Greece
Leaving Mola was a bit a sad (gonna miss the cool people there) but Shawn and I were also quite excited to see Greece! Greece was always part of Shawn’s travel plans and not really part of mine, but given the opportunity I thought I might as well. We took a night ferry from Bari to Corfu, and we arrived exhausted at the famed Pink Palace in the morning. The Palace lived up to its reputation immediately, offering us a free ouzo shot upon arrival. We ended up spending five nights there, and (mostly) had a good time. The reason I say mostly is because for whatever reason, maybe it wasn’t the right time of year or maybe the recession is keeping travelers home, the hostel was fairly dead. The private club was rarely even close to full, but the many events the hostel hosted enabled us to meet fun people. The ‘Booze Cruise’ was as alcohol-filled as the name implies and a lot of fun. On the cruise we went cliff jumping, passed through a bat-cave and got to chill on a secluded, private beach. We randomly met five guys from Vancouver on the cruise, and together with other newly met people (some from Ireland, others from New Zealand) we had a good time that night.
Me, above a beach on the island of Corfu, Greece
While in Corfu we also lounged about on a few beaches and explored a bit of the island on the scooters we rented. They were actually really fun to ride, mine went up to 60km/h. I did wipe out at one point when taking a turn too sharply, resulting in several pretty gross scrapes and a 10 Euro fine for scratching the scooter, but luckily it wasn’t that bad. Since neither Shawn nor I are real beach bums, we decided that we’d spent enough time in Corfu and were ready to set for a new adventure. Shawn had the brilliant idea of renting a car and road-tripping mainland Greece for five days (before our ferry back to Italy). We knew this wasn’t going to be an easy adventure to plan out due to the fact that neither of us drives standard, but we started looking up a few places anyhow. We googled around a bit and called a few places on Corfu, but we couldn’t find a place that could rent us an automatic for under 300 Euros and that would allow us to drive off the island. This was a minor setback however, and we agreed that we would just take the ferry to the mainland and try our luck in the port. When we got there we initially found only one place that had an automatic car available, but the hefty sum of 550 Euros was too much for our budget. The other places we tried were either closed (opening hours in Greece are totally random) or had no automatic cars. We were ready to give up on the small port town and take a bus to somewhere else when I found another car rental company we didn’t see earlier. The guy said he had a car! 250 Euros for 5 days, full insurance, everything, car was automatic, but he had to go somewhere and he told me to come back in an hour. We were cautiously happy about this and rightly so - after returning an hour later it turns out the automatic car they had was in fact 550 for the time we requested and he wouldn’t budge on the price even though he promised cheaper. Angry, we went back to the first place we found to ask if they had cheaper cars in other cities. The guy there suggested we try going to Ioannina (about 90km east), saying a big city like that would surely have what we were looking for, so we got on a bus and headed there. The people of Greece are very friendly people. After our arrival in Ioannina, a middle-aged man at the bus station decided to help us find a car. He made a few phone calls, and asked a few people about a car rental, but found no automatic for us. He did however say that there were a lot of companies in this certain area of town and he called a cab over for us and told the driver where to take us. When we got there, we quickly found the perfect car! Automatic, 260 Euros with full insurance and available immediately. We shopped around a bit to see if we could find a better price, but we ended up returning to the initial place. Bad news. The car’s battery was dead, and for some reason this is a big deal in Greece and it couldn’t be fixed. We told them we could wait till the next day, they said they’d do what they can, then told us where to find cheap accommodation for the night. Before I talk a bit about the city, I’d like to finish the story. The next morning we checked out of our hotel and headed over to Europcar. Great news! The battery was actually not impossible to replace (obviously) and the car was ready for us. There was one more little thing they forgot to mention, however, and that was that we have to be 21 in order to rent the car… 20 and 10 months wasn’t close enough and our hopes of a Greek road trip were shattered. The young couple working at the store did help us plan our bus trip to Athens though, and even gave us a free ride to the bus station. Yet even given the fact we couldn’t rent a car, we were happy we went to Ioannina. Being a city we had never heard of we had no expectations, but it turned out to be awesome! The city sits on Lake Pamvotis and is surrounded by large, arid hills. Being a university town it is full of young people, and packed with cool restaurants, bars and cafes. It’s clean and well-maintained and feels quite rich in comparison to the rest of the Greece I saw. Ioannina also has a rich history, worth reading about. In the end I was a bit disappointed we didn’t have a lot of time to explore it, but hopefully I’ll get the chance to come back one day. So like mentioned before, after Ioannina we jumped on a bus to Athens. We pulled into Athens late at night, and got ripped off by the taxi driver who took us to our hotel. He was being an asshole about bargaining, and we gave up cause we just wanted to get to our hotel already after the long ride south. The next morning we left the hotel and checked into a cheaper hostel, and explored the city. Athens is a cool city, certain things reminded me of Istanbul, others of Rome and others were unique. What was similar to Istanbul were the street vendors (one who gave Shawn and I both a free nectarine each!), the bazaars selling all kinds of random junk and souvenirs, and the stray cats. The crowded streets and crazy drivers were reminiscent of both Istanbul and Rome, but the style of life and the old monuments were definitely evocative of the latter. Though there are less old monuments than in Rome, the Acropolis is absolutely stunning. It can be seen from many parts of the city, and the whole area surrounding the giant rock it’s built on is quite green (for Europe). The city is also littered in Orthodox churches or miniature churches on the side of the road where people place candles and probably pray.
Athens
We saw a great chunk of the core city that first day, and while exploring we noticed that Tiesto was playing in Athens the very next night, our last. The next day we decided to buy tickets for the show (a newly-met from New Zealand gave us some money to buy him one as well), which in Vancouver would generally be a small errand. In Athens, this was a multiple-hour, decently-stressful escapade. The box office we initially went to inquire about tickets only sold tickets for shows in Thessaloniki so they sent us to a different place which had just run out of tickets. From there we were sent elsewhere again, and again, and again. We trekked from one side of the city to the other until finally someone told us to go to the arena where he was playing. We took a half-hour metro ride out to the arena, only to find out he wasn’t playing there - they sent us to another arena. Guess what? Not playing there either. Finally, we found some young hipster who happened to know that the show was actually at some old airport hangar, obviously far away from where we were. In the end the whole trek was worth it because we got tickets, and the show was amazing. I like Tiesto a lot more than I did previously, his live show was sick, he even had fireworks shoot out from the stage.
Tiesto
After Tiesto the three of us (Shawn, Michael and I) passed out for a few hours after which we hastily caught a taxi to the bus terminal. Michael caught his bus with three minutes to spare, Shawn and I had to wait a couple hours. The bus took us all the way to Corfu, where I was planning on taking a ferry to Dubrovnik in Croatia en route to Sarajevo. It turns out no ferries go from Greece to Croatia, only from Bari in Italy. However I already knew that the next ferry to Dubrovnik from Bari was not for a few days, so due to bad timing I decided to stay in Bisceglie with Shawn’s family for two days (which were amazing) then catch a plane to Romania. This post was published from Timisoara, Romania.
