Hello all,
Well here is our first report from Greece. We are currently in Nafplio at the moment which is a small port town in the Peloponnese area of Greece. Somewhere around 150km from Athens toward the southwest and very near to the city of Argos.
Our trip so far has been great. We spent the first two nights in Athens and did the customary touring of the Acropolis which is the location of the famous Parthenon temple and other runis.
From there we rented a car and pounded through the world renowned Athens traffic, which wasn't that bad after driving in Buenos Aires back in November. Although I cheated and have maps for my GPS of Athens and most of Greece :)
From there we drove around 350km from Athens to Meteora. This is the site of numerous monestaries which were created in the cliffs of Meteora back in the 15th century or so. These are amazing structures and are still used by monks today. The scenery here is unlike anything I have seen. The rock formations are stunning as is the hike on the steps to the top of them!
After a day at the monestaries we set out for another 150 km drive to Delphi. Dephi dates back to the 4-5th century BC, and was the location where the two eagles that Zeus released at opposite ends of the world met, thereby making it the center of the universe. There is a ton of history here and wikipedia will do a much better job of explaining it all :)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delphi
How they created these sites some 2500 years ago is beyond belief when you see the sheer volume of rock that was used to create the buildings. It would be a serious challenge today to create such buildings.
The drive into and out of Delphi is awesome with very winding roads. I had as much fun as I could in our small worn out Hyaundi, the guys in their Porsche's and BMW's were probably having much more fun than I was!
From Delphi we set out for another 350km trip to Nafplio which is where I am writing this from. We will spend a few days here and see the Palamidi Fortress tomorrow, apparently there is around 1000 steps to climb to get to the top! From there I am not certain exactly where we will go.
For some reason Greek history is full of people who like to build things up on mountains, I have done more hiking in the past 5 days than I have done in the past 5 years!
For all the pictures (there are well over 1000 so far), here is my Picasa page, check back over the next few days as we have a reliable internet connection at this hotel so I should be able to get most of them uploaded.
http://picasaweb.google.com/can773/
Chad/Agnes
