I've been listening to The Rest is History podcast for years and the subject I enjoy the most is Ancient Greek history. I didn't study any of this at school, and even if I had I wouldn't have listened to any of it because I have always been difficult and awkward and won't do what I'm told to do, and especially not by teachers. Eurgh.
It had to come to me naturally, later in life. So I read some books on the subject and relistened to old TRIH episodes and decided to visit some of these ancient sites myself, by motorcycle.
So I chose a weekend in April and found flights to Athens that were cheap. I would arrive Thursday lunch, and the flight home was midday Sunday. That would give me Thursday afternoon, Friday and Saturday on the bike.
The next job was to find a motorcycle to rent. As always I did my research. I found all the companies renting motorcycles around Athens and checked out their location and reviews.
The company that seemed the best by a large margin was MotoTravel Greece. I contacted them and they were happy to help. They sent me a list of bikes available. I chose a BMW F800GS at a cost of 360 euros for three days hire.
The next job was to plan the route. I like to plan various touchpoints on a trip. The overnight stays, any places to visit, any particular roads. So I bought a paper map, marked Mototravel Greece, Ancient Olympia, Delphi, and Mycenae with a marker pen and started from there. I then marked everything as placemarks in Google Maps which would be my satnav.
My flight was 6am. That meant arriving at the airport at 4am, and an alarm of 3am!
Luckily I managed to sleep a few hours that night, and another hour or so on the plane. I travelled in my motorcycle boots, jeans and jacket, and took my own helmet and gloves in a bag, as well as a rucsac for all my other stuff. Once in Greece I used an app called Freenow to book a cab from the aiport to MotoTravel Greece and was promptly dropped at their shiny new building on the outskirts of Athens.
The welcome was warm and the paperwork straightforward. They offered to look after any luggage I may want to leave with them, but I'd packed efficiently. Kostas, the owner, usually hosts tours using his bikes, and knows the route I had planned well. He showed me round the bike and suggested some places for me to visit and to stop at for lunch and breaks.
I was off! The bike had 20,000 kilometres on the clock but it looked and felt quite new. It had been very well maintained and looked after. It came with a top box (they offered panniers also) and a phone mount and USB point for charging.
The F800GS is very similar to my own F900GS so everything was familiar. This made familiarisation with Greek roads easy as I didn't have to think about alien bike controls. I set Google maps to Thebes and headed off.
The first few miles were out of Athens on the motorway. It was colder than expected (around 14 degrees C) and I rode for two hours.
I had been warned that Thebes is a bit of a dump but it served three purposes. 1) I had read a lot about Thebes. It was a major city state in Ancient Greece and has a rich history, 2) it suited my route as I wanted to travel from Athens to Delphi, and Thebes is on the way, 3) it was a much cheaper and quieter place to stay and eat than Athens.
Thebes did indeed turn out to be a bit of a dump but the hotel was nice and I was happy to leave the bike parked outside overnight. I found a decent restaurant and had a meal and a beer for 14 euros all in. I then found that you can buy cold beers from any grocery store, so I took a couple of nice cold Mythos to my room, read a book, and had an early night.
The next morning I left at 8am for Delphi. It was cold again and I wore four layers and was still a little chilly. It was 80 kilometres to Delphi and the road was great. It was like a very well surfaced and quite wide B-road with plenty of gentle curves.
It was a quite spectacular site with some well preserved ruins in a fabulous location on the slopes of Mount Parnassus.
Whilst walking around the temperature rose and as I left late morning it was 21 degrees C, and rose over the course of the afternoon to a high of 26 degrees.
Luckily the Greeks are adept at overtaking, and do so often and with effiency and speed. And the person being overtaken moves over to allow the manouvre to pass without issue. Completely different to British drivers who fly into a rage should anyone try to overtake.
I noticed more and more stray dogs. This continued to be an issue over the whole weekend. Some on their own, some in pairs, some in packs. It broke my heart to see them. Some were guardian dogs, but most looked like pets that had been abandoned. And plenty were females who were obviously either pregnant or had been feeding puppies. Being on a bike rather than in a car they could see me as a person and would look right into my eyes, pleading for human interaction. Just devastating that they were brought into this world by humans, and then rejected by us. All they wanted was for some company, as well as food and a family. You feel so helpless.
For lunch I stopped in a gourgeous coastal village called Galaxidas and had a toasted sandwich and an ice cream at a cafe on the harbour, at a place suggested by Mototravel Greece.
By mid afternoon I was getting pretty tired. I had opted to follow the coast road but this took me through miles and miles of seaside resorts with endless traffic lights. I headed on to the motorway for the final 90 minutes.
At 5pm I arrived in Ancient Olympia. My hotel, the Hotel Europa, was one kilometre from the Olympic site and was utterly fabulous. My room had a vast bed, a sofa, and a balcony overlooking the pool and thousands of acres of mountains.
Showered and in fresh clothes I rode down the hill in jeans a t-shirt, abandoned the bike at the entrance, spent 20 euros on a ticket and walked into the Olympic site.
I've visited plenty of ancient places but was unprepared for how magnificent Ancient Olympia is. Founded in circa 770 BC it is the birthplace of competitive sports. On a warm spring evening with the trees filled with blossom, birdsong filling the air, and with almost no other visitors I was entranced.
Yes, the site is basically ruins. But the importance of it, and the sense of place, of purpose, and of history is tangible. I walked through a tunnel into the stadium. It was silent but for the sound of swifts which flew around as I walked a lap of the 2,800 year old stadium. It was easy to imagine it in its heyday, with horses pounding the dirt, cheered on by 45,000 spectators. Goosebumps.
I ate in the hotel and retired to my room.
The next day was Saturday, my final day of riding. I left Olympia at 8.30am and headed in the direction of Mycanae, to the east. The satnav showed two routes, one north of the mountains, and one south. But I wanted to go through the mountains. So I set a waypoint at a place called Lagkadia. It added an hour to the journey but I could deal with that.
Immediately the roads were completely different to those I'd experienced before. Tiny and winding, and with overgrown bushes and trees either side reducing the width from narrow to very narrow. Every bend was blind due to the elevation and vegetation. It was great fun.
After half an hour it opened out into a valley floor with spectacular views in all directions. I stopped for a photo. A lizard basking on the road scuttled away. The place was dead silent. There were huge cactii growing at the roadside. Fields of olive trees around.
And then a dog in the distance. Tail wagging furiously she trotted in the road towards me. Female and obviously having given birth recently she wanted attention and food. I could give her the former but had none of the latter. A farmer in an ancient dusty pickup who I'd overtaken miles back hove into view and turned into the olive plantation. She must have known him, bade me farewell, and trotted off to see if he had any food, and maybe a pat on the head.
Back on the bike I headed further into the mountains and the views and terror increased in equal measure. Higher and higher I rode, with cliff faces to one side and huge drops to the other. The road was cut into the rock face. It was a challenge to balance my fear of heights with actually riding safely. I adopted a technique (talking to myself basically) I'd created in order to fill my mind with anything other than the fear of falling off the bike, over the barrier, and down the cliff face to certain doom. Fear of heights is anything other than rational.
Mycenae was another brilliant site. Older even than Olympia, it was home to a civilisation right at the start of Classical Antiquity which shone bright for a few hundred years before collapsing due to unknown reasons. Greek entered a dark ages until 800 BC when the Olympic site was constructed and the heyday of the Classical and Hellenic Periods.
After Mycenae I had two hours to get to MotoTravel Greece for 4pm so headed on to the motorway for the final section. I dropped the bike off, got a taxi into Athens centre and enjoyed an evening visiting the Acropolis Museum, eating a decent meal, and sinking a few beers.
I thoroughly enjoyed my long weekend in Greece and would recommend it to any travellers. Bikers especially can rent a bike and tour some of the best and most fascinating ruins in the world.
By Matt Hubbard
