Day 31 Roda, Corfu to Tirana, Albania

We caught the 9am ferry from Corfu Port and we understood why they didn't run all day, there was only us and two other tourists on the boat, plus about half a dozen Albanians.

At the port in Saranade we caught a taxi to the bus station where we purchased tickets to the Albanian capital of Tirana on the 10.30am furgon (mini bus). That gave us just enough time to go to the bank and get some of the local currency (lek), a sim card and a packet of chips for the five and a half hour trip.

We arrived into Tirana and checked into our room. We had decided to join the 6pm walking tour and though it had been raining it didn't look too bad so we went to the square to meet the group. Incredibly M met someone in the group who he used to work with, an amazing coincidence as Albania isn't on the tourist trail and there were only a dozen of us on the tour.

The tour was really interesting with the guide telling stories of living under communism until 1991, we were taken to see underground bunkers, and heard about the government propaganda that told the locals that the US wanted to invade because Albania was the best country on earth. That has changed of course, now they even have a street named after George Bush.

We also went to a Catholic church which had a statue of Mother Teresa out the front, Mother Teresa was born in Macedonia to Albanian parents so both countries like to claim her as their own.

Our guide also told us about the new Prime Minister who turns up to international meetings in a black suit and white runners, apparently he is an eccentric artist and is working hard to fight corruption and improve the country.

Unfortunately after not too long on the tour there was a loud clap of thunder and a few moments after that we were all drenched, the tour was unfortunately rushed through at the end, and we hurried back to our hotel to get changed before heading out again for dinner.

Day 30 Roda, Corfu

Corfu is very English. there are English people working in the shops and restaurants and we realise we haven't heard a "kalimera" since we arrived. This is quite disappointing as what's the point of traveling to another country if it has been homogenised to feel like home, where is the cultural element? Luckily its not as bad as somewhere like Benidorm in Spain but scarily we did see someone wearing a Benidorm t-shirt.

Along with the missing kalimeras is bread missing at the beginning of dinner, water brought to the table without asking, free desserts and shots of alcohol from cute miniature bottles that we'd experienced in the rest of Greece.

While K relaxed at the hotel, M walked to the abandoned monastery of Agia Ekaterini, after which we both headed along the coast away from Roda town for a drink, before returning for dinner to the ever constant 80's music and theme from Zorba the Great.

Day 29 Roda, Corfu

We drove to the little town of Paleokastrista for lunch which has a small beach and a nice harbour with cute restaurants overlooking the water. We weren't the only ones who had turned up in the town for lunch, a flock of goats thought it was Christmas when they found the overflowing mounds of garbage and were doing their best to help Corfu with the rubbish issue by munching through as much as they could.

After spending the afternoon chilling at a beach side cafe the haze had lifted a little from yesterday and the mountains of Albania were a bit easier to see. Albania is our next stop and is only 20kms away from Corfu as the crow flies.

Day 28 Athens to Corfu

Our flight to Corfu was at 10am so we dropped our rental car off at the Athens Airport then took the easy hour long flight to our last Greek stop, the island of Corfu. At the other end we picked up another hire car, this dropping off a dirty car and picking up a clean one a couple of hours later works well!

We are staying on the beach in Roda which is about an hour's drive from Corfu town and the airport. The first and continuing thing we noticed was the massive piles of garbage on the side of the roads. Apparently the issue has been going on for over a year, the locals that live near the tip say it is too appalling to live by and are picketing the gates and refusing municipal trucks access. The local government's recommendation is to keep your rubbish at home, however everyone just leaves it in the street.

Our hotel choice seems rather lovely and there aren't too many tourists yet. The beach is a little disappointing, we had read it was sandy with a few pebbles but that description should be reversed to very pebbly with a little sand.

We took the nice walk into the busy part of town, here the beaches are sandier but still not the great beaches we are used to at home.

Day 27 Delphi to Artemida

We felt quite smug as we left Delphi and there were already 15 buses at the site before 10am. We counted another 32 buses on their way to Delphi in the next half hour until we turned off the major road to head to the seaside town of Paralia.

We wound our way through sleepy villages until we arrived at the even sleepier Paralia, apart from a couple of old guys sitting on a veranda and a tiny pebble beach there wasn't any sign of life. We had considered staying there the night before so we were pleased we hadn't. We entered Artemida into the GPS and kept driving, eventually joining onto the official Marathon route. We have realised that no one takes any notice of the speed limits so we don't either.

Artemida was exactly the type of town we were looking for for our final night on mainland Greece. It is 15 minutes from the Athens airport and on the sea, with restaurants on the sand at the waters edge, so we booked ourselves into a room for the night.

Day 26 Thessaloniki to Delphi

We would have liked to have left the car at Thessaloniki and continued travelling north but the exorbitant one way rental fee of over $800 means it's better to head back to Athens and pick up a $100-ish plane fare to our next destination, which we decide is the island of Corfu. We collected our car from the car park where the attendant seems to spend his day playing an advanced game of tetris with the cars in his care as he skillfully manipulates them around the tiny area to quickly return yours.

With a day of driving in front of us we are quickly reminded of how difficult it is to see when the traffic lights change to red as the only light is next to you and none further forward, in fact someone has a theory on the internet that that is why old Greek people are hunched over, because they have spent their lives hunched over their steering wheels trying to see the traffic lights. Most Greek drivers use what we would call the emergency lane by driving half in and half out and therefore creating enough room for faster drivers to pass.

As we need petrol we come across a large service stop complete with food that is more like the ones we have at home. K ordered what was called a sausage pie, it looked like a sausage roll but once she bit into it she realised it was a hot dog encased in pastry. We continue driving with the snowcapped Mt Olympus, the largest mountain in Greece in front of us and road signs warning us of bears in the area, which is as novel to us as kangaroo signs must be for overseas visitors in Australia.

We make it to Thermopylae where there is a little information and an impressive monument to commemorate the war between 100,000 Persians and 7,000 Greeks. Thermopylae, meaning Hot Gates is a large and very hot spring with a strong sulphur smell.

We made it to Delphi mid-afternoon so about 5pm we decided to visit the archaeological site and take advantage of the summer late closing time of 8pm and also hopefully miss the Athens day tour buses. When we went to pay the €12 per person entrance fee we were told it was free for the day as it was International Museum Day, we were glad we didn't put the visit off until the morning!.

It was a bit of a hike to the stadium at the top but well worth the effort and the crowds were very light. As beautiful as the Greek archaeological sites are its a shame there isn't more money spent on restoration as they don't measure up to other sites we've seen, such as Ephesus in Turkey.

We decide to stay the night in Delphi and enjoy the restaurants with the beautiful valley views, as well as the free desserts that are offered after every meal in Greece.

Day 25 Thessaloniki

Our Greek vocabulary is growing at about two words a week but we expect it will be like the Swahili words we picked up in Africa from which the only word we can now remember is Muzungu (white person). We started with efharisto (thank you), which apparently we say way too much and the Greeks find it annoying, its not necessary to thank your waiter for bringing a drink, a nod will do. Then we learnt kalimera and kalispera (good morning and good afternoon, although their afternoon starts much later than ours) we then moved on to ne for yes,(that sounds confusingly like nay), yassas (hi, is used a lot as a greeting), yamas (cheers) and paracolo (you're welcome, said to us a lot).

We join the free walking tour of Thessaloniki that goes from 10 - 12, there's not much walking but we hear plenty of historic stories and myths as we see the main highlights of the city centre, We also realise that we often see black gowned priests with long white beards walking around the streets but we are yet to see any nuns. 

After a walk along the promenade past the historical white tower we decide to do something quite out of character and we get on a cheesy pirate boat for a 30 minute cruise of the bay. The cruise is "free" providing you buy a drink on board, the drinks are only about €3 more than in the bars and it is now very hot so we decide to take some time out and chill on the boat for a while. Our pirate ship comes complete with a pirate decked out in jewellery and a large skull and bones flag to wave from the bow while ringing a large brass bell to attract other tourists. The music on board is the same music we have heard everywhere across Greece, 1980's pop, it seems that Greece has been musically stuck in a time warp, on the plus side we know all the words which is not something we can say about contemporary pop.

While eating dinner about 8.30pm the skies darken as they did at the same time last night and we watch as parents hurriedly gather up their children from playing and rush them home before the nightly thunderstorm starts, its a good line to have, "you can play outside until the rain starts then we have to go home".

Day 24 Meteora to Thessaloniki

Meteora is made up of massive rock pinnacles, and on 24 of these pinnacles are monasteries. The pinnacles are immense solid rocks split by earthquakes and weathered by wind and water over 60 million years. The monks built their monasteries on top of them during a period between the 14th to 16th centuries as it was considered the perfect place to achieve absolute isolation, and it has now become a holy place for Christian pilgrims around the world, as well as a major tourist destination.

Fortunately for us they no longer use ropes and nets to ascend the monasteries, there is a perfectly good road that will take you to the gates. The down side to this is that the bus loads of tourists on tours also get to bypass the rope system and because we were there just after 9am we became one of the mob (if possible we usually try and time our visits to avoid them if we can). 

We started off at the biggest monastery, the Megalo (Great) Meteora, There are still many steps to ascend and as women aren't allowed to wear pants K borrowed a wrap around skirt from the pile. The monastery is in superb condition with a stunning church where many people are praying, including orthodox priests with mobile phones. The views are breathtaking as are the crowds and we drive onto the next on our list.

Monastery Varlaam is a slightly smaller but just as immaculate version of the previous monastery. Apparently women have only been permitted inside since 1928 when there was a fire and they helped to put it out. The frescoes are vibrantly preserved and we watched a man working on one of them above his head. One room holds an immense 16th century oak barrel that a lot of people think held wine to while away the hours but was actually used to store water.

The third monastery was St Stephen's but here the mass of teenage school groups and tourists made it a crush and as the owner of our hotel said, seen one monastery seen them all so we set our GPS to take us to Thessaloniki and we hit the road.

Thessaloniki has a large promenade on the water with many upmarket restaurants and bars, no signs of austerity measures and high unemployment rates in this part of the city at least. Although the promenade is quite nice there is a major road between the restaurants and the water so it is very noisy.

Day 23 Ioannina to Meteora

We headed off into the mountains to visit the Vikos Gorge area. We stopped at the cute little village of Monodendri that felt like it belonged in the Swiss Alps, although everything was made from the local stone which gave it different look. We went looking for some breakfast and although it was after 9am the village looked asleep until we found a place where we could order coffee and cake for brekky, very Greek.

We then drove on through the fascinating Stone Forest which is something we have never seen before, literally a forest consisting of massive greenery interspersed with natural layered slate type stone. We stopped at the Oxia viewpoint which has impressive views of the gorge that is classified as one of the deepest gorges in the world, it was also lovely and quiet with only two other couples there.We drove onto Vradeto village which has a great lookout of Vikos Gorge.

The mountain roads are really interesting because every couple of kilometers you come across sheepdogs, Mareemas and other breeds that are looking after flocks of goats and sheep, its fascinating to see so many of them doing their job without any shepherds overseeing them. At one point on the road the flock decided to cross the road in front of us, one of the rams got its horns stuck in some pig wire and the Mareema was standing behind it while the flock moved on. How does a dog deal with the difficult dilemma of sacrificing one for the greater good?

We continued our country drive dodging all the cattle who believed the road belonged to them and stopping at some stunning old stone bridges that crossed the Vikos River.

The country roads are very winding with many switch backs and there are many shrines, some of then quite beautiful and elaborate, originally we thought they were to mark a death on the road but there were so many we decided they must be for people to offer a prayer for safety while driving, but we later found that the former is correct and that they are recognising the death of a loved one. We were sad to leave this beautiful part of Greece but we needed to get to Meteora that night.

We made good time and arrived in the town of Kastraki at the foot of the majestic Meteora. Once again the cute village of Kastraki wouldn't look out of place in the Swiss Alps. We were amused to find the Sydney Hotel complete with a large sign of a map of Australia with the obligatory kangaroo in the middle.

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.