Hey! It's cleanliness!
Don't mock us, thou fool people!
Just be envious.
Well, no bothers at all last night! It was, indeed, a splendid campsite. We wondered briefly what anyone who saw us before we removed our bright orange tent from the sinking road bed. We decided we didn't care, and we ate yogurt instead. It seemed reasonable.
Unfortunately, the road towards Tripoli was pretty solidly uphill from our campsite for several dozen kilometres. It's miserable to start the day like that... we paused to stretch after a steeper uphill became a shallower one. Sigh... at least the mountain scenery doesn't disappoint (it never has).
For a long stretch, we had the road essentially to ourselves due to the closure. It wasn't until about 10 that we saw anyone else about, in fact. Shortly after trucks started roaring by us, we encountered a café where we stopped for our morning coffee. A fontana outside proved useful for the usual dishwashing and toothbrushing. For the first time that I can recall, we looked up while flossing and brushing our teeth at a fontana to see a tableful of people in the café cracking up at us. You know what, guys, we can use this thing as a bathroom sink. So get over it!
A little more uphill, then a long coast down to Tripoli. It looks strange situated where it is: mountains surround a small, perfectly-flat plain that is stuffed with town and highways and rail lines. We rolled into town in search of some feta for our lunch, and we walked out with 100g of the stuff for around €.70. We also found a bakery with some delicious cake, which we munched on in our tradition of dessert first. The lunch was pretty Greek-tastic... the leftover Greek salad from last night plus some of our delicious Kalamata olives plus the feta and Greek cake with some Greek bread to soak up the Kalamata olive oil... I mean, yum.
The way out of Tripoli wasn't obvious, unfortunately. Two roads head out: one is marked on our map as a "National Road." We haven't encountered one of those yet in person, but Nana and others assured us that they thought it was possible for bicycles to take them. We weren't sure, but the other option was a road (marked the same as other roads we've been permitted to take) that was roughly 50km longer. It seemed clear that we should at least try the National Road.
We got a whole 5km out of town before a police officer stopped ahead of us and turned on his lights. We got up to the car, and he was standing outside in sunglasses, smoking a cigarette. He asked us where we were from.
The exchange boiled down to his telling us that the road wasn't safe for bicycles, and would it be alright if he called a road service truck to carry our bikes to the next city? We of course said that it was fine, and after a twenty minute wait we packed our bikes into a road service van -- probably the most interesting pack-job we've accomplished to date: the bikes were parked vertically on their rear wheels between a tool tower and a stack of big, yellow roadsigns -- and hopped into the Greek police car for a 50km blast down beautiful motorway that had been cut into the sides of mountains and through enormously long tunnels.
We thanked him and the road service man as they dropped us off. They pointed us to Argos (in Greek mythology, Argos is a 100-eyed monster, in case you're curious) and set back to patrol the National Road. We hopped on again and headed for Korintos, which was a goodly distance through, again, roads winding up into mountains.
The coast down into town was chilly... we stopped at the top of it to apply our fleeces and long underwear to shield somewhat against the piercing wind. It still wasn't pleasant. On the way in, we saw piles of old stone and towers and walls perched atop an improbable-looking several-hundred-metre-tall mesa in the valley. Probably Archaia Korintos. Well, guess we're not going to see that on this trip.
We puttered around town for a little while to get groceries from a supermarket (where we explained our trip to the keenly-interested cashier) and get our new favourite drink, hot chocolate and Metaxa, from a bar to warm up. Now then, as to a campsite...
Korintos is situated at a squeeze between the bulge that holds Tripoli and the bulge that holds Athina. This means that it has a lot of waterfront, and that means that it has a lot of rich areas. It's hard to find a place to camp in rich areas sometimes, but with a bit of luck someone will have abandoned a house.. well, we found a number of semi-completed construction areas that look unused now, but the site that we've settled on is a field next to the wall of a neighbourhood. It's far enough from the road that we aren't bothered by the noise, and no one seems to come here; we cooked dinner without any incidents, anyway. Tomorrow, our 10,000th kilometre!!!!!!!!!