Day 12
(We re-counted the days, and re-organised the titles accordingly. Sorry for any inconvenience.)
First order of business, I must tell you that I forgot something super important about yesterday: soon after we crossed the border, I stopped in a small village, at the first authentic taverna I spotted, and we had an authentic lunch (albeit vegetarian): meze-style oriatiki salata, tzatziki, bread, and people talking, kids playing around... as it should be :)
The coffee machine was broken, so we moved to another place to have helleniko and baclava. And that was awesome.
And now, the vegetarian in me calls for an exception to be made when we find a taverna on a beach – if that still exists: I want a taste of fried kalamari...
Now, let's get back to our previous stop, in the Meteors. We went to one of the monasteries and one of the nunneries.
It is an important place for Christian Orthodoxy, but many visitors don't seem to give a hoot for the dressing code expected from the visitors. So all these monasteries and nunneries sell garnements to wrap women's pants in skirts, and to cover the shoulders of men and women, and for the real devious visitors who try and avoid the rule, I saw a nun running out of her quarters in order to swiftly and sternly equip the recalcitrant visitor with the ad-hoc accessory.
We slept not far from the Thermopyles, where there's a well known entrance to Hades. We didn't go there though, as the sea was much more inviting.
Tonight's spot was in a camping place in the shadow of olive and pomegranate trees. Too many mosquitoes made the night a bit itchy – that's the price to pay for sleeping with the windows open.
So we left the mosquitoes behind. We drove to a village close to Delphi, in another camping. The view is rather stunning: a must have for the centre of the world!
There's a swimming pool that is unfortunately colder than the sea yesterday. Some people (from Belgium, incredible!) came at the swimming pool to hold endless phone conversations: dealing with the food of their pet at the vet, with work colleagues, with the motor of a fence... Would you spend your holidays managing stuff at home remotely from a swimming pool in a rather idyllic place? They were not young. They were obnoxious. And after this endless string of conversations was over, they picked up their gear and left. Hilarious.
Tomorrow: day off. Wednesday: we'll visit the archeological site of Delphi, and we'll walk up to the stadium.
Now a little rant
As we travel we see garbage everywhere, and most of the garbage we see is definitely not travellers' garbage. People on a road trip do not bring family size washing baskets with them, refrigerators, coaches, and their rubbish bags do not contain the stuff we see scattered by stray cats and dogs, or wolves, or bears, further helped by the winds. This is a hard NO.
The laws that ban people to sleep in their vans are stupid, they have been imagined by stupid people who either can't think or have no spine, or both. These laws can only benefit the few money-makers behind the real-estate projects that play Monopoly with the coastlines. This is sickening.
May be... May be the next project is a sailboat.