Agean Queens

A lot to catch up on! Jane and I have been less eager to write the blog now that it is costing us $6 per hour to do so.

When we last left you dear reader we were in Fethiye, Turkey, getting ready to head off and see another of Turkey's wonders:

In 1886 there was a volcanic eruption in Tarawera in the North Island of New Zealand that destroyed the pink and white terraces - beautiful natural weirs and pools of calcium carbonate that featured in many paintings and a few very early photographs. This was widely regarded as a bad move on Mt Tarawera's part.

Fortunately the pink and white terraces were not a one-off. Pammukale in the south west of Turkey boasts a spectacular rip-off of this Kiwi innovation, Calcium Carbonate (A.K.A cement) dissolved in hot water gushes up from a natural spring that was the home of the Plutonium of Ancient city of Heirapolis. No the Romans didn't have nukes, this was the name of the temple of Pluto (ie Hades), where along with the spring water came noxious vapours that amongst other benefits managed to kill a couple of terminally pushy French tourists a few years back. Anyway the terraces of Pammukale extend over several kilometers and are a quite brilliant white colour, the dissolved calcium carbonate precipitates out in places where the water flows fastest, which has a natural tendency to build up the terraced ponds. Several thousand years ago this was also the home of a major Roman city - Heirapolis, named for the wife of Hercule's son (not Hera Zeus's wife). Estimates place this snake infested city at about 150-250,000 people, the principle being that you take the number of seats in the theatre and multiply by 10 to give the population. It's a pretty big theatre. This is also the place where one of the biblical Phillips (either P the apostle or P the evangelist) was maytred, but in this area you can pretty much spin a bottle, follow that direction and trip over some religiously important spot within a few kilometers.

Moving right along the next must see on the Turkey grand tour was Ephesus, a city supposedly named for Ephos, Queen of the Amazons who, all lurid legends aside, did not did chop off their right breasticles, nor even in fact exist except in fantasies. Anyway, it was an important port town, but then the sea up and left taking the port with it and leaving this town in the middle of a malarial swamp five kilometers from the sea. As might be imagined this reduced property values somewhat, but usefully helped to preserve it as something of a ghost town. There is a lot of wonderfully preserved classical era architecture in Ephesus, The library of Celsus is a very impressive monument to the learning to the Romans and their skullduggery - they've found a hidden tunnel from within the library to the bordello next door.

Surprisingly in all the ruins we saw it is the massive and heavy archways that seem to have survived best, the walls seem more likely to fail in earthquakes, or get recycled and the columns were almost always destroyed by man - for a good reason; the sections of the columns were stacked up on each other and keyed together with iron dowels around which molten lead was poured to rigidly lock them together. This was an excellent source of lead and iron for people of later ages. A lot of the carefully hewn marble was also appropriated by peoples to do their own thing. A terrible example of this is the Ancient Temple of Artemis (also known as Diana) near Ephesus that was one of the ancient wonders of the world. However times changed, the Early Christians came and had to destroy or put their stamp on that which came before and so used bits of the Temple to build amongst other things the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul and a grotty little church on a nearby hill. To me it is a measure of the civilisation of the Romans that they left much of what they came to control intact, adding to it or modifying it without needing to exorcise and destroy all evidence of what came before. If only Christianity had shown such forbearance (in literature as well) then perhaps we could have avoided the Dark Ages and enjoyed the renaissance a thousand years earlier.

Enough of Turkey already. Off to the Greek Isles. First substantive stop (after a bit of tedious island hopping) was Mykanos. This has been a party island for decades, Jane's dad got propositioned by a bloke there 30 years ago, and so it was somewhat appropriate that one of the first sights we see as we get off the boat at midnight is a Drag Queen with huge curly afro, heels and a red sequin dress. We settled in for two nights, one day spent at paradise beach, where there were guys waving their sunburnt willies around, and a fridge in the snack shop tried to electrocute me (shop assistent was helpful enough to explain to me that it was my fault for not wearing rubber shoes).

Around about here I joined up with a new travelling companion: Giardia, and it's sidekick Giardi-arse. This enhanced our holiday in the same way that leg amputation enhances running.

Naxos, 3 days, nice town, lovely beaches, worst white wine we've ever had, assuming it was in fact wine as billed and not a mistranslation of "reject vinegar". Not eating. Lack of appetite aside, after just a few days the ubiquetous Greek gyros (pita bread rolled into a cone filled with fat drenched meat, chips, tomato and mayonaise and generally massively inferior to what we get in New Zealand) were rapidly loosing their appeal. Fresh fruit and vegetables off the menu due to dodgy guts so unfortunately no salads.

Santorini, 3 days, crappy beaches, amazing views in this island that was blown apart by a massive volcanic eruption 3500 years ago. It is suggested that this was the mythical Atlantis, and the scraps of the city of Ancient Thira that somehow survived the eruption (though everyone scarpered - they apparently had some warning) perched as they are on top of a hill as far from the caldera as you can get are quite impressive. The white buildings on the cliff tops overlooking the huge flooded and still active caldera that is roughly 6km across are truely a quintessential mediterranean experience if you can afford what they are selling. The crappy 50cc scooter we hired that was only capable of going uphill if you got a good running start and cost 5 times as much as a better bike in Thailand did, really set the tone for Santorini, not a place you want to do on the cheap. Worst red wine we've ever had. Eating a little, evacuating a lot.

Crete; we started at Chania in the Northwest where I spent a couple of days in bed after another fatiguing ferry ride, we then did a 5 hour walk through Sumaria gorge from the heights of the mountains down to the beach, very pretty. Subsequently spent 4 days in bed in beautiful Paleochora trying to recuperate with the worst flatulence of my life while Jane went progressively more and more stircrazy.

Athens. Another long tiring ferry ride followed by walking the streets for several hours looking for accomodation and being laid low for two days yet again. The Parthenon and the temple of Olympian Zeus were very impressive. But otherwise give Athens a miss, one bright note: Athens was responsible for our best meal in Greece; it was Italian.

Jane decided she wanted to climb Mt Olympus, and so she did. Pretty massive effort; it was a climb of about 2000m up and 2500m down in one 11hour day, passing pitifully weak Germans and other Europeans all the way. I dutifully stayed in bed and propped my head up to praise her athletic prowess and feign sympathy for her self inflicted muscle aches.

After some discussion on the matter we have decided that the Greeks are without a doubt the most asthetically challenged people we have encountered on our trip. While they are friendly enough they appear to be taking many of their fashion tips from the 70's, women dye their hair badly, frequently sport mustaches and beards (no joke) and have a prediliction for wearing tight clothing over bodies that are definitely not deserving of such treatment. Wouldn't normally make such an observation but it really struck us pretty hard. On the other hand this might be just the place to go if you are a bit on the homely side (In the land of the blind the one eyed man is king).

Thesseloniki was our final stop and nothing more that a way out of Greece. We booked the train to Slovenia and for the second most expensive nights accomodation of our entire trip were treated to a stay in the grottiest place we've been in since we got to Europe. Final impressions of Greece were capped off by the guy in the urinals at the train station masturbating and learing at me as I was at the urinal beside him. And of course then the train trip was just awful.

In the recent James Bond movie Casino Royale they take a train to MonteNegro. A nice clean modern train. This identifies the film as entirely a work of fiction as we are sure said train does not exist. For the tidy sum of NZD$150 each we had a 25 hour train trip on a 3 carriage train that was we believe probably cleaned at some stage during the 90's. Eight passport inspections Greece - Macedonia - Serbia/MonteNegro - Croatia - Slovenia, no food, no drinks, no toilet seats, toilet paper or water to clean hands with. Don't ever do this. It is generally cheaper and certainly healthier to fly. Watching the Serbian countryside crawl past at a stately 20-30km per hour between random unexplained stops in the middle of nowhere did not provide us with the treasure trove of fond memories we had hoped for.

Things finally started to look up with arrival in Slovenia, Ljubljana ( ie Lyublyana) this is a very pretty place sometimes called a mini-Prague (not that we'd know the difference yet). It was the economic heart of the old Yugoslavia, and in the early 90's they told the increasingly chauvanistically Serbian Slobodan Milosovic and Serbia et al to go and collectively hump themselves. Luckily they had a convenient buffer in a similarly minded Croatia who were sitting between them and Serbia. Croatia of course ended up doing all the fighting necessary to back up the finer details of the point they were trying to make without Slovenian support, not winning them a lot of love in Croatian hearts. Anyway Ljubljana is full of nice little street cafes and bars which are the only places open on a Sunday (very olde worlde to us progressive Antipodeans), and everyone makes use of them. It also has very cheap medical care. And most importantly it has non-greek food.

Summarising:

-Turkey, fantastic, more interesting and definitely cheaper than Greece.
-Greece, in general give it a miss. Food is crap and/or expensive. Maybe visit the islands with friends and money. Early days yet but possibly don't come to Europe for the wine.
-Giardia, fantastic way to loose weight, shitty way to spend a holiday.

PS I may be being too hard on Greece, perhaps blame it on the bug, but then again.... Also much praise to Jane for the added weight (me) she has had to lug around this month.