Monemvasia to Athens

I set my alarm for 7.30 and I got organised, had breakfast and was downstairs by 8.10. I paid my €30 and walked across the road. I bought my ticket to Athens for €23 and was told that I would only have to change buses at Molai. I was lucky that an 8.30 bus ran on Fridays. The bus arrived and we got on for the trip to Molai. When we got to Molai I had my first encounter with squat toilets and this one was particularly nasty so I opted out.

The bus to Athens arrived from Neapoli very full, so I sat right up the back. John sent me the names of hotels around Larissa on this trip but I didn’t dare look down at the phone for long enough to reply. The driver wasn’t as kamikaze as the last one but I still got a sore neck from craning. Thankfully they didn’t take us through every village this time, and we got to Sparta quite quickly. I had to change buses, so I stowed my bag underneath, grabbed the front seat just before a little old lady grabbed the seat next to me, and dived for the toilets. By chance I ended up in the same cubicle I’d been locked in, so made sure I left the door ajar. I got back on the bus and we set off.

The journey was peppered with many horn honkings and dangerous driving and I was reminded about the boxes. I asked John in a text whether they were shrines, and also asked about the Nafplio cacti. He confirmed that they were shrines for road victims (pretty terrifying considering how many there are) and said the cacti were fruit cacti.

We arrived in Tripoli and stopped briefly at the smaller bus stop on the Sparta road. The bus continued on, and I had my camera out to be ready for the canal. We stopped at the Corinthia bus station I’d been dropped off at on the way to Nafplio first.

After setting off again, I had to whip the camera out when I saw the canal looming almost immediately. I only got one photo with no ships in it. That means that the stop beside the road for Fihtio had indeed been the bus station; it means that the canal had been right beside me the whole time I’d been waiting for the Nafplio bus; and it means that John was 100% deadset right about it all and I was an idiot. I kicked myself for the next half hour.

We drove on, stopped at Piraeus, and on the outskirts of the city the driver asked me in Greek to check on some traffic he couldn’t see. I stared blankly back at him and the ten other passengers who were looking at me and babbled uncertainly ‘singnomi, den milao eleenika’ (Συγγνωμη, Δεν μιλαω Еλληνικα). It seemed to do the trick though because the driver nodded knowingly and about three other people raced to the window to look. We arrived at the bus terminal and I found yet another chicken pitta, then found the toilets. It was my second and hopefully last encounter with squat toilets. Thankfully they were much cleaner than the one at Molai. Still not nice though.

I found where the Omonia bus left from and bought my 50c ticket. The bus arrived very quickly and I got off one street from Omonia Square. I had planned to look for a hotel in the periphery of Syntagma Square because I was too hot and lazy to look for the ones John had recommended, but found a good room at Hotel Cecil on Athinas St for €65. I took my gear up to room 103 and took some time to cool off and recover.

Just before 5, I decided to walk up to Syntagma Square and get the tram to the beach, since I didn’t manage it last time. The tickets only cost 60c each way and were quite easy to come by. The trip was pleasant and I saw a different side of Athens, and when I got there I walked along the beach from two stations north of the bend down to Edem Beach.
The beach was nice enough but nothing special with not much to see. The water was nice on my feet and a lot of people were playing tennis with wooden bats. There was nothing in the marina direction, so I went back to the tram. By the time I made it back to Syntagma among the crowds it was dark. I wandered back through the square in search of dinner. I got YET ANOTHER chicken pitta (they didn’t have lamb) which was really good, spoke to some Scots in the queue and walked back to eat and relax. Bed at 11.45 after seeing news reports about political riots in Thessaloniki, though it was all in Greek and I couldn’t tell what caused them.