Let’s do this as a travel blog kind of day, starting with my photo of the day! This is us trying to navigate through one of the many small towns from Monomvasia around the coast to Tyros:
Seriously – this is the main coastal road around the Peloponnese! What the photo doesn’t show is that to get around any corner we had to fold in the side mirrors. It also doesn’t show that this is a TWO-WAY ROAD. As I’m a pretty ordinary driver, but a pretty crap reverser, I think my aura preceded me and all oncoming traffic pulled off the road or reversed. And just to show this was not isolated, heres a little montage from the next village:
Yes Susi, you do drive through the town square to get through the village.
So, drenched in sweat after each village we breathed, drank in the scenery, and thoroughly enjoyed the drive. To put some perspective to this, I think this was one of the most beautiful drives I’ve ever had. This is, no doubt, aided by the fact that the van remained undamaged, we never really had a nervous break-down, town pressures were alleviated by smiling inhabitants waving us by and the day’s end brought us to this:
I’ve put together a slide-show of just some of the sights taken in over the day, but this necessarily lacks the smells of the forest, sea, orange blossoms and fynbos as we moved around the various headlands. What a day!
Earlier we had climbed to the top town in Monomvasia, and it would be wrong to ignore just how pretty this Venetian fortified town is. Built in the 12thC, with its church still standing, and some of the frescoes still somewhat intact. As with all the religious buildings in Greece, this underwent original Frankish building and ownership, Venetian improvements, surrender to the Ottoman Turks after the collapse of Constantinople, return to Venice for less than 100 years before returning to the Turks, and then, finally, emancipation in the 1820’s.
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