Day 22 Nafplio to Ioannina

We drove up to the Nafplio fort first thing but chose not to go in, after checking out the views of the town below we started off for Olympia, the ancient birth place of the Olympics. We wound our way up the mountains and through the  villages on some pretty narrow roads, approaching goat tracks in some places. We decided to check the GPS and found that M had set it to avoid tolls ... that is certainty one way to make sure you see plenty of authentic Greek countryside!

The GPS is quite hilarious as it can't read the Greek names so it reads out every letter individually which makes for some very long street names ... "turn right at alpha omega beta kappa lambda mu mu epsilon .....".

Unfortunately our GPS dramas weren't over as it decided to take us on an extended tour of Olympia and its country back lanes before bringing us to the wrong entrance of the archaeological site. We were headed straight towards the biggest crowd of tourists we had seen since Macchu Pichu. Not sure whether we should move forward, we did a U-turn and went back up the road to park the car under a lone tree.

Maybe we have been spoilt up until now as we aren't used to sharing Greek archaeological sites with so many people. We decided to go to the museum first as it seemed a bit quieter, before tackling the site itself with the groups of people with numbered stickers on their chests following a tour leader holding a paddle stick with the same number.

The Olympus site is the original Olympic Village and was better than we expected as some of the reviews had made it sound like it was in shambles but to the contrary we found it a great site to explore. Lots of tourists lined up on the 2500 year old marble starting blocks at the running track, not really our style. At one stage a large snake slithered past M on the path, he obviously didn't find the tourists too noisy, he must be used to sharing his habitat with thousands of tourists everyday. It's the third large snake we havve seen in 24 hours, a quick google search said that there is only one venomous snake in Greece, but how to tell which one?

We missed the cheaters display where the players who were caught cheating have had their name and their actions recorded for all to see, but as it was in Greek we wouldn't have been able to read it anyway.

On the way out of Olympia our GPS continued its unhelpful routing taking us around Olympus's goat tracks in different circles, until we finally found the road to Katakolo, which looked like a nice spot on the water for lunch. We weren't far out of Katakolo when we realised this was the town the cruise ships came into before transferring everyone to Olympus. There were two massive ships in the harbour, one displaying the acronym we had seen on the stickers worn by the tourists.

We had to keep pushing on as we hoped to get to Ioannina that night. M decided that he might as well drive like a Greek person if we were going to get anywhere so started following everyone else and passing if there was enough space rather than what the lines painted on the road indicated what you should be doing, and we made it to Ioannina in the early evening.