Greece — a beautiful baptism of fire
Dogs, mountains and ‘fancy old stacked rocks’
After our uneventful stay in Athens we hit the road with only a mild amount of trepidation that we’d be pedalling a) uphill for the rest of the day and b) this would be the first few miles of our 2000+ mile ride.
But we escaped the urban sprawl Athens without too much hassle or navigational failures. Iain fixed a stiff link in my bike chain which had been causing it to mysteriously skip gears (fixing this is as easy as wiggling the chain a bit with some oil, but can be a hard fault to discover, luckily Iain recognised it immediately).
The day was a beautiful and quiet cycle as the hubbub of Athens quickly turned into empty mountain roads. But it was an uphill struggle (what was to be the first of many) as we climbed up and up to around 650 metres in the isolated hills to the north of the city.
Night of the dogs
That night we pitched up camp hidden behind some thorny shrubs in what was a fairly unremarkable wild campsite just away from the main road.
We went through our evening routines, cooking a small meal, carrying out some minor bike maintenance and settling in to sleep for our first night on the road.
But as the sun set and we closed our eyes, the wind dropped and the barking of dogs began. Coming at first from one direction and then another, and another again, there was howling and yapping and what sounded like dogs fighting.
It began to sound like the barking was becoming closer and closer, and came from all angles around us.
Iain and I lay wide-awake whispering to one another hoarsely in worry. We had been warned of wild dogs in Romania, but had not yet expected to encounter packs of them so early into our journey.
We prepared for battle. Iain did a piss in a circle around the tent, “to slow them down”. I made a pile of rocks by the entrance we could hurl at the dogs. I brought my bike-support pole close to hand, Iain held a can of deodorant and a lighter. So should the dogs attack we could burst forth from the tent in a furious flurry of rock throwing, fire and extendable-aluminium-stick flailing.
We settled into an uneasy sleep, haunted by images of being surrounded by ravenous hounds, with eyes gleaming yellow in a circle around us should we look and flicker the flashlight outside.
However, when we awoke and looked around we saw that the dogs were clearly attached to the surrounding farms some considerable distance away and their barking had been picked up by the mountain winds and our first night nervous imagination had ran away from us.
Even as someone who’s done a decent amount of it, I always find the first sleeping “in the wild” a little concerning before settling into it. Every little noise can put you on edge as you become aware you are actually very vulnerable in a tent, despite the false subconscious belief that a small wall of fabric will protect you from the dangers of the night.
Day two, storms and railway camping
The following day was a fairly standard day of cycling, as our tyres munched around eighty kilometres of asphalt. We descended down through theancient city of Thebes (modern Thiva) of Oedipus Rex fame.
We stopped to top up our supplies at a supermarket. As Iain was inside I saw two other fully loaded cycle touring bikes with a girl guarding them just as I was with ours.
I introduced myself and discovered she and her friend (who had just reappeared) were French and planning to cycle up the west of Greece and get the boat over to Italy and home to France. They were also two visions of the most perfect tanned beauty I have ever seen on bikes.
Sadly my terrible French and their limited (but quite respectable, really) English made communicating difficult, let alone attempts at flirting in a Lidl carpark. My imagination did wander to thinking about how lovely it would be to cycle with these two, instead of my… less than beautiful companion (Iain’s pointed out I’m hardly Mr Universe, or even, our “stunning” friend Josh).
I mentioned there were two French cycle tourers to Iain when he came out of the supermarket as I went in, thinking he might go talk to them too. However, he just nodded and started packing away his food methodically.
When I exited the shop I expected to see Iain flirting as best he could with these two. Instead all he said was “you never said they were women!” as he apparently only noticed as they left and it was too late to chase them down.
We crossed a great drained lake and were forced to shelter under a tarp from a thunderstorm that rumbled across the flat expanse, as we cowered away from the bikes hoping lightning would not strike us.
We finally camped that night under a railway bridge, which was a better campsite than you’d expect. It felt like a bit of proper drifting was taking place, it was all very ‘Of Mice and Men.’
Day three, mountains and storms
The following day we climbed out into the mountains again with a cold wind blowing down from the snow capped peak of Parnassus. It was all verdant and green, looking almost alpine if it weren’t for the olive groves and the slender shapes of cyprus trees dotting the landscape.
We stopped for a very generous lunch in a small taverna and consumed some hearty and delicious traditional Greek food, which was a massive helping of bread, salad, tzatziki and huge plate of spaghetti with slow stewed pork and chicken. Which powered us over the mountain pass.
Just as we were about to descend another thunderstorm stuck, we cowered under a tarp against the mountain side under some bushes once again as thunder rumbled all around us, before deciding to press on. Layering up, we raced down the sharp twists and turns of the road as it descended a wall of mountain.
We flew down six hundred metres of mountain before reaching the sea-level plain, which was in ancient times was host to one of the most famous battles of all time — Thermopalyae, where the Spartan King Leonidas held off the mighty Persian Army of Xerxes with just his bodyguard of 300 warriors (ie the battle in the movie 300 for the uncultured amongst you).
We were exhilarated, but soaked and cold by the end of this and decided to stay the night in a hotel in the town of Lamia.
Day four, the mountains of madness
The mountains behind Lamia came as a surprise. It didn’t look that hard on the map, but there was a 750–800 metre climb. With the uphill struggle starting the moment we left the hotel, continuing on and on up the baked red earth of the mountain side.
Passing cars beeped their horns at us, initially we thought this was in annoyance at cyclist on the road (but as there was plenty of space on the roads traffic wasn’t an issue), but we realised they were waving us on in encouragement.
Which would seem fitting in what I’ve observed of the Greek “national character” (insofar as there is such a thing a national character) as a people who are largely jocular, friendly, extroverted and welcoming.
Despite the clear physical traces of a hard recession hitting the country with many derelict and abandoned factories, shops and buildings littering the landscape, the people seem on a superficial level at least happy.
This smiling face of Greek encouragement was something Iain and I desperately needed, as with no exaggeration, the Greek mountains are some of the hardest cycling I have ever done and we were becoming worryingly fatigued, early into our trip. With aching muscles, penetrating tiredness and all the chafing, sunburn and minor complaints that go with living on the road.
But for all our suffering the breathtaking beauty of the country more than compensated us. Surrounded on all sides by deep green mountains capped with gleaming white tips that disappeared into dark rumbling clouds.
The wind was not with us, but it was gentle and cooling, the temperature was a perfect 20 degrees every day and the sun shone without fail. And for every hard mountain pass there was descent which filled the blood with flashes of adrenaline as we cascaded down at breakneck speeds into vast valleys that stretched on to the next set of distant mountains.
We camped for our last night on a pile of Earth behind an empty factory, which doesn’t sound like the most scenic location.
But we were in the centre of the rolling green Thessalonian plain, a vast 200x200 mile cauldron of fertile land surrounded by mountains on all sides. And just as we went to bed we were gifted with a rainbow coloured sunset, a full moon and constellations danced above us through the clear night.
Day five, the plains of Thessaly
Flat plains are mine and Iain’s cycling speciality, and even into the wind we ate a comfortable 50 kilometres for breakfast as we hurtled up past Larissa to the slopes of mount Olympus which came into distant view as “the home of the gods” was shrouded in clouds.
We decided we didn’t have it in us to take the 1000 metre high pass over the mountain and decided to risk the low pass through the “Tembi Valley”, which was marked on the map as a motorway grade road. We prepped for a hard cycle in our normal way, which is eating an apple and another food we have to hand.
Upon reaching the pass, everything was suspiciously quiet. We cautiously pedalled on into the steep walled valley, an epic deep gorge with high stone walls. Not a single car passed us on the broad motorway. I began to worry that the road was closed and the motorists knew something we didn’t.
But then we saw above us a tunnel entrance, so new the we could smell the asphalt drying. It was not yet even appearing on google maps, so we were very lucky indeed to enjoy a wide smooth flat ride through the mountains down to the coast with the road more or less to ourselves.
We reached the coast at around 6pm and after some debate we decided to catch a train into Thessaloniki rather than camp by the beach. And after a 100km ride, the prospect of short train ride vs another 100km day of getting lost on motorways, winding dead-end roads over a featureless river estuary, and industrial outskirts of a big city, seemed very appealing.
We arrived into the hectic traffic of Greece’s second city at around 9pm and it was something of a shock to the system. I was exhausted, lost and stressed, trying to find the hostel in a warren of one-way streets and unforgiving aggressive taxi drivers. Meanwhile Iain needed a crap like he’d never needed one before, he reported after.
We arrived at the hostel after trekking uphill through cobbled streets and our stress was instantly ameliorated by the friendly warm atmosphere of the hostel and the friendly grin of the receptionist with an infectious laugh. She poured us two beers and made us feel like we had come home.
Our hostel, the ‘Little Big House’ where I find myself now, is a beautiful comfortable little hostel sitting in the shadow of Thessaloniki's old Byzantine walls, with a charming coffee shop in front and frankly I couldn’t think of a better place to sit, relax and recharge before hitting the road once more.
