Last day on the Greek mainland

Well, yesterday was certainly a full day. Excuse me if this post seems a bit rushed, but I've done a million things since then and it's all I can do now to remember what I did yesterday and in what order!
So, yesterday began with getting up relatively early and heading north, in a general meandering direction toward Athens so as to see as many ruins as possible on the way. And see heaps of ruins we did.

Zeus temple at Nemea

First on the list was Nemea. This place would have been absolutely fascinating a month ago, but I've seen so many classical ruins since then that I'm afraid it only registers as very interesting now. This was another complex with a Zeus temple and a stadium for games, as well as an unusual bath house and more lizards than you can poke a moderately sized stick at.

Myceneae.

Next was Myceneae - the bigger brother of Tiryns which you might remember from the last post, and where that period of Greek history derives it's name. In many respects it is indeed like a souped up version of Tyrins - bigger, better preserved, more important, more impressive location. It also has an obviously better pedigree, supposedly being the city that the famous Agamemnon ruled. Agamemnon, if you can remember back to studying the Iliad in high school, led the Myceneaen army to Troy. The site was famously excavated by a man named Schliemann in the 19th century. Ever over-zealous, he declared the nearby Tholos tomb, a death mask found during excavations, a comb, a toothbrush and briefly his own shoelaces as belonging to the famous bronze age king, because apparently in its over thousand year history Myceneae was only ever ruled by the one ruler.

Bottom of the Cistern at Myceneae. I really
wish at this point that I had space for a picture
of the Lion's gate or the entrance to this cistern
or the Tholos tomb,but I don't. If you ask nicely
I might just put them in a post of their own.

Anyway, the site is still hugely impressive, with the two highlights being the lion's gate and the cistern. The latter is basically a tunnel that leads down underground probably about twenty meters to a place where water was stored. The interesting thing about it is that it is not lit at all and there are no safety rails. Down the bottom it is pitch black and the uneven steps are slippery. But it was real and raw, and that's how I like it, even if I could have broken my skull. There's more I'd like to say about Myceneae, but I still have a lot to cover, so moving on...
Next stop was Corinth. This place was incredibly important in ancient Greece, but unfortunately now it's only a sleepy little town with a spectacular acropolis and a few ruins, mostly roman.
Acrocorinth was the first part we visited. It's situated on a nasty rock with great understatement called a hill. Mountain was more like it by the feel of climbing it. Very little of the original ancient Greek buildings remain apart from a few rocks at the very top that represent the temple to Aphrodite. Apart from that the "hill" is criss-crossed by byzantian walls and towers. Buggered if I know why they needed them at all - a soldier slogging up this bastard in full armour would only need a light breeze to blow over.

Acrocorinth

The ruins of Corinth itself are mostly roman now, as the city was taken over by them. While I have nothing against the romans per se, it's still slightly disappointing when you're in Greece and expecting Greek ruins. Still standing, however, was an archaic (so before the classical era) temple to, if I remember correctly, Apollo.

Ancient Corinth

After that we pretty much headed straight to Athens to return the car. This is where Karen decided to have her last little joke at our expense. Giving her the exact GPS location of the place where we were to return the car we were led right past the service road next to the highway where it was. This is where we discovered something interesting about Greece - God help you if you want to go back on the highway. We ended up paying at the toll station a further three times before we were able to get back.
So now I was going to write another post about what I did today, but honestly I can't be bothered now. Long story short: I left Jan in Athens to find his own way back to Germany and I'm staying on an island that's also a volcano and I'm getting around on a quad bike. Want to know the full story? Stay tuned! I'll post it all tomorrow.