The best cave in the world. And the most disappointing

I came to Greece a bit blasé about caves. We've done Waitomo (in NZ), which is pretty nice, with some fine glow worms, and we visited several in Cuba - some where you could swim spookily in the dark underground caverns. So when we walked down to the Dirou Caves one afternoon and found them closed, I wasn 't too bothered. How wrong I was.

If I hadn't been persuaded to persevere the next day, I would have missed out on a rare treat. The Pirgos Dirou sea caves are quite amazing. More than a kilometre of well-lit caverns, joined by  narrow tunnels, which you explore in a small boat. It's not hard to imagine Charon, the mythical boatman who ferried half-dead souls to Hades (the underworld), in exchange for  a one obol coin.

More prosaically, you get almost an hour of jaw-dropping rock formations and staggering reflections. If you are ever in the Mani, it's a must-see. 

We knew the cave at Tainaron, at the bottom of Greece, wouldn't be quite so spectacular, but still, it has a good legend behind it. Myth suggests it is the entrance to Hades, used by Hercules when he went to catch the three-headed dog Cerberus, guardian of the underworld. As an aside, Cerberus was the inspiration for JK Rowling's "Fluffy", the three-headed dog that Hagrid got from a Greek man he met in a pub, and which guarded the Philosopher's Stone. Fluffy, like Cerberus, had a fatal flaw (in terms of his usefulness as a guard dog) - music made him fall asleep.

With that as a backstory we made the detour to the cave. Big disappointment. I don't know what it was like when the Ancients roamed, but these days it's not even a proper cave - just a bit of an overhang littered with dodgy-looking bits of toilet paper. Don't bother.

Ten reasons to love our Greek walks

1. Maria-the-little-old-lady-in-little-old-Greek-lady-black, who lived in a little stone house, in a practically deserted village, who turned out to be a civil engineer of some international repute: We were walking through the tiny settlement of Ano Boularii - one of many in-the-middle-of-nowhere Mani villages, just north of Geriolimenas, when we came across Maria Alevromayiru. At first sight she was a wonderfully-typical elderly Greek village woman in her widows weeds, black headscarf, hobbling about in her garden. A crackly "kali mera" to passing tourists. Except she wasn't at all what we thought. She invited us into the house, talking in Italian and some English, apologising for her tatty clothing. She was in mourning for her sister, who had died three months ago, she said. This was her sister's house; she had moved back to her native village to be with her sister at the end. In the low-ceilinged, whitewashed stone-walled living room she showed us photos of a stylishly-dressed business woman sitting with others around a conference table, and in "project successfully completed" line-up shots with lots of men in suits. In a couple of them she was standing next to then French far-right leader Jean-Marie Le Pen. She had been a civil engineer, she said, had worked in Italy for some years and travelled widely. It was not what we had expected. She asked us back another day to drink coffee, if we had time. Here is my phone number, she said, typing it into my mobile phone. And of course we wanted to, but we never did. (The third photo below is me walking in Ano Boularii, the village where Maria lives)

2. The dog: We picked up this dog -  or rather it picked us up - in the practically deserted village of Mountaniotika. It was lunchtime and the only sign of life in the whole place was a couple of cats and the sound of snoring coming from a shuttered stone house. The dog watched us eat our spanakopita and then cheerily joined us on our walk. Like she was our dog and this is what we did every day.

The trouble was that at the edge of the village she wouldn't go back. When we shooed her away, she'd lie cheerfully on the road for a while, but when we looked back, there she was following us again. Eight hot, dusty kilometres later we felt we couldn't just leave her to find her way back up to her mountain village. So I hitched back to Gerolimenas, picked up the car and Sam (who joined us for the ride) and we loaded the dog (with a good deal of reluctance on her part) into the car and took her back to her village. Where she totally ignored the dog meat we had thoughtfully bought for her delectation and trotted happily off home, without so much as a backward glance. Bloody dogs. (A selection of photos below of Geoff, the dog, and the village where the dog came from. In one of the latter,  check out the work that went into those terraces. Just to squeeze out a few strips of semi-fertile land. They were tough, those Maniots.)

3. The tortoise. I know, I posted a photo of a tortoise before. But this is a different one. In fact we saw wild tortoises on three separate occasions. How cool is that.

4. The dung beetles. We saw them the day where we were afraid we were going to be shot by invisible hunters, and their dogs must have been along the path earlier on. The dung beetles had rolled the dog poo into balls and were rolling their smelly loads... wherever dung beetles take shit. Over stony paths, round thorn bushes. I read that in a single day, a dung beetle can bury dung 250 times its own weight. (It stores it as a healthy snack for later, or as a place to lay its eggs. It's best not to think too hard about that, especially when you are having breakfast.)  And we thought our walking was hard work. (Taking pictures of dung beetles is hard - this is the best of a terrible bunch.)

5. Mule tracks. Back in the 17th and 18th centuries, the Ottomans built a hundreds of kilometres of "kalderimi", or mule tracks, to carry soldiers and supplies between their conquered towns and villages. They are an impressive engineering feat, two metre-wide cobblestone paths supported in many places by stone embankments, through that steep, inhospitable terrain. Many kilometres remain in pretty good condition and make fabulous walking tracks and relatively good protection against those evil thorns. In  other places, the Maniots built paths between stone walls, giving the landscape a Welsh look. Those tracks often aren't in nearly such good nick. 

6. This walking sign. There weren't many walking signs on the tracks we did. Just the occasional faded blue paint spot on a rock. (Actually, mostly just the walking book saying to look out for faded blue paint spots, but NONE to be seen.) And the signs that were there often appeared to be pointing in the wrong direction. This junction was the best. If you know a bit of the Greek alphabet, you'll notice Areopoli signed both to right and left. There was a third sign at the same junction pointing at 90 degrees to these two, also signalling the way to Areopoli. Such choice! 

7. This lunar-like monument: This was the only time we saw anything remotely like this, and who knows what it is. Shrine? Monument? Nuclear bunker? It is very fine though, especially with the cows.

8. The snakes. Quite exciting for snake-deprived New Zealanders. Actually, we ddin't see any live snakes, but we took photos of two dead ones in an enthusiastic fashion.

9. The 9km-long walls around Ancient Messene: They were built from 720BC onwards in an often-futile attempt to keep the Spartans at bay. (Somehow it isn't possible to write a Greek blog without mentioning the Spartans...) Though most of the walls have fallen down in the last 2500 years, the remaining sections are deeply impressive. As is the fact flowers eek out an existence there. And here's a random photo of a preying mantis I found on my leg as we walked along the walls.

Thinking about it, I suppose it's quite impressive that you are able to walk along 2500-year-old walls. Reminds me that as a child you could scramble on the stones at Stonehenge. Now you can't even walk between them. In 30 years time we'll be telling the tale to our grandchildren of how we walked on the (now) forbidden walls at Messene.

10: Lunch: Often eaten in a shady spot outside a church (there's always a church in Greece). Whenever possible we ate spanakopita (a Greek spinach pastry) bought at a bakery before we left. And drank water from an outside tap fed by a spring at the church. Not a bad life...

(This is our lunch spot on our last walk in Greece - a circular 14km from the seaside village of Finikounda, a 10km hitch from Methoni. The church, typical of the Messinia area, is dedicated to John the Baptist and has some deliciously-gory-before-lunch icons of the saint in various positions with and without his head (in the same picture, of course). The church also has this strange little hobbit door. And a fine wall for eating lunch.)

No roses, just quite a lot of thorns

Before we arrived in Greece we borrowed a walking guide for the Southern Peloponnese. It's published by Sunflower Landscapes, in case you are interested, and it’s a great book, with awesome walks and (mostly) easy-to-follow descriptions. We've had some wonderful days over the last month or so.

Walking around Ancient Messene and (below) on the track to the end of Greece.

But... the main problem is that our edition was published in 2003. We discovered the hard way that’s a long time ago in terms of Greek walking trails.

Actually author Michael Cullen knew that too - in a note at the beginning which we didn’t read until far too late, he says “conditions can change fairly rapidly in the Peloponnese”. He talks about newly-bulldozed tracks misleading you about which path to take, and “natural causes”, by which I assume he means floods washing out the track etc. Although natural causes probably also encompasses the main hazard we found from having a 13-years-out-of-date walking book - THORNS.

A fine prickly bush on the track to Momenvasia and (below) thorns just waiting to take over an Ottoman mule track.

In gentler countries, when you hear about paths being overgrown, you might think about grass or trees, maybe a few brambles. In the Peloponnese every plant that might overgrow a path is a spiky bastard. The most innocuous yellow, grass-looking thing has leaves that will rip holes in your leg, there are pretty flowery-looking plants that are actually just made of thorns. There is hawthorn, gorse, brambles - and more I don’t know the names of. I do know they exist, however - we’ve battled through them.

There are so many thorns in Greece they have got into the mythology. Acantha (which translates as “thorny”) was a nymph loved by the god Apollo. When she rebuffed his advances he tried to rape her, and she scratched his face. Apollo wasn’t impressed and turned her into the spiny-leaved Acanthus plant.

Meanwhile the Romans, whose eastern empire included Greece for 800 years, had a god of thorns, Spiniensis, whose job was to keep thorn bushes out of people’s fields. If only we’d known, we would have sacrificed a few virgins.

The trouble is, that once you’ve hacked your way a few hundred metres down a path that’s obviously not (or is no longer) a path, you have to make the decision whether to walk back - through all the thorns you’ve tackled already - or hope that it gets better. Geoff and I fall into the optimistic camp, which is mostly the wrong choice.

A track - in 2003

On one particular Mani walk (in fact, the one in the picture at the top of this blog, just later on) we found ourselves battling up the side of a gorge through (and I’m not exaggerating) hawthorn, brambles and other spikey things over our heads. The only solution was to put our bags over our faces, bend low and push through. We did make it to the dirt track we were heading for, but with clothes, bag and skin shredded. After that one I had to take my walking shirt in by 5cms on each side to cover up the rips. My money pouch lost its decorative button somewhere, my hat its ties, our legs were scratched for days.

A good day - no blood. (Photo taken on a different walk!)

Often you’ll set off down some track you could get a 4WD down, and then suddenly for no reason it disappears into gorse and stones. We learned (but only after trying the alternative far too many times) to turn back when that happens. (Maps.me, a GPS-based app which doesn’t need an internet connection, is quite useful too...)

Where the hell are we going?

Another danger not mentioned in the walking book, was hunters. One day we found ourselves in the middle of what sounded like an in-the-desert-stakeout-movie set. Guns were firing off all around, the echoes ricocheting off the mountainsides - though we couldn’t see any heads popping up from behind the rocky outcrops. We assumed from all the empty shotgun cartridges lying around that it was a few locals coming out for their regular Sunday afternoon hunting trip in the mountains, but it was still a bit scary. We walked along SINGING and TALKING VERY LOUDLY to each other.

Sheer bliss. No thorns, no hunters, just quite a few rocks

A few for the album, Grommit

We only came to Alypa Bay because it was at the end of a full-day walk we planned to do, so we wanted to check out options for getting back to our car once we’d finished. Our Peloponnese walking book describes it variously as a "pirates' cove" and a "sunken cove", neither of which is particularly accurate, though the hillsides are steep and there are a few small fishing boats in the bay.

What Alypa is, however, is pretty magical - so much so that we found a room, and stayed there for five days, swimming, walking and pottering around the surrounding area. In fact, we only moved on when the lack of any internet connection began to impact on Sam's school (which is now totally online) and my work (which was needing some email activity). Which is kind of a sad reason to leave.

You might just be able to spot Geoff sitting on "our" deck and, (in the one below) me and the washing

The village is tiny: a couple of dozen stone houses, several with Mani-style towers; a largish church; a small chapel, and a beach taverna with a concrete back wall and a roof cobbled together with green canvas, corrugated iron and lots of rope.
The taverna menu included three fish options - small (whitebait-sized), medium (large whitebait-sized) and large (small trout-sized). The first two were fried whole and the third sliced into steaks through the backbone and also fried. All were delicious. The seven local cats would arrive with the smell of fish, so not a bone or a fish head was wasted.

Sam ate chicken souvlaki and chips, with tomato sauce. There was Greek salad and a rather bitter vegetable we only tried once. Plus beer and two wine options - white or rose - both relatively revolting. Alypa is the only place we've been to in Greece where you can't drink the tap water.

We ate in the taverna every evening, playing cards or dice while we waited for the food. We were always the only customers for dinner (it was late September, I suppose, and getting chilly outside), though a few other tourists turned up for lunch or drinks during the day.

We lunched on our deck

Our landlord in our small-room-with-terrace was Vasili, who lived round the corner and rowed out sometimes to check his nets in the bay. We never saw him wearing anything but a pair of old shorts - never a shirt, even when it got chilly in the evenings. One day he came back in his boat with a fish, which he gave to his cat, waiting for him on the beach.

Greek bros - Geoff and Vasili

Vasili's aunt ran the beach taverna, with her husband. Photos on the wall of the living room, which doubled as the kitchen prep and food storage area, as well as where we went to order our food and pay our bill, showed she'd been a beauty as a young woman.

Watching the neighbours

Then there was a youngish-middle aged couple living in one of the houses opposite who would arrive in their small motorboat while we were having breakfast in the mornings, and unload one plastic shopping bag. Just one. She sat in the front of the boat, he stood at the back to steer. Neither wore life-jackets. We never saw them head off, and it didn't look like there was fish in the bag. Maybe they went shopping - perhaps it was easier to access the nearest shop by boat. While we were there, a younger woman moved into part of their house; a daughter maybe. There were no children in the village.
In the stone house next to them was an elderly couple, who lived with a middle-aged couple (daughter and husband?) They ate all their meals on a covered deck outside, staring at the fridge (which was also on the deck) - never out at the view, and they sat out there chatting late into the night. They fed the old lady with a spoon.
If you swam across the bay to the right you came to a ladder out of the water and a staircase leading enticingly up, but it only led to a firmly locked gate. I snuck past it but the only thing further on was a large fence and a more impenetrable gate. It is the Mani, after all.
Tourists came to the beach to swim, but we never saw a local in the water. They didn't use the beach cafe, either, but in the early evenings the men would sit in hard chairs on the narrow main street, chatting. Just like in every town in the Peloponnese. Sometimes the aunt joined them, preparing vegetables.

Possibly too many shots of Alypa - Ed

Flomochori village shop

We shopped at the little store in Flomochori (picture above - with the bikes outside), and bought fruit and vegetables at Kotronas from a van that went round the villages. We found a funny little abandoned almost-island called Skopa, connected by a thin strip of beach to the outskirts of Kotronas. The sea was amazingly blue and you can swim off the rocks at the back and no one would know you were there.

There are ruins of houses on the island, and a tiny, kept-up church. Three goats roam around and there are all sorts of trees - fruit, nuts, olives. Someone loved it once. It’s the sort of place you fantasize about buying in your retirement; a spot to live out your days. Well we fantasize anyway...

Greetings from "our" island (below). Come to visit anytime