Daryl & Heather Overland

After Heather's encyclopaedic description of our travels through Italy, I'll try and keep this one brief.

Athens had its good and bad sides. Booking train tickets to anywhere is a total nightmare, but I'm a sucker for some good ruins, and Athens has the best. Having gone back to 79AD in Pompeii, we went back another 500 odd years to check out the work of the Classical Greeks on the Acropolis and surrounds. Truly amazing. They were pretty darn clever back then, those Greeks.

Having spent a day ruin-hopping, we spent another day checking out the National Archeaological Museum (having checked out the Australian Consulate for voting purposes inbetween). Among a lot of stuff, it contains the finds from the royal grave circles at Mycenae. The Mycenaeans were the guys involved in the trojan war and pretty much every other Greek myth that has come down to us since Homer. Anyway, the stuff they produced (back in 1500 BC or thereabouts) and managed to keep buried for over 3000 years is astonishing (gold face masks, jewellery, swords etc.).

Keeping to the theme, the next day we went and visited Mycenae itself, about 2 hours bus ride and a 4km walk through torrential rain and fear of being struck by lightning. Was it worth it? Totally. The palace complex is surrounded by a wall built of huge boulders (by the cyclops), with the famous Lions Gate. Anyway, if you like your ruins, it's a good 'un, and I finally got some use out of my three years of undergraduate archaeology.

We are now in Thessalonika, not a particularly interesting place, but a necessary stop on our way to Romania, due to the aforementioned nightmare train booking process. Tonight we catch a train to Bucharest, and then on to Transylvania.

Phew! OK, it wasn't as short as I'd promised, but now we are fully up-to-date.

P.S. Heather has just reminded me to say that we ate 3 really amazing souvlakis each from Savvas (only 1.60 euros too) in the four days we were in Athens (plus one OK one from near our hotel and one rubbish, overpriced one in Mycenae). This infomation is important, apparently.

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