travel blog: Ode to Homer (a.k.a. sorry its a long post)

doh~! getting out of Morocco was a pain in the bum. Apparently Morocco is only really connected to Spain, Paris and Frankfurt by expensive air flights... The initial plan of skipping along the coast of North Africa by ferry was sank due to the recent suspension of several ferry routes in the area..to salt the wound it also seems nearly impossible to get into Egypt without paying for a 400 euro return air ticket from Greece..Greece to Cairo is about Reno to LA..but for 500 usd..darned expensive. Anyway, after some clever searching and route planning Helen and Kelly managed to piece together a relatively cheap string of air flights from Fez to Athens via Casablanca and Barcelona..Unfortunately the travel day ended up being almost 24 hours long..the upside being that we got an 8 hour layover in Barcelona..more than enough time to tour around town and grab more tapas and sangria. Long day short, we arrived in Athens at 4 am local time..and despite this late hour it was still about 100 degrees outside..apparently we had decided to land smack in the middle of a recent heat wave (and subsequent fire storm). We paid 40 euro for a taxi to get from the airport to our hotel in the Plaka area in central Athens which we thought was ridiculously expensive until the sun rose and we were able to scramble up to a rock outcropping near the Parthenon and get a glimpse of the city (some local stray dogs were kind of enough to lead us there in a strange "lassie sort of way").. anyway, wowsers..I thought the LA and Inland Empire sprawls were bad...Athens is ridiculously large and nasty looking with a thick yellow layer of haze blanketing it..apparently it has been suffering from this scale of sprawl, pollution and congestion for several centuries and the airport being a recent addition is of course located about 20 or 30 kms out of town which explains the exorbitant cab fare. Anyway, there we were..sitting on top of a large piece of rock watching the sunrise over the hills behind the Parthenon..kind of a neat scene actually given that for 2 millennia people, all the way back to the original Greeks themselves, have probably been using this perch as a place to watch the sun rise over the Parthenon. In fact the rock itself had become quite smoothed and polished from the 2000+ years of hands and feet scrambling over its surface.. From the rock we mosied down to the entrance to Parthenon to wait to get in..by the time the doors opened several tour groups had already arrived..and within half and hour of us getting inside the other 500 tour groups showed up. Getting out of the Parthenon was actually comedy as we had to fight our way past the throngs of people just to get down the hill. In retrospect it seems that we lucked out with our 4 am arrival time since I think that if we had attempted the Parthenon at any time later in the day that we would have been hard pressed to get close to any of the structures let alone take photos of anything else but other tourists.. So after a couple of extremely hot days in Athens we decided to head towards the milder climes of the Pelopponesian peninsula..to a town called Nafplio by the beach. Nafplio was a welcome relief to the heat and the crowds..well, sort of..yes it was hot but we had the sea to swim in and yes it was crowded but they were all greeks on vacation so it was a much nicer experience than Athens. We ended up staying in a pensione named after Helen that was very quaint. 'Helen' as it turns out is a very popular greek name and I, as it turns out, am somewhat thick since almost every time time I tried to book a place to stay I would begin to spell out Helen's name..which almost universally elicited the response of "yes, I know how to spell Helen, thank you". Only about a week into Greece did I make the connection..Greek = Hellenistic..anyway.. After soaking up the salt and sun in Nafplio for several days we made our way towards Kalamata (where the olives come from) to await our ferry to Crete. On the way we hit a strange summer storm of sporadic heavy rains and (greece) lightening. Taking the ferry to Crete was long and otherwise boring except for the mild bit of choppy waves we hit about half way through. There are these strings-of-beads (kind of like rosary beads but without the religious significance) that only older greek men play with when they get nervous..so as we hit the choppy water the cabin of the ferry became alive with a cricket-like clicking and clacking as hundreds of these beads-strings came out of pockets and began to dance and flail about the wrinkled old hands of just as many older greek men..I told myself that all this noise was surely going to ward off any evil minded water spirit and that we would in fact arrive safely at our destination..which, a few short hours later, we did. Crete is an interesting place politically and geographically.. The mountains behind the town of Hania (chania) are enormous..as big as the French alps we were told..and politically Crete is mostly communist with its own sub-government to greece we were also told. (pls, anyone chime in if this is incorrect as we were skeptical ourselves) Anyway, Crete is neat. Hania, an old Venetian port town, was fun and we were able to take a snorkeling trip out to the local island to see the kri-kri's and a shot down and now sunken german WW2 bomber. From Hania we made our way to the so-overpriced-and-so-not-worth-it town of Heraklio (Iraklio) to await our ferry to Santorini.. I should mention that while in Heraklio we were able to visit the since controversially reconstructed ruins of Knossos..home of the ancient Minoan civilization that was wiped out in a smoldering hot blanket of ash when Santorini (our next destination) exploded 4000 years ago. The ferry to Santorini (thira) was the Flyingcat 4..one of the superfast hydrofoils..this thing was amazing..fast, totally smooth, high tech and a nice bright race car red thanks to Vodafone sponsorship. Santorini is a spectacular place. This once proud and tall island mountain was reduced (in the aforementioned eruption) to a non-contiguous ringlet of steep caldera walls with a still smoking central mound that oozes the occasional lava field and sulphurous stink. We stayed on the outside of the ringlet in a town called Perissa where the beaches are better. After a slight snafu with our lodging reservation thanks to the clowns (i'm being polite here) at Romani travel agency, we settled in for a few days of black volcanic rock beaches and long walks along the crest of the steep caldera walls. It was here that we had to say good bye to our friend Kelly and her funny sunburn (a painfully bright red, almost perfect diamond shape pattern centered across the back of her neck and shoulders). Helen and I wanting to avoid the mayhem of Ios, Naxos and Mykonos made our way back down to Crete this time heading east towards the town of Sitia where we are now awaiting our ferry to the famed island of Rhodes (Rodos) and our next hop into Turkey.

the parthenon being reconstructed..