Leaving Tolo with slightly heavy hearts, we cycled to the foot of Ancient Mycenae and spent the night in a campsite run by a lovely Greek family. The next day saw us undertake a long climb through the centre of the Peloponnese in order to reach the Corinth Canal and cross onto mainland Greece. After several hours of blistering heat, we stumbled upon the last campsite before Athens, and found a perfect pitch right by the sea.
Despite its beautiful location, we were almost the only people there: after speaking to the owner, we discovered that the refugee crisis has had a huge impact on Greek tourism, with British tourists in particular staying away because of fears (fuelled by the tabloid press) of rampaging hordes of “economic migrants”. In fact, until our time at Piraeus Port (blog to come), we saw no sign at all of the refugees, but the scaremongering is having a disastrous effect on the livelihood of those Greeks who depend on tourism.
The next day, we set off for Athens with some trepidation about our route into the city. This proved to be relatively well-founded: once again, we were wobbling in the hard-shoulder of a three-lane highway as the lorries thundered past. After several nerve-wracking hours, we entered the city itself, and managed to make our way to our Warmshowers host, Lilian. Lilian was an incredible host, and let us stay on her sofa for four days while we explored the city. On her recommendation, we went to the brilliant Ai Wei Wei exhibition at the Cycladic Museum, ate delicious souvlaki (Jonathan) and beans (Harriet) in a local restaurant, and even went out for a morning cycle with her local road-bike group!
We were very pleased when we managed to keep up with them on our unloaded but still fairly heavy touring bikes, and whizzed up and down hills along the coast from Athens.
We celebrated Jonathan’s 32nd birthday in Athens, and had a lovely day mixing culture with swimming and plenty of food and wine! We visited the Acropolis, took a trip to the beach outside Athens, and finished by sharing a bottle of Tsipouro in the wonderful Brettos Bar in Athens Plaka.
After a few relaxing days, we were ready for the next part of our Athens stay, volunteering in the refugee camp at Piraeus Port.