Kay says she has writer’s block so I am called on to open this last lot of words from Greece. I never liked opening when I tried to play cricket because nasty fast bowlers with a shiny new ball would try and hurt the fool at the other end who never really sorted out how to play defensively. But the chance of injury here is slight.
We are at our last tourist destination before having to return to the delights of Athens and the flight home. This place is called Momenvasia and it is a beautiful old cobblestoney small town inside walls, on the side of a precipitous rock which is a little island connected to the mainland by a causeway. Our hotel is a series of beautifully restored old buildings and our room has heaps of space, nice furniture, a beamed ceiling, and a lovely patterned marble floor. Of course perfection is elusive and here it is missed because there are no cars in this town and it is a long bumpy walk, with lots of steps up and down, from the front entrance of the fortress. Kay’s bag has already sustained an injury and a young man had to be found to carry it – we both were expecting the handle he held it by to break off. I gather an arrangement for returning has been settled. Also, the owners and staff are not great at English which was a small problem for Kay this morning when she was trying to get across that her dumb husband had washed a shirt, rolled it up in the towel, stamped on it, gone to breakfast and then went out for a walk leaving it in the towel on the bathroom floor. Of course when we returned, the room had been sorted out and the towels all gone to the laundry and were in a washing machine, which is where Kay and the owneress found the shirt which is now cleaner than ever on this trip. I had to part out for a very nice lunch because Kay was exhausted from all the sign language.
We came here by a four-bus journey from Nafplio which is also by the sea, also very pretty, with a castle on a hill and lots of shops and restaurants. Out hotel there was about one third of the price of the present place but it had two large and effective chandeliers. One was right over our bed and I did wonder how well it was attached to the ceiling. The castle was supposedly 999 steps up from sea level so we took a taxi up and walked down, after an exploration that at times had my stomach twitching at the vertical drops to the rocks below. Kay seems to quite like that sort of thing.
We got to Nafplio by a three-bus three-taxi journey that took all day from Meteora in the north. Meteora is the sight of some amazing high, stand alone rocks (I think over 300m high) upon which keen male people laboriously built monasteries many centuries ago. At one stage there were twenty eight monasteries but now there are only six, but that represents an upward trend because female religious people have turned up and taken over a couple of ones that were abandoned. We did a tour and visited two of places and it is hard to imagine what it must have been like building these things all those years ago. The one we saw now inhabited by nuns was much tidier than the monks one, with neat gardens and all the signs in matching writing. Nowadays these institutions are on the tourist trail and last year a million people visited – €3 a pop to go in each one, plus souvenirs to buy, means they are doing quite well financially.
But they were not the big thrill of the tour. At the end we drove a to a cave where recently some amazing archaeological stuff was found. This place is called Theopetra Cave and rather than give you all the gen you can google it. The best bits were seeing a footprint made by a seven year old Neanderthal child which was one of several that were all made with a left foot, so many thousands of years ago this child went hopping through a muddy section and probably got told off by the mother for getting a nice clean Hyena skin tunic all dirty. Then there was the oldest known man made structure which is a wall of stone across the entrance which has been cleverly dated and coincides with the onset of the coldest ice age. I could imagine the women telling their men to give hunting a miss for the day and do something about the drafts. This place is not on the main tourist trail and I had never heard of it, so it was great to be taken there and find it was actually a really important site.
We went to Meteora from Athens, and we arrived in Athens from Naxos where we last emailed you. Many years ago I was briefly in this city and I remember stating that it was a dump apart from the big tourist sites. And things haven’t really changed much. This memory was quickly reinforced when we had to get into a very crowded metro carriage where someone kept jiggling my bag as I strained to keep my balance and not tip over – when we got out I found my wallet pocket had been opened but my rudimentary defence system against such actions had stopped my wallet disappearing. Then we had a bit of fun finding our hotel. We ended up stopped on a footpath trying to coordinate the detail of three maps when I looked up and saw the hotel over the other side of the street. It was very close to the Acropolis so we got there early the next morning, thank goodness, and did all the walking reading and photo taking. It has changed a fair bit since my first time and is at present pretty much a construction zone, but the presence of the Parthenon remains as always. We did most the rest of the tourist stuff over a couple of days and there is a bit left that will be sorted before we leave.
WARNING – the following paragraph includes gross generalisations. I have a theory about cities that have been the centre of tourism for several thousand years. Along with Athens I have been to two others, Cairo and Varanasi and they are all the same as far as this theory is concerned. The theory is that the people who deal with tourists in these long-visited places have a new gene, developed over centuries by survival of the fittest processes so they now are hard wired to lie, cheat and thieve with absolutely no sensation of the slightest wrongdoing. They also automatically understand how far they can go with each punter and adapt their behaviour accordingly without any thought. So in Athens the accommodation is the most expensive it can be without stopping the trade. The meals are the least they can get away with without making you get up and leave. The all round service is perfunctory and just enough to stop you wanting to trip up the tardy nearly insolent waiters. But one taxi driver’s calculation was not quite right, or he didn’t realise I had looked up the detail of what they are supposed to charge – by my reckoning he wanted 30% more than was needed and although it wasn’t going to break the bank, a matter of principle had arisen and had to be dealt with. This involved sharp words, a couple of reciprocal insults and the punter walking into the bus terminal feeling justice had been done.
My wine research took an upturn in quality yesterday when I followed little hand painted signs to ”Byron’s Wine Tasting. Byron is a very cultured 78 year old who has retired to Monemvasia after a high powered career and in order to not get bored has an interest in a local winery. The wine tasting was not very commercial as there was only me and him and eight different wines (all from newly opened bottles) with some nibbles – when we seemed finished, and it took a while, I asked how much did I owe and he named a small figure, and then said I had one more to try. This was a beautiful sweet wine, and a bottle of it is my bag. As usual the whites were outclassed by the reds, which were pretty good. It was dark when I found my room and wife.
Kay: Well, what could I add to that? Dennis has everything covered perfectly while I’ve been out to have my afternoon caffeine fix and attend to my knitting which is very important as #2 Grandchild will be arriving in 6 weeks and I’ m trying to make Amy an old-fashioned bed jacket in 3-ply (that’s girl talk) from a knitting pattern that was my grandmother’s and shows a 1950’s price of 1/9d. Hopefully I will finish it in time for Paul to admire his wife sitting up in bed with it and the new child.
Meanwhile we’ve used almost all our pills and contact lenses so it must be time to head home.
Hear from you soon
Cheers
Dennis & Kay
Temple of Hephaestus and goddess. 
John Cleese has a lot to answer for in Athens 
“Free” lounger on the beach at Paleohora in Crete 
NZ Forces command bunker Hill 107, Maleme Airport, Crete 
Can only be Santorini 
Akrotiri archealogical site 3 enclosed acres 
Unfinished marble statue of Dionysos 800BC Naxos 
Monastery perched above Meteora 
Top left Nethanderthal fottprint from 7 year old. 
Oldest discovered manmade structure from the last ice age 
Looking down on Momembavia