The Earth has a navel

“You go south,” said the hotel porter. “Follow the signs for Athens.” And we were off, waving farewell to the Makedonia Palace Hotel, which had turned out to be a first-class visit. Not cheap, hopeless for any form of dietary control as its food was tremendous, but the Makedonia Palace was excellent for pampering and comfort.

Our endpoint was Delphi, roughly five hours’ drive away, on a route down the east coast of Greece, before crossing the mountains at Lamia. Some of our hosts had suggested we did not cross mountains but kept to flatter lands and took a more circuitous route. We had disagreed, so across the mountains it would be.

Mount Olympus - up there somewhere is Zeus

First off and to our right, was Mount Olympus. The Greeks call it Mytikas and I have climbed it a few times in earlier years. At 2917m, it is the highest mountain in Greece. The name means “nose” and it is meant to be home to plenty of Greek gods, Zeus in particular. We headed past, it was not a day for climbing, as the mountain was shrouded in cloud and the summit was out of sight. There was residual snow as well. There is a ski resort for Olympus called Vryssopoules, which is heavily used and popular, but the ski season was well gone as we drove by.

Greek motorway toll booths are frequent. Unlike Italy and France, they appear always to be staffed. I have no idea what I will do if my credit card ceases to work as I am carrying barely any cash. There was one toll booth today, at Lamia, where cash was needed, and I had to hold a discussion through an intercom with an unidentifiable female voice.

“We only take cash,” she said.

“I have none,” I replied, although I was fibbing. I was just hoping I would not have to go searching for the small amount of cash I had stowed away in one of the car’s smaller compartments.

“I can issue a non-payment form,” said the voice in a matter-of-fact tone. It is what they do if you are lacking lolly. I scrabbled in the car, retrieved the small amount of cash I possessed, and less than a euro later we were through the toll without mishap. Attendants are good in one respect, as the personal touch feels helpful. In others an attendant is bad, as it brings the car’s front wing perilously close to the booth, the proximity alarm hollers, and it is simple to end up with an expensive scratch.

You see our problem with speed?

There was an annoying police car today, which was travelling at exactly the maximum speed limit. At least I thought it was, as I find Greek signage impossible to understand. One moment I am permitted to travel at 120km/hr, 100m further it drops to 80, and moments later it is up to 100, or even 130. When I return to UK, I expect to be greeted by a pile of speeding tickets. I wager most will be Greek.

The mountain crossing from Lamia turned out to be brilliant, and we climbed and wound our way, hairpin on hairpin, steadily to 865m. There were viewpoints on the way up, and plenty on the way down, as well as two roadside cafés near the summit pass. We stopped for a coffee at one of them. I ordered a double Greek coffee, which is the equivalent of intravenous caffeine. The boost effect is astonishing. Outside the café were two trees in full leaf. One was a plane, the other a mulberry, albeit without the berries to prove it.

Rockfall en route to Delphi

Coffee was followed by a long descent towards Delphi, again the multiple hairpins and the signage I could not understand. At least I could comprehend the signs warning of rockfall, as there was plenty of shattered rock lining the roadside, but the speed signs remained a mystery. I could also interpret the signs warning of animals, especially when I hurtled around one hairpin and there, in the middle of the road and standing its ground was a large, muscular bull. It looked in my direction with a don’t-mess-with-me expression as it watched its cows slowly cross the road behind him. The bull was clearly on guard. I stopped obediently, let the cows cross, and slowly, ever so slowly, let the car head downwards. I had no wish to have a horn through my windscreen. I let out an audible sigh as the bull allowed us past watching us with a staring gaze.

Slightly further on, and around several more corners, we accidentally came across another British war cemetery. We were not expecting it, but these were the Bralo graves. There were not many, 102 in total, but this was a place that was forever England. Once again, the Commonwealth War Graves Commission were doing a magnificent job. The cemetery was spotlessly clean and tidy. It appears the dead were mostly former patients in what had been a nearby military hospital, long since disbanded.

The British cemetery at Bralo - most died of the Spanish 'flu

Despite its name, the cemetery is not in Bralo, but on the outskirts of the village of Gravia. Most of the dead had perished from Spanish influenza in a very short time, between September 1918 and April 1919. The deaths, each of a young man, were tragic and do put the recent COVID-19 pandemic into perspective.

We made it to the Amalia Hotel in Delphi shortly afterwards, although the Bralo cemetery forced us into silence. The graves were truly tragic. However, the Amalia Hotel excited me, as I had stayed there before, what felt to be a million years ago, when I had been a teenager living in Greece. The Amalia was then a spanking new establishment and my parents had taken me. It is now a coach-tour hotel, used for its convenience instead of its once fashionable style. When I had first gone, I am ashamed to say when, the Amalia was where to be seen.

Having dumped our bags, it was off to the ruins of Delphi. After all this was once where the Oracle was to be found and I had a burning question for her. Myth has it that Delphi is the navel (“omphalos”) of the earth, hence the location of the Oracle, and was established thanks to Zeus and two eagles. He allowed one to fly east, the other west, and where they met in the middle was the omphalos. I scanned the sky for eagles but saw nothing, save a few cotton-wool clouds high above me. Disappointingly, I could not find the Oracle either, as she had long since disappeared. There was no sign of her beneath the Temple of Apollo, which was where she was once located. I addressed the ruins, not the person, as it was all I could do.

Temple of Apollo at Delphi - it was below this that the Oracle did what she did

“Why am I always wrong?” I asked, to what looked like a half-ton boulder. I half whispered, looking guiltily around me as I spoke, for fear a fellow visitor would think, quite logically, that I was an Englishman gone crazy.

For a moment I waited. Silence. Perhaps the rustle of a faint and distant breeze. Then I jumped, because the sound was unexpected. The ground rumbled, the breeze became wind, and the clap of thunder surrounded me. It was all around, in front, behind, below, above, and then the rain started. It was no shower, but a downpour, verging on hail. Thunder and rain had appeared within half-a-minute of my question. If I could understand the sign, I could understand the answer to my question, but there was no one nearby to explain.

We returned to the Amalia Hotel to find its car park filled with coaches, so many that the hotel staff assumed we were part of a group.

“Which group?” we were asked when we arrived for dinner.

“Our own,” I replied, to be greeted by a confused expression from the waiter.

“We are a group of two,” I continued. “Our own group. We do not belong to them.” With a surreptitious thumb I indicated the at least 50 fellow diners that two grey coaches had disgorged 30 minutes earlier. The tourists were hard at work demolishing a buffet dinner.

The waiter nodded, smiled, and showed us to a table, as far from the grouped diners as was possible. He recognised that we wanted to feel individual. Group tours were not our thing.

Wind turbines at sunset - a landscape ruined

That evening there was a glorious sunset as the hotel faces west. The sky turned a perfect pink, then a darker orange, colours that my camera could not replicate. A sunset is time for thought, so thinking we did. Yet way in the distance were multiple wind turbines on the mountaintops and ridges. Wind turbines, the landscape eyesore, that seem to double, quadruple, and clone in a moment. Why do people do as they do? We were seeing the destruction of a once perfect landscape by modern technology. There is no way that society is advancing, it is barely holding its own.

***

Stayed at:

Amalia Hotel Delphi

Apollonos 1

Delfi 33054

Tel: +302265082101

Web: https://www.amaliahotels.com/delphi/hotel/

Email: delphi@amaliahotels.com

Ate at:

The hotel