Greece - Days 3 and 4 - Olympic games, Mystras

Alive and kicking on the third day, we headed out of Patra and made our way down toward Olympia. By this point, we were getting the hang of Greek driving, which basically has this extremely courteous habit of driving as far to the side of the road as possible, and thus creating a passing lane where none is marked out. Today we had a couple of incidents with driving, including potholeyness of doom (I swear this one was so deep I saw Elrond) which we failed to avoid, and a couple of crash-stops to avoid speed cameras (on my part - Dave was much more law-abiding in his driving).

Olympia is of course known as the birthplace of the Olympic games, but was a massive religious sanctuary as well, and we spent several hours wandering about in amongst the ruins of various spectacular-looking buildings. This is a place which once housed one of the wonders of the world, the Statue of Zeus, and the temple is still there. Well, kind of. You can definitely get an idea of how wow it must have been, how imposing. The sculptor Phidias made the statue on site, and his workshop is still there - they've found scraps of ivory offcuts. How awesome is that? So of the ancient wonders of the world, I've now seen the sites of four of them - can't believe I missed the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus, since I was basically right there in 2007. Oh well, I have to travel to Rhodes, Turkey again, and Iraq to finish the set. Hmmm, that last one might be a fraction more perilous...

Anywho, we wandered through the extensive ruins, only occasionally walking where we shouldn't. The heat was really oppressive - it was a dead still day, with the sun absolutely hammering down on us. We got all artsy-photographic for a while, but none of the shots looked as impressive as they did in my head, so we moved on.

The highlight of the visit, for me, was the stadium. Like, the actual stadium that gave birth to the Olympic games! It's a pretty big, open expanse of ground, with starting blocks, and a ring of seating, the ground is baked solid underfoot like pottery in a furnace. So, there's nothing to be done here, apart from run your own race. I mean, how often do you get to run on the ground that started the Olympics? So off with the jandals, line up on the starting blocks, get Dave to give me an "On your marks, get set, go" and I'm off! The heat is unbearable, the soles of my soft, city-boy feet are stinging, and bruising, and splitting on the baked earth and pebbles, and the general feeling is... well, indescribable. It's honestly one of the coolest things of done - the sense of place and moment are about as far from the humdrum, work-a-day life as you can get. It is for these things that we work, and it is this that we must never forget. One for the mental scrapbook, alongside the road at Ephesus, Ninety-mile Beach, mountain-tops in Switzerland, and Crak des Chevaliers.

We left Olympia and headed, making our way across the mountains towards Sparta. Well, where Sparta was. Our actual destination was Mystras, a Byzantine town perched on a hillside. Actually, that's misleading. It's a Byzantine town welded precariously to the side of a cliff, with spectacular views across the Spartan plain, and jack-all in the way of accessibility. No wonder the people gave up on it in the 1800s for the newly-rebuilt Sparti. We drove over the mountains, down the gorge towards Mystras in the gathering gloom, again marvelling at the sheer beauty of the landscapes that were unveiled at literally every turn. We mucked around with filters and the like from the top of the pass, and got a couple of decent shots at a random pagoda we found.

Mystras, when we found it, was breathtaking. We arrived as dusk was falling, and ended up next to the palace at the very top of Mystras. We managed to get a couple of nice shots of the palace overlooking the Spartan plain, and then headed in to New Mystras (i.e. a town next to Mystras, but which you don't have to be a mountain goat to live in) to find our hotel.

The next day, day four, by my reckoning, we headed up into Mystras. Up is the operative word. We effectively climbed a cliff for a couple of hours. There is still a working monastery amongst the ruins, so we visited that, and then climbed further up through the ruins, as the views got more and more spectacular. The castle at the top (ow, my thighs!) must have been the most redundant structure ever created - if I had an army, I'd look at that hill and think "there's got to be a better option than trying to take that." I guess that in the middle ages, it paid to be ridiculously over-careful.

So anyway, having got back down the hill, and got ourselves a nice lunch from a nice restaurant, we headed off. We went into Sparti, to sort out a few administrative details (like cash, and ice cream), and to see the archeological museum, which unfortunately was closed. So we got on the road, and headed on up to Argos, where we were staying for the night.