9 March 2010 (Tuesday #2) – Argolis day, Epidaurus

Repeat from last post: Today we did the “Argolis Excursion.” Specifically, we went to three places in the Argolis region of the Peloponnese in Greece—Corinth, Epidaurus, and Mycenae. The last post covered the Corinth Canal, and this one is about Epidaurus.

After Corinth, we got back on the bus (and sat on the right side!) for the drive to Epidaurus. Here’s a view out the bus window, showing what Greece is famous for—trees and mountains:

Depending on the path the bus driver took, the water is probably the Saronic Gulf, but it could be the Gulf of Argolis. It’s hard to get one’s bearings with all those trees in the way.

Hold the phone! Here’s a bunch of trees; they must be hiding something really important:

Hmmm. It was just more blurred trees, mountains, and water. However, that almost looks like a narrow, white beach along the edge of the hills on the left side:

If so, it’s the only white beach we saw the entire time we were in Greece. Sometimes the mountains went right to the water with no beach, while other beaches were brown and rocky. (Destin it was not.)

Cute farmhouse:

At last the bus has arrived at Epidaurus:

The colors in this photo are straight out of the camera. Although spring had not quite arrived in Greece, the trees were already green, and on this day the sky was a gorgeous blue.

Interruption for history lesson:

• Epidaurus is reputed to be the birthplace of Apollo’s son Epidauria, the healer. Therefore, it was the most celebrated healing center in the Classical world.
• The Theater at Epidauras was built in the 4^th century BC, and it’s considered the best preserved structure in Greece from the Classical period. In 426 AD the Christian Roman emperor banned all activities at the theater. An earthquake in 528 destroyed it and buried it until excavations began in 1881. Greek dramas are staged there now in July and August.
• The theater at Epidaurus is also famous for its perfect acoustics. Without amplification all spectators can hear the unamplified spoken word, that is, if the speaker is standing on the round thing in the center of the theater and if it hasn’t rained (apparently water messes up the acoustics). The theater's perfect acoustics are the result of its being built into a sloping hillside and the limestone from which the seating was constructed. The limestone also acts as a filter for low frequencies, thus eliminating the sound of chatter from the audience.
• The theater is 350 feet across and 55 rows high. It seats about 15,000. (The photos don't do its size justice; it's big!)

When we get off the bus, we always encounter the local stray animal population. In Athens it was dogs, but in Epidaurus it was cats. See:

 
I just realized I didn’t show any photos of the dogs in yesterday's posts about Athens. Must go look for a dog photo . . .. Found one:

No, I have no idea why I took a photo of a dog under a motorcycle. In fact, this is not a typical dog because it’s on the small side. Greece is loaded with HUGE stray dogs.

Interesting facts about dogs in Athens:

• Many, many dogs are strays, especially as the economy has worsened. People who can't afford to keep their dogs open the door and send them out to live on the streets. (I'll bet microchipping is not big in Greece.)
• The strays are fat.
• The strays wear collars.

Apparently, they’re not big on euthanizing strays in Athens. The officials take care of them healthwise, though. Once a year they round up the dogs, give them shots and a general health check. The dogs’ are given new tags for their collars (also provided by the government) to show they’re current on their shots. Then the officials take them back to wherever they were picked up and release them.

The citizens and tourists take care of the dogs' feeding and attention needs, to the extent that the dogs are HUGE, friendly, and generally laid back. Even seeing a pack of dogs coming toward you is not scary in Athens. You don’t see dogs that have been run over by cars, because supposedly the street dogs are street savvy, even knowing how to cross with pedestrians at the traffic lights.

Back to Epidaurus . . . While waiting to get inside the theater at Epidaurus, we saw this building with some ancient ruins (probably Doric columns) stacked up on the porch:

Parts of ancient ruins are everywhere!!

Then we climbed these steps to get to the theater:

Looks like someone filled in the ancient marble with cement.

Here’s our tour guide for the day, giving us the history of the theater:

We liked her a lot; she really knew her stuff. Like all the guides we had, she spoke several languages.

We entered the theater through the ancient passageways that are visible far back on the left side:

We traveled with the couple on the left for two days. They are Marilyn and Ronnie from Vancouver. Note the people on the right. It’s a young couple with two kids and a grandmother. The mother of the kids is wearing mostly white to walk around dirty, ancient sites AND she’s wearing boots with very high heels?? Strange.

Here are similar columns on the other side of the theater:

One or both of these sides was/were the front of the dressing area for the performers.

Taa-daa—the Epidaurus Theater :

Note the woman scurrying to the center of the “stage.”

Now she’s at the center, hunched over a round thing on the ground:

Here's a close-up of the woman over The Raised Center Thing (see red arrow):

(Note to self: Be careful when leaning over at tourist attractions, or your butt might show up in someone’s photos.) What she was doing was dropping a coin for her tour group to hear the perfect acoustics of the theater. Sometimes people stand there on The Raised Center Thing and tear a tissue or strike a match to demonstrate how perfectly the sound carries to all the spectators.

Here I am standing on The Raised Center Thing:

Not having a coin, tissue, or match, I repeated, “Testing. Conrad. Testing. Conrad.” This embarrassed Conrad, so he ran up the steps to get away from me. This photo shows that he was now far away from me:

I took photos of Conrad running to the top of the theater:

Conrad at the top:

That woman with the white clothing and high heels went up to the top, too, AND she took the kids with her. I was impressed. I admired her spunk from my seat.

Conrad took photos from the top:

Nice view, eh? (The "eh" is in honor of our Canadian friends.)

An artsy photo:

Check where the red arrow is pointing:

I think someone else got sick of the trees blocking all the important tourist sites and started a forest fire, like I was threatening to do.

Conrad's self-portrait from the top of the theater:

Then Conrad ran back down the steps, ran across some of the “seats” . . .

And jumped.

Conrad has a lot of energy.

While he was running and jumping, I sat:

(Do my shoes look like elf shoes to anyone else?)

Conrad sitting:

Conrad standing on The Raised Center Thing:

When we left the theater, we encountered a path winding through trees:

That led us to suspect Something Important was behind the trees.

We followed the path and saw this sign:

The red arrow points to where we were standing at that moment, in the area outside the theater. The rest of the stuff on the map shows all the structures that used to be on this site.

We also found a little museum with lots of statues of clothed people and (of all things) ancient surgical tools:

More statues:

Before we left Epidaurus, Conrad talked to this cat:

Then we got back on the bus to go to Mycenae (see next post), and Conrad, as usual, fell asleep:

These last two photos show part of Conrad's cast, acquired because he broke his distal radius in three places before our trip. We are a clumsy family.

9 March 2010 (Tuesday #1) – Argolis day, Corinth Canal

Well, good grief. It's taking me many times longer to do these posts than the whole trip lasted. I must pick up speed!

This post is about the Corinth Canal in the Argolis region of the Peloponnese peninsula in the western part of Greece.

Today we did the “Argolis Excursion.” We went from Athens in the Attica region of Central Greece (which I would call Southern Greece) to the Peloponnese peninsula region, which is Western Greece. Well, technically the Peloponnese has been an island since 1893 when the Corinth Canal was constructed. Whatever it is, it’s covered with mountains, too! It’s sometimes called Peloponnesus, because the Greeks have serious spelling issues.

This map shows the regions of Greece, with the Attica and Peloponnese peninsulas indicated:

As I said, Athens is on the Attica peninsula. It's about where the word “Attica” is.

Today we went to three places in the Argolis region of the Peloponnese—Corinth, Epidaurus, and Mycenae. This map shows the three locations:

(Those arrows do not indicate our bus’ exact path.)

Conrad really knows how to set up a trip! I’d either join a tour group (like one of Rick Steves’ groups) or show up in a foreign country and be clueless about what to do. On the other hand, Conrad got with a travel agent in the States, told her basically what we wanted to do/see in Greece, and let her set up a number of day tours for us to choose from.

All we had to do each morning was to show up in our hotel lobby at 7:35 a.m. We had a morning routine. First, we gorged on that free breakfast buffet in the hotel restaurant, and then we went to the restrooms off the main floor lobby, where I apparently couldn’t tell the difference between the signs on the doors (they're exactly the same as in the United States; go figure) and generally went into the wrong restroom, except the day I ended up locked in that stall . . ..

After the potty break, we sat in the lobby and tried to avoid the tour group that assembled in our lobby that must have been from some National Lampoon movie. They were convinced we were part of their group, and they introduced themselves loudly and repeatedly.

At 7:35 a guy would enter the lobby and more or less say, “Gibson.” (He had a strong accent.) Without saying another word, he’d turn and go outside. We followed him onto the street (good thing he wasn’t an ax murderer or something!), where he’d stop next to a bus, which we always hoped was our bus for the day. One time he walked about two blocks away from the hotel before stopping at a bus. We followed him anyway.

Here’s our name caller, as seen through the bus window:

We called him Ponytail Man for obvious reasons:

The bus would make several stops around Athens before setting out for the tour. We knew when the last people of that day’s tour group had been picked up, because Ponytail Man would stand on the sidewalk next to the bus, remove the band from his ponytail, flip his hair around a few times, and walk off. I so regret not getting a video of that.

On this day we left Athens via the National Road. Actually, we left Athens every day but one via the National Road. I thought that National Road was one heck of a highway until I learned all the major highways are called ~The National Road~ with a number added. For example, there is Greek National Road 1 and Greek National Road 8 and GNRs with other numbers, too.

It always seemed to take nearly an hour to get out of Athens (lots of those 5,000,000 people are on the city streets at the same time). Once on the National Road, we left behind the massive congestion but retained the massive hills and mountains that are Greece.

Here we have just left Athens and entered the countryside. This photo was obviously not taken from our hotel . . .

because you can see the Parthenon!

It amazed me the number of billboards, signs, and store names that were in English. Some were a mixture of the two languages, like this one:

From the first day of our touring, I told Conrad we had to sit on the right side of the bus so we could see and photograph The Important Sights along the way. If you sit on the left, it’s hard to take photographs across the people sitting on the right. I acquired my Where-to-Sit-on-a-Tour-Bus knowledge from my earlier, extensive traveling through Europe. (That was a joke.)

For the record, almost EVERY SINGLE important thing to see in Greece was on the left side of every bus on which we rode. Nevertheless, we stuck to that right side, because I was sure Important Stuff would eventually show up on our side. I was wrong.

Another problem we had on the tour buses was limited visibility. Almost EVERY SINGLE time a tour guide on a bus pointed out something important, we couldn’t see it because it was surrounded by trees. See; here’s Conrad looking out the bus window at something important:

Since I can’t see it in the photo, I can’t remember what it was.

Here’s another view from the bus:

Since stuff is visible here, you can be sure it was nothing of significance. However, the Greek shipping industry is hugely important overall. Without it, the Greek economy would be even further in deep doo-doo.

Here is something else that was important, as evidenced by the covering of trees:

The blurring is due to the speed of the bus. Greek bus drivers know no fear. We were often right on the edge of a narrow road with a sheer drop-off next to us. We didn't always have guard rails either. Scary.

One day on one of the bus tours I got a tad frustrated with the view-blocking trees and said, “Well, give me a match, and I’ll burn down all the trees!!” Perhaps I said that a bit too loudly, because everyone on the bus turned to look at me. Conrad loved it when I did things like that.

At last we reached our first stop of the Argolis Excursion, the Corinth Canal. It’s about 55 miles west of Athens. Here I am (with some strangers) after I got off the bus and was about to cross the highway:

After looking at the canal, we returned to the shops in the background where I obtained postcards (bought some and accidentally stole some others) to send to family and friends in the States and in Italy.

Here’s the Corinth Canal:

Notice anything? Like its ridiculous narrowness? It’s only about 70 feet wide and about 26 feet deep.

Check out the sign by the canal:

It does not look like the best place to take a cruise, but it’s used mostly by tourist ships, since freighters certainly wouldn’t fit.

The canal connects the Gulf of Corinth with the Saronic Gulf, both in the Aegean Sea. It separates the Peloponnese peninsula from the Greek mainland, making the peninsula an island. The canal was built between 1881 and 1893, although it was first conceived in the 7th century BC. The problem with constructing the canal was that it had to be cut through heavily faulted sedimentary rock in an active seismic zone.

More photos of the Corinth Canal:

The above photos give a closer look at the sedimentary rock.

(I'm so glad I didn't learn until after the trip that Greece in on an active seismic zone. My broken leg, Conrad's broken arm, and the national riot provided plenty of drama, without the additional worry of an earthquake.)

Conrad smiling and leaning on the railing on the highway over the Corinth Canal:

From the Corinth Canal we headed to Epidauras. See the next post.