“The Glory that was Greece” – Edgar Allan Poe
[Continuing the account of a trip from London to Athens by train and boat, undertaken in November 2022.]
Day 8 – Tuesday 22nd November 2022 – Bari to Patras
After a postprandial drink in the ship’s bar, I returned to my cabin to settle down for the night. However, the prospect of getting to sleep quickly was not good, as I discovered that the schoolchildren who had been rampaging round the ship earlier had cabins all around mine. Rather than stay in their cabins, they were congregating in the corridor outside to conduct loud conversations until late into the night. They eventually settled down at about 1am Italian time, which was 2am in Greek time on which the ship was operating. Before arriving at Patras the ship was scheduled to make an intermediate stop at Igoumenitsa at 5:30am. Unfortunately, the schoolchildren were disembarking at Igoumenitsa, which meant that their teachers started banging on their doors to wake them at 4am (just two hours after they went to bed) and there was further commotion immediately outside my cabin door for the next hour and a half until they got off. I tried to get back to sleep, but with no success.
Once first light started coming through the window of my cabin, I decided to get up. The ship was now much emptier, with very few people in the communal areas. After leaving Igoumenitsa, the ship closely followed the Greek coast weaving between various Ionian islands, before entering the Gulf of Patras. It had now become quite windy, with storms forecast for later in the day, such that it was virtually impossible to walk about on deck on the wind-facing side of the ship.
When I planned this trip, I originally thought that I might just travel straight to Athens from Patras. However, when I discovered that Patras had a castle and a top-rated archaeological museum, I instead decided to schedule an overnight stop there. I went back to my cabin to plan my time in Patras, only to discover that I had made a bit of a mistake, as Tuesday is the day that all the attractions there are closed. As we progressed further into the Gulf of Patras, it became more sheltered and it was possible to wander about on deck with less discomfort. After a while, the city of Patras at the head of the Gulf came into view and we docked there on time at 1300.
Once the ship had tied up, I was free to walk off using the same route as I did when boarding. However, in Patras the foot passengers were then required to get on a bus, which took us the short distance through the port area to the main entrance. Most of my fellow passengers were not planning to stay in Patras and were enquiring about where to catch onward transport to Athens. When we got to the port entrance, the others were somewhat dismayed that there were no buses or taxis waiting to go the city centre, which was about a mile and a half away. As the hotel I had booked for the night was only about half that distance, I was quite happy to walk, particularly since I was considerably less encumbered with luggage than the other foot passengers. Nonetheless, as I walked down the main road from the port to the city, I was twice approached by taxis trying to solicit my business.
I checked into my hotel early and set off to explore Patras. I wandered into the city centre and then climbed the steep steps of the St Nicolas Stairway, which led up to the castle. As I had discovered that morning, the castle was indeed shut on Tuesdays, so I had to content myself with peering at it through the fence. From the elevated view I could see the forecast storm approaching across the bay, so decided that it would be a good idea not to be too far from my hotel by the time that it arrived.
I went back via St Andrew’s church, a massive multi-domed Greek orthodox edifice. I also discovered that I had made a second mistake in the planning of my stay in Patras. I had thought that my hotel was close to the main railway station, from where, the next morning, I was due to catch a railway bus. However, inspecting on the ground, I discovered that the station near my hotel was Agios Andreas (St Andrew) station, which despite having a large number of sidings attached, and scheduled to have the occasional train, was rather derelict and clearly not the main station.
As the first drops of rain started to fall, I made my way back to my hotel. As I was rather tired from my lack of sleep the night before, I had a lie down for a while before going out to find dinner. I chose a place to eat in the city centre which had very good reviews. The meal was excellent. For starter, I had flatbread with beetroot, followed by pork served on a bed of blackcurrant flavoured rice with grilled brussel sprouts. The fridges in the restaurant were situated above the kitchen area, so once you placed your order, somebody would climb a ladder to get the necessary ingredients and hand them down to the kitchen.
The meal was very filling and I meandered slowly back to my hotel. Patras in the evening seemed considerably more lively than it had been during my earlier explorations that afternoon. Just after I got back to my hotel, the heavens opened again. I could hear the rain lashing against my bedroom window and when I went to the bathroom I discovered that rain was coming in round the edge of the window seal and was flooding the bathroom floor. I contemplated contacting reception to get another room, but thought that I didn’t want the hassle of moving my belongings, so instead I used the bathmat to plug the leak.
Day 9 – Wednesday 23rd November 2022 – Patras to Athens
After breakfast in the hotel, I walked to where I now knew Patras railway station to be in the city centre. As the line from Patras is in a rather poor state of repair, there are no trains to Athens, but Hellenic Railways offer a replacement bus service as far as Kiato from where the line to Athens has been electrified. I had pre-booked a ticket on the 1015 bus. When I arrived at the station just before 10am, the bus, as well as a number of prospective passengers, were waiting outside. The bus driver arrived about 10 minutes before we were due to depart and opened up the bus to allow the waiting passengers to board. I bagged a seat in the front alongside the driver, who was wearing an Italian state railway uniform (as Italian railways now also own the Greek rail network).
We set off on time and once we had cleared the suburbs of Patras we joined the motorway that runs along the southern side of the Gulf of Corinth. Throughout the whole journey, the driver was engaged in a conversation on his mobile phone, while dancing along in his seat to the music on the radio, and only occasionally putting his hands on the steering wheel. The bus departed from the motorway for a while to make an intermediate stop at another railway station, before returning to arrive in Kiato on time at 1150.
At Kiato station, as there was no explicit information about which platform the trains to Athens departed from, I just followed the others to a platform where there was a train waiting. However, as none of the other people showed any signs of wanting to board this train, I just remained on the platform with them. After a few minutes, another train arrived, which everyone got on and it departed on time at 1159. Not long after leaving Kiato we passed over the Corinth Canal, which was even narrower than I was expecting.
As the train neared Athens it stopped more frequently and filled up with people. Its final destination was the port of Piraeus, but I got off when it arrived at Larissa, Athens’ main station, at 1323. As the hotel I had booked in Athens was only one stop on the Metro from Larissa, it did not seem worth catching it for such a short distance, so I walked to the hotel. They let me check in early and gave me an upgraded room on the top floor with views across the city, and which also provided free wine and beer for my use. I just left my bag and set off to explore.
This time I did catch the Metro, which conveniently had a station right outside the hotel. My planned first stop was to be the Roman Agora. However, when I arrived there I discovered that my guidebook had misinformed me and that in winter it shut at 3pm, so I thought I would not have time to do it justice before it closed. Instead I went to the Acropolis Museum located near one of the entrances to the Acropolis complex. This modern purpose built museum has been designed to show the Parthenon friezes on the top floor, but as the originals are in the British Museum, they can only show replicas. The Acropolis Museum is clearly very sore about the British appropriation of the so called Elgin Marbles, describing it as an illegal theft. I spent a couple of hours in the Parthenon Museum and the excavations underneath it, before returning by Metro to my hotel. When I came out of the Metro station I was glad that it was next to the hotel, as it was now pouring with rain.
After my lovely meal in Patras the night before, I was encouraged to discover that a restaurant not far from my hotel also had very good reviews, so I decided to go there. I ordered fried courgette as a starter, followed by lamb shank. Unfortunately, the quality of the meal was rather disappointing. The courgette had originally been deep fried, but was not freshly cooked, just reheated with the batter having a rather unpleasant taste. I thought you could not go wrong with lamb shank, but while the portion was generous, somehow it was devoid of flavour – again I suspect it was not freshly cooked. Even a free Greek dessert and liqueur did not make up for my disappointment in the restaurant.
Day 10 – Thursday 24th November 2022 – Athens
As my guide book suggested that the Acropolis and Parthenon are best appreciated if you get there early before the hordes arrive, I left my hotel at 7:30am to catch the Metro so that I could arrive at the entrance to the Acropolis by the time it opened at 8am. My plan was to ascend straight away so that I reached the Parthenon at the summit of the Acropolis and then take my time to explore more on the way down. Despite my advancing years, I can still climb uphill much more quickly than the average tourist and I was the first person from the entrance at which I came in to reach the summit. There were just a few other people there who must have come in via other entrances to the site. It did feel quite special to have such a historic site virtually to myself for the first fifteen minutes or so that I was there. That said, the Parthenon is undergoing repair, so that you could only walk around the outside, and there were a number of workmen already busy in the interior.
When I had had enough of exploring the summit area and the crowds were starting to build, I started to slowly descend stopping to examine in more detail various sites that I had gone past quickly on the way up, including the Temple of Athena Nike, the Odeon of Herodes Atticus and the Theatre of Dionysos.
By the time that I had finished thoroughly exploring from all sides the whole of the Acropolis complex, I observed that there was now a steady stream of visitors trudging up the hill towards the Parthenon. I left the site and walked a short distance across a main road to the Temple of Olympian Zeus. Perhaps I had become blasé after the splendour of the Acropolis, but, apart from the entrance gate and a few columns that were surrounded by scaffolding, there was not a great deal to see at this site, so it did not detain me for very long. I was rather amused by some tourists I encountered at the entrance who were under the mistaken impression that this was the Acropolis, despite the fact that views of the Acropolis dominate from wherever you are in Athens, including from the Temple of Olympian Zeus.
Next stop, a short walk away, was the Panathenaic Stadium, site of the original Olympic Games of the modern era in 1896 and the Intercalated Olympics of 1906. Although now the wrong shape to host international athletics, it was used as the location for the finish of the marathon races in the 2004 Olympics. I was given an audio guide to escort me round the stadium, which included visiting a small museum of Olympic memorabilia. I thought it appropriate that at the time of my visit the centre of the stadium was being used by a group of children for their school sports lesson.
I then returned to Athens city centre by walking through a pleasant pine-scented park. My next stop was the Roman Agora, which I had intended to visit the day before, but my guidebook had misinformed me about its closing time. My guidebook informed me that there was a museum in the Agora, but this also turned out to no longer be the case.
I then walked via Hadrian’s Library to Syntagma Square in the centre of the city. This is where the Greek Parliament is located and the square was the centre of the anti-austerity protests between 2010 and 2012, following the Greek financial crisis. Every hour the guards of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier are swapped over, and I got myself a prime location to observe the spectacle. Dressed in traditional uniform with oversized shoes adorned with pom-poms, the changing of the guard involves a very elaborate ritualistic silly walk. There are no barriers to separate you from the action, just a few markers on the ground beyond which you should not cross.
Once the new guards had safely been installed, I walked to the Benaki Museum, devoted to Greek Culture. Again, my guide book had misinformed me, as it said that there was free entry on Thursdays – in fact, on Thursdays entry is only free after 6pm when the museum stays open to midnight. This was a fascinating museum telling the history of Greece through cultural artefacts. It was slightly disappointing that the top floor galleries covering Greece since the 19th century were closed at the time of my visit. That said, I am not sure that I would have had the stamina to view them properly, as I had spent most of the afternoon viewing the galleries that were open.
I left the Benaki Museum to encounter the perpetual traffic jams which seemed to afflict all the main roads in Athens. It dawned on me that during my whole time in Greece I had not seen anybody cycling – so unlike most other European countries these days. I wondered if nobody cycles because the car traffic is so bad or whether the car traffic is so bad because nobody cycles.
After a brief stop to buy a few presents to give to people when I got back home, I caught the Metro back to my hotel. After the disappointment of my meal the previous evening, I thought hard about where to go for my final evening. In the end, I chose another restaurant within walking distance of my hotel. The place was rather quiet, and I had dolmades to start, followed by a kebab, with some Greek wheat beer to drink. Although not haute cuisine, the food was freshly prepared and very tasty.
Day 11 – Friday 25th November 2022 – Athens to London
Because I had the luxury of a later start this morning, I woke early. When it was clear that I was not going to get back to sleep, I got up and started packing my bag for the trip home. I eventually left the hotel at about 9:40am and caught the Metro to go to the airport. Athens Airport is on the Metro line M3, but only a small proportion of trains go all the way to the airport, with one scheduled about every 40 minutes. I had carefully timed my departure so that I should not have too long to wait for an airport train when I changed from Metro line M2 to line M3. However, when I reached the platform at the station which served my hotel, it was obvious that there was a problem. The platform was full and rather than trains being indicated every four minutes as expected, the next train was shown as out of service in 12 minutes with a working train another three minutes behind that. In the end, the out of service train did seem to come back to life, but it was sufficiently late that I should have just missed the airport train when I changed onto line M3. I ran down to the M3 platform, to see a train there, but it was not the airport train which was shown as the next one – fortunately it was running a few minutes late, which enabled me to catch it and not have a 40 minute wait. The journey to the airport takes about an hour and for the final part the Metro comes above ground and runs on the suburban rail network.
I got to the airport just after 11am, in plenty of time for my 1315 flight. Athens airport was remarkably pleasant, with no queues for security or the leaving Schengen passport checks. I bought myself some lunch and went to a quiet part of the departure area to eat it. The plane arrived on time and there was a short bus ride from the terminal to reach it. The plane was a Boeing 737 Max, the first time I had flown on this aircraft. I am not sure if it was because of its bigger capacity, but they struggled to get everybody on board before its scheduled departure time. I was on the last bus-load to be delivered to the plane and as soon as I had got to my seat the plane doors were closed and the plane started to taxi to the runway.
The flight back had amazing views throughout. Apart from when we were over Germany there were clear skies. The flight path took us over Albania, then along the Dalmatian coast to reach Italy between Venice and Trieste. We then flew over the Alps, going directly above the Brenner Pass which I had crossed by train in May, with good views of Innsbruck on the other side. When the clouds cleared after Germany we passed right over the centre of Brussels, before crossing the North Sea to land at Stansted airport a few minutes early. I was shocked to find that there were no queues at all for passports at Stansted – the first time that I had ever experienced that – and because we came to a gate adjacent to the main part of the terminal there was no waiting for the shuttle train. Consequently I was through the airport only about ten minutes after landing.
A couple of trains and and a tube later I was home before 5pm, earlier than anticipated. This was fortunate because I had arranged to play in a quiz that evening. My team captain had sent us e-mails the day before exhorting us not to be late, but inevitably he was the only member of the team to arrive late. His excuse was that he had had to come from Cricklewood that afternoon – he asked us where we had come from, expecting us all to mention somewhere local, but my response of Athens trumped his Cricklewood, and I had been on time!
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