My Big Fat Greek Adventure

Sorry I haven’t been able to upload pictures recently. I’ve been really busy and I haven’t had Internet in my room. We spent last week traveling the Peloponnese. We visited sites in Nafplion, the first modern capitol of Greece, Mycenae, a palace of the Mycenaean empire, Sparta, and Olympia, the site of the ancient Olympics. It has been a lot of ruins but really awesome places. For the past two days I’ve been in Corfu which is a beautiful island in the northwest corner of Greece. We’re at Corfu Town which is a really nice city with a lot of Italian influences. We took a tour of the town yesterday and a tour of the Achillean palace today which was actually pretty modern, built around 1890. We’ve had a lot of time to go into the city and enjoy our 5 star hotel with a bowling alley, casino, pool and elevator going down to the beach among other amenities. We’re leaving tomorrow morning for Lias, a small town in the mountains which was the setting of a book we all had to read. We are meeting the author of the book for lunch and apparently there is going to be a camera crew recording our visit there. Then we make a stop at Meteora and Delphi before coming back to Athens to spend a free day and fly home on August 7th. It has been quite an exciting trip and I will try to get more pictures up if I can. 

On Sunday we rented ATV’s and cruised around the island all day on them, I shared one with Leighann and by shared I mean I drove the whole time. It was a great day. We went to some red sand beach with a huge red cliff overlooking it. We went to a black sand beach and did some cliff jumping there. We went to a winery museum and learned how they made wine on Santorini and how it differs from the rest of the world, the vines grow on the ground in a circle. We went and saw the sunset. We found some ATV course that we cruised around in the dark. It was a pretty epic day. The next morning we woke up at 530 and drove down to the beach and watched the sunrise. Then we cruised around the ATV course some more in the morning before we had to return them. I drove the ATV for like 18 out of the 24 hours we had it.

On Saturday we took a pirate ship and sailed around the island. First we stopped at the volcano and got to get off and hike to the top of it. Its pretty much just a huge pile of volcanic rock. We then sailed to some sulfur hot springs. It was pretty cool, the water was really warm and the ground was just mud which is good to rub on your skin. We then went to some other village on a smaller island next to Santorini. It was a really cool cruise.

Santorini was a beautiful island. On Friday we went to the mountain on top of the island. We then went to a fortress near that mountain which still exists from the medieval times. Then that evening we went to the far side of the island to watch the sunset which has been called the nicest sunset in the world. I don’t want to complain but I don’t think it was the best sunset. It was beautiful though. The town is so nice, white houses on the side of a cliff overlooking bright blue water and a volcano across the sea. A lot of the churches have the blue dome roofs which is what everyone sees from all the posters. 

Here are some beautiful scenic pictures from Santorini

I’m in Santorini now which was recently named the most beautiful island in the world by Travel + Leisure magazine. It is completely gorgeous. The western side of the island is full of cliffs leading to the Mediterranean with beautiful white houses overlooking them. Right across the water is the famous volcano which was one of the largest volcanic events in history when it erupted around 1600 BC. This eruption completely destroyed the civilization at Akrotiri on Santorini and may have lead to the downfall of Minoan civilization in Crete. It is still active and most recently erupted in  1956. The eastern side of the island contains beautiful black sand beaches and vineyards for making wine. Today we are going to the end of the island, where all of the pictures of Santorini come from, to watch the sunset.

Today we visited a few more areas of Crete. First we stopped at Gortys which was a former capitol of Crete. It is important because it has the largest set of written laws engraved into stone so that all of the people can read them. We then went to Phaestos which, like Knossos, contained a huge palace. This palace sat on top of a small plateau overlooking all of the surrounding country side. It was a palace for the Minoan civilization 3000 years ago and handled all of the trade with outside countries during that period of time. We then went to a small village Matala which sits right on the Libyan Sea. The Libyan Sea is gorgeous blue, clear water. Matala had a set of cliffs and caves to explore though. One of the cliffs was pretty common to jump off so 12 of us went cliff jumping. It was a 40 foot jump into the water so it was awesome. Such a great thrill rush. We all got to the top and most people were about to back out cause we were so high so I jumped in first and everyone ended up doing the jump. It was sick. More pictures to come when I get a chance.

Yesterday we took a bus trip through the mountains to the southern side of Crete. We then took a ferry boat through the Libyan Sea to the Samaria Gorge.  The full gorge is about 18 km long through cliffs as tall as 1000 meters and as narrow as 3 meters between them at parts. It was the most beautiful hike I’ve ever taken in my life. Total, I hiked about 13 km through the gorge alongside a fresh water stream. It was really nice to get completely out of the city into nature and the beautiful mountains of Crete. The pictures can hardly do justice to how amazing this was.

For the past few days we have been in the town of Rethymnon on Crete. Rethymnon is a beautiful city right on the northern side of Crete on the Mediterranean Sea. It has an old city area which is lots of buildings from the Venetian times and Ottoman times which where nations that conquered Crete. Its interesting to see the different forms of architecture from the separate time periods. It also contains a large fortress to protect the old city. 

In Heraklion Crete we went to the Knossos palace archaeological site and museum. Knossos was where the Minoan civilization and culture came from. The Minoan’s made great advances in all forms of culture, architecture, written language among other things. It was where the Greek myth of the Labyrinth and Minotaur come from. We visited the archaeological ruins of the palace which was an absolutely enormous palace consisting of 5 floors and over 1300 rooms. The architecture of the palace at the time was completely revolutionary. It had a running water system, a ventilation system and a lighting system. Surprisingly a lot of it remains as it was built around 1700 BC. That’s almost 2000 years before the Roman Empire. It was a really awesome place to see and the museum was really nice. The Minoans have an interesting history for being partially isolated on the island Crete.