11.11 - Day 301 - Orio (Evia) to Charia (Mani), GRE
Monday 11th November - Orio, Evia - Charia, Mani, Greece (Day 301)
After a slightly unnecessary early start - Sienna was due for a school zoom lesson at 7:30 am, but once we’d all woken up and were ready to go the wifi wouldn’t work. Sienna is more annoyed about not being able to read her book online as opposed to being woken up for no reason.
We pack up and leave Cozy Orio Apartment, leaving a handful of euros to replace a broken plant pot from overzealous Lego playing - like most of our Greek stays I need to google translate a message through Booking.com / Agoda in Greek to ‘hosts’ we never see.
Off the island of Evia - with a quick stop to buy some beers from the Septem brewery - onto the motorway, all the way down to Corinth for around midday. Here we hop out the car and walk across a bridge over the Corinth Canal, built with near vertical sides 90 metres into the ground down to sea level.
At 6.5 km long connecting two seas it’s impressive, unfortunately it was almost obsolete by the time it was finished in late 1800’s because it was too narrow for larger ships. Now still remains a tourist stop and a bungee jumping platform - we give that activity a miss. A 10 minute stop, but I wouldn’t suggest you come all the way from Athens to see it.
We stock up on some baked goods and a preposterously large slab of baklava before driving 15 minutes on to a site that perhaps is worth a trip from Athens - Acrocorinth.
Atop one of the rocky outcrops jutting up from sea level is an ancient fort - everything is older in Greece; this settlement has sections of original wall from 6th century BC. Thankfully in the here and now there’s a car park near the first gate and we walk past the empty moat and through three large stone gates forming a triple layer of defence.
On a wall with the countryside below we munch on our lunch (and make only a small indent on the baklava) before scrambling up the rocky paths.
There’s a smattering of other visitors but it turns out this place gets larger and larger and everyone is free to roam anywhere; inside derelict buildings, along the ramparts with occasional cannon shafts lying in place. There’s no information boards or indeed any semblance of modern organisation but at 0 euros to get in, it’s more about letting your imagination and wonder do the work.
Back onto the Motorway it’s a further 2.5 hours all the way South now to Charia near Areopoli on roads that get progressively small and windier passing through the hills of Mani in the Peloponnese region of mainland Greece.
After stocking up at Lidl in Sparti we arrive at Stenorougi Charias, a two storey stone house of which we have the ground floor apartment. Our car sits in the desolate square of this hamlet as we run our bags inside in the blustery rain. Whilst we can hear the gusting wind, we’re snug in our stone bunker and hunker down for the night.