Yoni and Mark awoke in quite distressing fashion, with many small but angry looking red bites all over their arms and upper body. It appears that their beds had bedbugs. Mark’s was much worse than Yoni’s and he insisted on moving rooms. The bites didn’t destroy their holiday, but it’s definitely not pleasant to wake up to tens of bites on your body. It’s not clear if the cream or aloe vera that we bought at the local pharmacy actually helped, but it didn’t hurt.
After the bedbug shock, our day started with buying supplies for a picnic lunch, which we almost always do at least once every trip. Yoni and I also snuck into the Saturday services of the Arachova church. We had two clear observations. The first, our brief presence reduced the average age in the church by twenty years. This was not really a surprise. The second, which was an enormous surprise, was how eerily similar the tunes of the Greek prayers were to Hebrew prayers. Mark, Garry and Phil who waited outside commented they thought it sounded like Shabbat prayers at an orthodox synagogue and not Saturday prayer at an Orthodox church. Yoni and I were even more convinced from inside the church. I would love to find out how this was, that all five of us heard the same similarity. We’ve all heard Catholic prayers before and there is no similarity whatsoever to Jewish liturgical music.
Arachova’s most famous landmark is the clocktower, jutting out into and over the valley beneath the town. From a distance, we’d seen people at the top of the tower and we wanted to climb it. We couldn’t, however, find the entrance. In the end, after much exploring, I found it, but it seems to be a very well kept secret. In order to climb the clock tower, you follow the wall of the Arachova Ethnographic Museum of Folklore, down a narrow path that runs between the museum and the neighbouring building, cross the museum’s back yard, turn another corner and wedge yourself though a half open gate. And not a single sign to show the way. I half expected to be asked a secret password in order to gain entry, but the little booth next to the half open gate was empty on this Saturday morning. The 360° views from the top certainly justified the effort to find the entrance.
As we drive from point A to B via Z, we usually listen to music. Whilst we all have different musical tastes we learnt that the culinary brothers from another mother shared musical genes as well. Mark’s musical tastes has an arrested development, being stuck in some weird 60’s fantasy. Occasionally a70’s song would sneak in, but 80’s was much too recent for him. And Phil was convinced that Mark was a musical genius. Garry and Yoni suffered in silence. I was perhaps a little less silent. Next trip I’m going to make the playlist and I’ll subject him to some of my most eclectic, modern Jazz-punk, or gems from the anti-folk movement.
It should not come as a surprise that over the years our trips have changed a bit. Our earlier trips had us walking many kilometers in villages, towns and cities but not always a longish walk in nature. Over the past few years a nature walk of at least half a day is always part of the itinerary, even on a short four day trip like this one. Here in Greece, Yoni had hired the services of Trekking Hellas Parnassos as guides. This was the first time we actually had a guide walk with us and whilst the path was mostly quite clear and definitely not dangerous, we would never had found this route without the husband and wife team of Eleni, the guide and Yurgos, in charge of logistics. Eleni was a fantastic, passionate guide, giving many insights to the area, explaining how and why the famous Parisian neighborhood of Montparnasse was named after the national park we were walking through and recounting amusing stories of her past, weird clients.
Travelling isn’t just about seeing historical sights like Delphi. For us it’s just as much about trying to experience local life and meet local people. Eleni and Yurgos gave us a fantastic opportunity to understand what country life is like in this area of Greece. And their own story is straight out of Disney Films. She is (or maybe was) an urbane city girl, half Greek and half French, who lived in Paris for ten years as a product designer, until she met and fell in love with Yurgos, the oldest son of a country shepherd. She decided to pack up the fast life of Paris in order to live with Yurgos, the love of her life, in the Greek mountains. And they lived happily ever after. And I’m really not being cynical. We found their story very moving, uplifting, even. And then they set up Trekking Hellas Parnassos in order to show people the area they love. They are part of a sort of cooperative of other similar, small local trekking companies throughout Greece, each covering their own area, that does their marketing and website together. I imagine that each member of the umbrella company has their own story, similar but different to Eleni and Yurgos, and certainly very grass roots.
The walk itself was wonderful. An easy 6 km stroll, firstly through fir and juniper forest in the Parnassos National Park, then along a rocky path that led to the most perfect picnic spot, overlooking Delphi, and on to the coast. We had bought local cheese, meats and vegetables, together with freshly baked bread from the village bakery. Eleni, not knowing that we had brought picnic supplies, bought real fetta cheese by Yurgos’s shepherd father, olives pickled by Yurgos’s mother, olive oil from a local producer and a thermos of mountain herbs tea. It was the most perfect of picnics. Yurgos’s father’s feta, which we assume was made from super fresh, unpasteurized sheep milk was as good as we had had anywhere, and that’s before I drool over the olives and olive oil. After lunch we walked an easy half an hour back the way we came, where Yurgos was waiting for us in their van to drive us back to our car.
If picnics are pretty much a permanent fixture of our trips, a visit to a winery is just as compulsory. As already stated, the brothers from another mother do not really enjoy alcohol, so we decided it best for all that we drop them off at the hotel for some rest time while Yoni, Garry and I drove twenty minutes to the Vinifera organic micro boutique winery. Mini-micro-boutique winery. Three brothers have decided to follow their passions and start up a winery that at the moment produces only six thousand bottles a year. They are obviously very serious as they have invested a lot of thought in to branding, with beautifully designed labels and even marketing, as you can buy their wine online in England, though I suspect that is out of the back trunk of one of the brothers who lives in England. The winery is so small that they don’t have a tasting room, as such. We had never been to a wine tasting in a flat before, but here we were, sitting at the dining table of the brothers’ recently deceased grandmother’s apartment in the village of Melissia. The wine was quite nice, without setting the world on fire. We’ve definitely tasted worse, either here in Israel or elsewhere.
Eleni recommended the To Tsoukali restaurant in Arachova. What can I say? First night was great. Lunch in the taverna in Delphi even better but this was somehow even one step above that, great local food on steroids. The first course to come out was a tomato and red peppers soup with a local burghul like grain mixed with yogurt and we all agreed that it was THE dish of the trip. The rest of the starter courses were delicious and the 2 main course dishes were perhaps not quite as good. But for overall ambience, the chef who sits with the clients to hear what they like in order to build the courses around that, a very reasonable cost of about €25 pp, this was a place we would all come back to in a heartbeat.
Jurgos’s brother owns a bar in downtown Arachova, and even though we’d had wine tasting, and wine with dinner, an after dinner night cap at the Bonjour café and bar just seemed like the perfect way to end an already perfect day. Jurgos’s brother wasn’t there when we arrived, but their father, the shepherd/best-feta-cheese-maker-in-the-world, was. Whilst he didn’t speak any English, when he saw photos of his cheese and olives on our picnic spread and of Eleni and Jurgos, he understood everything, with an enormous, proud smile on his face.