Olympia

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The bus ride from Nafplio to Olympia was one of the most incredible and scary experiences of my life - I highly recommend it. We went from Nafplio to Tripoli and then transferred to a bus that we thought was going to take us directly to Olympia. Throughout the whole of the trip we saw some spectacular scenery. We wound our way up and down mountains on narrow roads where one side of us would be sheer cliffs going up and the other side would be drops going several hundred feet down with little clearance for the bus. We saw amazing towns built into the mountains with buildings up and down the cliff face. The roads were so narrow and winding at points I did not think that the bus would make it through. We thought the total time for the bus rides was to be three and a half hours but boy were we wrong! It was almost two hours to Tripoli and then Tripoli to Olympia ended up being close to five hours! About three hours into it the bus pulled over to the side of the road and several people started getting up off the bus. No one said anything so we had no idea what was going on. A girl in front of us was spoken to in Greek about where she was going then she rushed off the bus to get her stuff so we thought we should probably ask what was going on. Sure enough we had to transfer buses in the middle of nowhere on the side of the road because the bus that we were on could not do the remainder of the trip due to some closures on main roads. It took us another couple of hours to finally get to Olympia and some very nice Greek women on the bus letting us know where to get off.

Olympia was essentially a ghost town. It is a town, which appears to run solely on the tourist industry, and we came at the end of the season so there was literally no one there except the shopkeepers, and the restaurant and hotel owners, and the odd tour bus of Americans. We spent a relaxing evening in our hotel eating pita bakes (the yummiest chip type thing in the world) and trying to understand Greek soap operas.

We spent the majority of the next day at the archaeological site of Ancient Olympia. It was huge and very cool to explore. There were not many complete structures but enough standing portions to fuel the imagination. The on site museum was fantastic. There was an exceptional display of the pediment sculptures from the Temple of Zeus as well a quite famous statue of Hermes holding the infant Dionysus (which I have been tested on many times).

The next day could be considered on of the longest traveling days ever taking us from Olympia to the island of Santorini.

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Photos

Ancient Olympia
colonade

Only standing column on Temple of Zeus
Reconstructed I think

Temple of Zeus
Pediment Statues