by the famous Greek hospitality when our server in a cafe gave me his personal recommendation for the most chocolatey snack and then promptly gifted it to me. I think he could see I really needed it!

We’re so excited to be in Greece and to be able to spend a few weeks exploring it further. It’s got a lot to live up to after Italy, but we have high hopes!