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Going from Epirus to the Peloponnese
- I rent a bike like this (c) by honda
weeooow ;) with a motorcycle it feels much funkier!!
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6th day A bus brought me from Igoumentsa to Prveza, where I met Spero to get a bigger bike. His company, Broumis, was the only one who would allow that you take the bike and ride it all over Greece. I really liked that Spero! He told me: "The most important thing for me is: (1) Ride carefully, don't brake your neck! (2) Bring me back my bike!" I was willing to accept (1) and (2) ;) and rented the bike for a month, which had a quite big 600 price tag, but I did it anyhow. It was a 250cc Honda "Custom made" street motorcycle. When I rode it first I thought it was the _pure power_ at my fingertips ;) Happy with my new means of transportation I used the coast road to get to Rion, near the city of Patras. It was quite late and I stayed at Rion's campsite and had a look at the unfinished Rion-Antirion bridge to the Peloponnese, it gave a promising impression. I heard of a place called "The place of the five winds", some special location on the Peloponnese were my sister among other Buddhists was building a Buddhist centre. It was situated on a mountain at the Gulf of Corinth, maybe at around 1300m altitude and I was wondering how funny the "9 kilometers of funny road" leading there would be. The mileometer said 181km. |
7th day The ferry boat released me to the Peloponnese and after enjoying many kilometers on the coast road along the gulf I found the road going upcountry and uphill the the wind place. Just before that I had seen a guy raiding the same kind a motorcycle as I did, but for some reason he showed some tricks like raiding it standing freehand. I made my feeling of having such a BIG and STRONG bike a little smaller ;) After a lot of asking and searching I was getting close to the place. Someone told me that I have to turn left at some big "fish-tanks", so I was always looking for some concrete high-rise structure, but in fact the fish-tanks were more like fish-pools not very prominent. One time the road was blocked by sheep, it was a remote place and nobody seemed to take care of the sheep - except two shepherd-dogs. The dogs were quite aggressive barking and snarling at me. I tried to impress them by making loud noises with the motorcycle but they didn't back off. Somehow I managed to pass that dogs and ride on with high adrenaline levels, thinking about the man-eating horror stories my parents had told me ;) I got there and got to know some people: Bea, an attractive girl from Berlin, Ulrike, who gave a supercorrect impression to me, Uli, who was dancing very engergetic and said that he was a raw beginner with people, Pjotor who was taking care of the cash, Tatjana, the cooolest Russian girl, Patricia, she was the boss... Well, it was interesting to be there, I put up my tent and chatted with people. Food was nice, 10 per day. |
- "The place of the five winds" is somewhere here
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8th day Today I worked on the building site of the "Showerhouse" and I learned that a fundament consists of three parts and that's a lot of work to do it. After some hours my eyes gave up. The Greek sun and the high altitude made them burning and full of tears, so I stopped for that day. I also learned that Buddhists don't believe, instead they trust.
I continued to work on the showerhouse, I did a part of the form in which the conrete will be filled later on, I drove some iron-bars into the hard ground and I sew off all prominent parts of the strutting. Right. On this day I was talking with a Buddhist lady about our beliefs. I said that I don't believe in reincarnation or any god. She said she would prefer to be dead to having my attitude. Nevertheless I like the place and the people. The girl from Berlin was swinging in a hammock, listening to high-volume music from her CD-player and singing along with closed eyes. That was really cute :I. I decided to leave the place on the next day and to come back to check the showerhouse five years later. That would be 2008 ;) |
Thru. 28th of August, 10th day After having said goodbye to the Buddhists I took ferry back to the main land. This time I had been on the boat quite early, meaning I had a pole position when landing. I was sitting on the bike, engine already running when the ramp came down. Well, when it was open I just hit the road, across the wide landing area, following the road to the right up the hill and away. I remember this moment well and even though a motorcycles in general is a environment-killing and often darn loud machine it made me feel good. Later that day I arrived at the anchient site of Delphi. 174km |
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