Peleponnese Pilgrimage

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In 2003 The Independent on Saturday travel section ran an article by William Dalrymple about a holiday he had had with his family in the Peloponnese. It was very evocative about the countryside and in particular about the sites - more Frankish (French Crusaders who ran this part of the world for a good part of the 13th century) and Byzantine Empire than classical Greek and Roman. I had kept the article and earlier in 2005 booked up fights to Athens and arranged to hire a 4 wheel drive jeep for a week. During the summer books were read and an idea of an itinerary came together - followed by telephone calls to hotels. What follows is a diary of our week:

Saturday 1 October
Alitalia/All Idiots
We had decided to make a start on the Saturday by heading west from Athens to the edge of the Peloponnese and had booked into the Hotel Mandas in Loutraki near Corinth.

Checked in with our usual underweight bags. We flew Alitalia from Heathrow (having managed to use Sainsbury’s nectar points via e-bookers to defray most of the cost). I managed to buy three shirts from Austin Reed, to be picked up on return. Flight to Milan was uneventful and short. We had an hour or so to wait - but transfer chaos ensued.

Susan became a traffic cop, enforcing some sort of queuing discipline….echoes of a previous experience in Luxor. Arrived in Athens on time and waited for the bags, eventually Susan’s arrived, mine didn’t. Alitalia baggage handling find the bag, it’s in Milan! along with the bags of several other passengers. “Will be on the next plane arriving in the early hours, where are we staying in Athens?” We explain that we are not - a bit of an alien concept - the solution for bags outside Athens is to put them on a public bus, but not on a Sunday…..we decide that the only way to see the bag is to return to the airport in the morning. We pick up our hired jeep and have a chat with the hire firm who happily tell us that the flight we had been on is notorious for baggage problems. They very helpfully try to find us a nearby hotel but all are booked up so we head on to the Athens ring road motorway, into the night.

115 kms later we arrive in Loutraki feeling tired and in need of food and alcohol. Spirits rise when Yota the hotel receptionist produces two bottles of very cold lager. This barely hits the sides and we then hit the seafront for a stroll and some dinner, choosing the busiest restaurant where we have our first Greek salad of the week and a decent local red wine.

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