Been a while since we last updated this bad boy and as you would have guessed we have been flat out... well not really - the last few weeks have been somewhat of a holiday from our holiday. After finishing up in Jordan we decided against visiting Israel for obvious reasons so hit up sunny Cyprus.
We landed in Larnaca in Cyprus and were greeted by sunny weather and not a whole lot to do, so we spent one night there and re-located ourselves to Limassol, fortunately enough the apartment we were staying in was cheap and located right above a pub! Limassol is a cool little coastal town on the southern coast of Cyprus so we decided it was a good location to hire our second car for the trip - Gertie - and what a weapon she was! We spent most of our days aimlessly driving around Cyprus (it really isn't a very big place), checking out the scenery and visiting the small wine villages that are scattered around the island. One of the villages was called Omodos - where we ended up buying a bottle of the most expensive wine in the village (11 Euro) and had an amazing lunch, the "small" meat meze which was actually massive!
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| Larnaca by night |
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| Enjoying a wine in Omodos |
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| Tom with our 2nd course of our "small" meze |
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| Tom with Gertie - our Hyundai i10 - what a beast! |
After a pretty relaxing week in Cyprus it was time for us to actually do something and move on to Greece, Athens to be specific. We arrived in the home of the Olympics intending to try our hand at Couchsurfing - a website where bums like us go when they don't want to pay anything for accommodation - pretty much you find people who are willing to let you stay in their house for free! We managed to find an awesome Greek couple, Olga & Nikos, who were willing to put up with us for 4 nights and they were great! We kicked off our stay with Tom teaching Olga how to play chess (definitely the blind leading the blind) and it just happened to be a Harry Potter chess set, Tom was pretty excited!
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| Mr Potter teaching Olga how to play chess... and nearly losing |
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| Us with Olga and Nikos, our fantastic hosts in Athens |
Our first day in Athens was spent visiting the most obvious sights - the Acropolis & the Parthenon (the huge temple in all the pictures is actually called the Parthenon - it took Tom a good 20 minutes to iron that one out). Despite the 15,000 cranes working on it to keep it standing that Parthenon was incredible and the Acropolis as a whole was awesome!
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| The Parthenon with just a few cranes and a bit of scaffolding... |
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| View over Athens from the Acropolis |
Naturally this post needs the obligatory mention of how amazing the food was and Greece certainly had some amazing cuisine. Firstly let's set this straight - yiros, souvlaki and kebabs are all different - the difference lies in the cooking technique used and Tom made it his mission to sample each one and ensure that was true.
Following Olga's helpful advice, we decided that visiting one of the islands was going to be a waste of time due to the fact that no one goes there in winter and the weather would be shite - so we went to a small "romantic" town called Nafplio. As with Cyprus we did minimal activity for our 4 days in Nafplio. We climbed 912 stairs to visit the Palamidi Castle and the rest of our time was spent drinking coffee and playing backgammon. Nafplio definitely lived up to it's reputation as a "romantic" town - the absurdly vocal love-making coming from the rooms either side of ours definitely provided proof of that fact.
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| KG getting her arse handed to her in backgammon |
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| Some of Nafplio's lovely scenery we managed to admire between asthma attacks while descending the stairs from Palamidi Castle |
We had one last gigantic feed of mezze and lamb with Olga and Nikos before saying a sad goodbye. On a more exciting note we have arrived in Barcelona and are hanging out with Jo and Rickles! Woo!
