Athens and Cape Suonion

This trip marked the beginning of our last ever Europe adventure before we head home to Australia, so we were determined to make it a good one. Our plan was to fly into Athens then do a bit of island hopping across the Greek isles before making our way over to the south west coast of Turkey, then heading up to finish and fly out of Istanbul. That was the plan and we had just under 3 weeks to do it.

Our first stop was Athens. We flew in late on a saturday night to arrive at a similar hotel drama to the one we encountered in Barcelona a few weeks before. Luckily enough the hostel people were nice and found us another place to stay at (which was actually in a better location and better price!).

Early next morning we started our discovery of Athens. We headed first to the magnificent Acropolis, which is topped by the ancient Parthenon, built 431 BC as a temple to the Greek goddess, Athena. It was awe inspiring to say the least. Something we had only ever seen in pictures, we could never have dreamed to actually be standing in front of it! There are also a few other temples and constructions on the acropolis, and the awesome blue sky we had made for some great photos.

We spent a fair bit of time around the Parthenon and other surrounding archaeological sites, including the Odeon of Herodes Atticus, Theatre of Dionysis and the Agora - the ancient city centre of Athens. The whole place gave us a feeling similar to what we got in Rome walking around the Colosseum and the Roman Forum, the amount of history and age of things we saw was overwhelming. There are also a few interesting biblical related sites which we saw, one being the Areopagus (mars hill) which was quite amazing to see.

After a good 4 hours walking around we thought we would stop for a break, where we decided to try Greek Coffee, which I had never heard about prior to coming, as if I did, I would probably have not ordered it. I can only describe it as drinking muddy, sludgy dirt, mixed with sugar. Yes, Mel was not impressed.

The rest of the time in Athens was spent with a bit of shopping through the market streets, along with a visit to some more ancient sites - Hadrians Library (where we encountered some cool wild tortoises), Hadrians Arch and the massive Temple of Zeus (which only has a few columns left standing but is still amazing).

With a bit of daylight left, on the advice of Lonely Planet, we caught a bus to a place called Cape Sounion, about an hour and a half south of Athens, to watch the sun set over the temple of Poseidon, which is perched on a cliff overlooking the mediterranean sea. Probably havent captured it in the pics, but this was definitely one of the most amazing things I have ever seen, and we were very glad we decided to go as we nearly didnt! This was to be the first of a couple of amazing sunsets we were going to get in the next few weeks.

After all this we returned very tired back to our hostel and ended up deciding not to stay another day in Athens as we were so eager to get to the islands and relax. So we tried very hard to get some sleep as we had to be up at 6am to get our 9 hour ferry to Santorini in the morning. We had certainly packed a lot into our 1 and a bit days in Athens so were looking forward to relaxing on and island paradise....

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