sean's musings

Delphi is another place that I’d heard a lot about and always thought it would be fun to visit. It’s the location that the ancient Greeks would journey to and have their questions answered by the Oracle. It’s set way up in the mountainside about 3 hours outside of Athens. Instead of taking a special tour and joining a group, we’d read that it was easy enough to get there using public transportation. We wanted to get out their earlier in the morning, so we got up early and made our way to the long distance bus terminal on the outskirts of Athens. This involved the Metro and a city bus.

We bought our tickets and hopped on the bus. I’d expected it to be much fuller on the bus, which is why we’d gotten to the bus station by 6:15am for the 7:30 bus. However it wasn’t that bad as far as being busy. The bus stopped about half way there, in the middle of nowhere at a nice little cafe/ hotel. The rest of the way up was climbing. And climbing, and climbing. We hit a small town called Parnassos (which is named after the mountain Delphi sits on) and the road narrowed. It narrowed so much through the city that in a few places the bus was only inches from another big truck trying to go the opposite direction. I thought we were going to hit someone, or something for sure. Parnassos looked like a ski town, with lots of advertisements for ski shops and rentals. It certainly seemed high enough in elevation

Got off the bus shortly after in Delphi and immediately bought our return ticket for 4:00pm. We’d thought the archaeological site didn’t open until 12, so had an early lunch at this cafe dangling off the cliff. The view was outstanding, as we were perched on the mountain looking all the way to the Sea of Corinth. Walked through a couple of shops along the way to kill time, until we got to the site. At that point we realized it was already opened, so we got tickets and went in. Delphi is built into the side of the mountain on multiple vertical levels. This meant more stairs. I think my calves are pretty well solid now.

I can see why they would have chosen this location for the Oracle sanctuary, as the views were awe-inspiring. We climbed all the way to the highest point and saw an old stadium where olympic-like games were played. The main highlight was looking back down over the theater, and the Temple of Apollo. It was hot, and we were done pretty quickly looking at all the sites and still had a lot of time to kill. We knew there was a 1:30pm bus going back to Athens, and the guy at the bus depot said we could use our ticket to get on that one. Headed back home and slept most of the way, as the heat was getting to both of us.