Get up early so we can avoid the expecting strong wind in the afternoon
and reach Olympia before it is getting late afternoon.
Hanna’s birthday, but it is way too early to ring her up at this hour.
Planning to leave 7:00, so I walk to the port police 6:55 as told yesterday
with the filled in form. Am I surprised? No one at the port police office,
closed. I waited another 20 minutes, but still no sign of any police men so I
decided to skip it. Ok, breaking the law but who knows when they were coming? And
I told them yesterday that we were leaving at 07:00. Getting up the anchor
without any problem, we hadn’t crossed the anchor line with our Italian neighbor
as he insinuated when we were mooring, hah! So off we went, still without any
sign of the police.
Very calm sea. Heading south by motor for Katacolon port on the west
coast of Peleponesos. The only exiting thing happened was when two big commercial
ship passed us by. And of course the
mandatory swim tour out in nowhere but with 27,3 C water temperature. Hardly refreshing,
but still nice. We arrived the harbor with an incident free, almost perfect,
mooring aft to the quay. A very friendly harbor captain greeted us welcome to
Katacolon and informed us of all the necessary stuff.
Tried to ring Hanna a couple of times again, but failed.
The target of the day was obviously the nearby ancient site of Olympia.
When we arrived the only trip there by train had departure some hours earlier. In
spite of the 30+ tourist buses parked next to the yacht harbor no one of them
seemed interested in driving to Olympia, in fact we did not met any driver or
passenger at all. Only option left was to rent a car. After a while walking down
the village main street Kimberley and I found the magic sign – “Car rent”. 5
minutes later we were driving a 10 years old Opel Corsa back to the boat to
pick up Sally. Olympia is some 38 km away from Katakolon, and we passed the county
capital Pyrgos on the way and found out which bus Kimberly must take on the
Friday to her flight in Athens.
We also have a simple but lovely lunch in Pyrgos, the dishes were really
price worthy and tasty – 3,5€ each for a good and tasty meal. I.e. not tourist
prices, as this was not a tourist town at all. However they had almost normal Mediterranean
prices for drinks, beers etc. It seems that drinks have international prices.
Suddenly Hanna ringed me back and I and we got the chance to
congratulate on her 26th birthday! Hurra!!!
Olympia was actually much better and interesting than I had thought.
They started to use this site for Olympic games 1000 years BC. And they kept on
in 1200 years!! Compared with the modern Olympic games which have been held only
for some 115 years. I only had an elliptic running track in mind for these
ancient games, but there was so much more. It was almost like a modern Olympic village
with (the ruins of) a great number of arenas and buildings covering an area like
1km x 1km. Quite exhausting to explore in +36C, I can tell you, but very
interesting and thoughtful. One detail, they had a “walk of shame” for all
athletes to pass on their way to the big elliptic arena. All athletes that had
been convicted by the judges to have played foul had their names in scripted in
a long row of rocks as warning examples of the shame they would suffer if
cheating.
I asked the girls to do some
wrestling at the wrestling arena for camera shots, but this was not all
appreciated by the guards and we were told off to stop it immediately.
The day ended at a restaurant at the port water front. Really nice food,
but the waiters had their thumbs in the soup if you know what I mean. I hope we
will not suffer from that during the night.
Topping up with a couple of ouzos with ice in another bar nearby and it
was time for bed.
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