Jane woke with a touch of
the squitters. We speculated on whether she hadn’t quite kicked the bout she
had in Stoupa, or whether it was the result of eating in the camping ground’s
taverna last night. There were only two other couples eating while we were
there and there must be issues regarding the freshness of ingredients for a
comprehensive menu. A couple of Imodium soon had Jane feeling better while I
started feeling mild stomach cramps as I had done last week. We decided to wait
a while before leaving the camping ground.
I found I could log on to
the camping ground’s wi-fi although the signal dropped out from time to time
and line speed was very slow. There was an email from Vodafone with the monthly
home broadband bill. They had still not given me the NZ$35 discount for having
a Vodafone mobile in spite of batting email backwards and forwards over the
last month. I had previously been told the discount had been “automatically
removed” and my attempts to have Vodafone “automatically reinstate it” had come
to nought. After waiting for a long time for it to download I found a contact
number on Vodafone’s web site. After a 5 minute wait my call was answered, but
the person I was speaking to only dealt with mobile account queries. He could
transfer me to a broadband colleague, but there was currently a 20 minute delay
in that department answering calls. I explained I was in Greece and wasn’t
prepared to hang on for 20 minutes, I would call back later, or email when I
had a better internet connection.
While waiting for
Vodafone to answer my call, I spotted the following in last weekend’s Sunday
Times that I have been putting off biffing out until I have squeezed out every
last drop of juice:
Scientists in Utah have pinpointed
the part of the brain that gives us the “never again” morning-after feeling. (Hangovers
are the classic example but we have all woken up thinking “I’ll never do that
again”). In tests on rats it was discovered that the lateral habenula is
activated by bad experiences such as a hangover. It has yet to be found which
part of the brain is responsible for over-ruling the lateral habenula a day or
two later, but it can only be a matter of time.
There was also an email
from TomTom in the UK. It seemed that English wasn’t the first language of
Kunal P and it completely missed the points of my complaints. It ended with “I
am sure the above given information is helpful to you”. (sic). It wasn’t and I
wasn’t happy, but it wasn’t the right time to lob something back. That needed a
bit of thought.
Next time I looked at my
email, my inbox was completely empty as was the outbox. Was this the work of a
virus? Then, the inbox started to reload, but painfully slowly. Shades of
trying to load a TomTom map!
While we were waiting to
see how our stomachs were going the two young Englishmen that had arrived on
their bikes last night were packing up nearby and getting ready for the road.
We went over to talk to them. They were brothers from London, they had flown to
Athens and rode to Corinth yesterday. They are aiming to reach Barcelona via
Albania, Montenegro and Croatia – 3,000 km in about 6 weeks. One mentioned he
hadn’t done much cycling! We chatted for a while contrasting how little they
were carrying with what we had on board Mabel. Today they were hoping to get to
Patras. We wished them well.
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| Intrepid Cyclists |
By 09:30 we were both
feeling well enough to go out for the day. We wanted to visit Ancient Corinth,
it was only a few kilometres from the camping ground and the camping ground
receptionist had given me a map marked up with directions. I decided we didn’t
need the satnav which Jane wasn’t comfortable with. She perhaps had a point as
we soon found ourselves in open country and intuitively we knew we were heading
away from Ancient Corinth. I checked the camping ground map again and realised
the short cut shown was incorrect but there seemed to be another feasible
route. I backtracked and came to road signs that had ‘Ancient Corinth’ obliterated
with red tape. Unlike yesterday, however, a detour was signed. We soon grasped the detour was required because of the closed motorway bridge that had caused
us so much grief yesterday.
The detour took us in a
wide arc eastwards before swinging back west. Jane was convinced we would never
get back to the camping ground without satnav. (I think she has satnav dependency).
I tried to reassure her that I could find my way home, but Jane was far from
convinced.
We came to a small town
with signs to ‘Historic Site’ but missed a turn and found ourselves in the
country once more. A not-so-smart 180° turn that narrowly missed a car emerging
from a side road and then weaving through the town’s narrow streets culminated in a
short drive the wrong way up a one-way street and there we were – the ancient
ruins stretched out in front of us!
Ancient Corinth was a key
centre of the Greek and Roman worlds whose possession meant the control of
trade between northern Greece and the Peloponnes. As a result, the area’s
ancient history is dominated by invasions and power struggles. The most
significant struggle was Corinth’s rivalry with Athens, against whom Corinth
sided with Sparta. The Romans defeated Greek city states in the Peloponnes and
razed ancient Corinth in 146 BC, rebuilding it in on a grand scale in 44 BC
under Julius Ceasar. It was originally intended as a colony for veterans (the
forerunner of Malvina Major retirement villages?) but it later became the
provincial capital, growing rich on trade with Rome, Syria and Egypt.
Earthquakes in 375 and 521 destroyed the city.
The man in the ticket
kiosk wouldn’t give me the senior’s reduced rate because I couldn’t produce
anything demonstrating I was an EU citizen, but that only left us €3 worse off.
“Disappointing” aptly sums up how we felt about the site. The remains of the 5th
century BC Greek Temple of Apollo – 7 monolithic Doric columns, some with the
capping beams in place were very impressive. And the Roman remains gave a feel
for how large and advanced the city would have been, but the information boards
describing what we were looking at were, like those at Ancient Olmpia,
inadequate and confusing. While we knew we were looking at what once had been
an enormous market place with 33 shops, the orientation of the plan of the
buildings differed from that of a small scale site plan making it hard work to
orientate ourselves and comprehend what the remnants of columns and walls
represented. Similarly, we thought we were looking along the marble paved
Lechalon Way only to find it ran at 90° to he direction we were looking because the
orientation of the Temple of Apollo shown on an artist’s impression of how
things would have looked was incorrect. The display board at the Fountain of
Peirene – a structure hewn from a limestone bluff helpfully showed a plan of
the fountain on which was marked Sections A-A and B-B together with two
sections, neither of which was titled. As Jane said, if I was confused by the
plans having spent my working life looking at engineering drawings, then how
was eanyone else going to understand them? The one saving grace came at the
end of our visit when we came across a display board with an artist’s
impression of how the city would have looked. That was good.
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| Temple of Apollo |
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| The Romantically Named 'Temple E' |
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| Column Frieze Detail |
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| Fountain |
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| South Stoa |
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| Theatre |
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| The Fort of Acrocorinth Can Just Be Seen Overlooking Ancient Corinth From High On The Hill |
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| Very Good Impression Of How Ancient Corinth Would Have Looked |
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| Bust of Julius Ceasar |
The Greeks have missed a
trick. Everywhere we went in Italy two years ago there were English speaking
guides who, for a price, would provide a conducted tour in English. There has
been nothing similar in Greece. In 2012 after a conducted tour of Pompei, we
left with a good understanding of how the city functioned, the purpose of the
various buildings, even down to the detail of seeing the world’s earliest
takeaway establishments. We left Ancient Corinth feeling not a lot the wiser
about the city.
Next we collected Smarty and
drove 4km up a winding road to the medieval fortress of Acrocorinth which is
perched on the top of a hill nearly 600 metres above Ancient Corinth.
Archaeologists consider the origins of the fort date back to the late 7th
or early 6th century BC and it has been added to by Romans,
Byzantines, Venetians and Turks. Inside the fort’s 2km perimeter wall once
stood houses, chapels, mosques and other structures. The fort was important for
the defence of the Peloppenese and its ownership history has been chequered. It
withstood attacks from barbarians, Slavs, Normans and others. In 1210 after a 5
year siege it was captured by Frankish Crusaders. Apart from a brief occupation
by the Knights of Rhodes from 1400 to 1404 it remained in Byzantine hands until
1458 when it was captured by Ottoman Turks. The Venetians held the fort from
1687 to 1715 when it reverted to the Turks until the Greek uprising of 1821.
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| Approach To Acrocorinth |
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| Second Defensive Gate |
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| Steep Track Of Polished Cobbles Was Difficult To Walk On |
While not a lot remains
of the buildings inside the perimeter walls, the fort is an imposing sight from
the road approaching from the west. The main gate house and perimeter wall are
largely intact as are two subsequent defensive gates set in massive walls. The
climb up through the three gates was hard going on a steep track roughly paved
in polished limestone cobbles. We both found ourselves slipping at times and
the combination of the steep climb and temperatures in the high twenties
necessitated frequent stops.
Once inside the third
enclosure wall we climbed a steep path that zig-zagged its way up towards the
north perimeter of the fort. At the top we were able to look down on Ancient
Corinth a long way below. The columns of the Temple of Apollo were imposing at
ground level, from our vantage point they looked insignificant.
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| Looking Down On Ancient Corinth (In the background is the closed bridge that caused so much grief yesterday) |
If anything, making our
way down along the steep, slippery cobbled paths was more difficult than going
up. We both slipped frequently and were glad of handrails placed strategically
on the steeper sections of track.
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| About To Start Back Down |
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| Lunchtime Refreshments |
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| This turned up while we were eating lunch. Obviously, it had been tipped off Jane was in town |
As I set off for the
camping ground after lunch Jane was convinced we weren’t going to be able to
find it without a satnav. Her anxiety increased as I took a road that clearly
wasn’t one we had travelled earlier in the day, she vowed this was the last time we
would drive anywhere without a satnav (I’m pretty sure that would be diagnosed
as satnav dependency). I was following signs to Athens and Patras knowing that
should take us to the intersection of the Athens - Patras motorway with road we
had used earlier. I was correct, we were soon on familiar territory and arrived
back at the camping ground in next to no time. Jane wasn’t exactly effusive in
her praise of me getting back without a satnav or apologetic for doubting my
navigation skills. I did, however, get a thank-you.
I checked my email. There
was something from Vodafone saying they were emailing because they knew I was
in Greece and could reinstate the broadband discount if I confirmed a validation
code they would send me. Somehow they had linked my phone call this morning to
my discount issue. This was a leap forward, but as I pointed out in my reply, I
had already confirmed validation codes 5 times and was no better off.
Jane spent the remainder
of the afternoon on the beach while I filled in gaps in the blog.
Our evening meal was
Jane’s variation of Jenny’s ‘egg in a
bowl’ – cubes of toast with tomato and egg.
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