Hard ground last night in our abandoned building refuge. Our bodies ache, our shoulders and backs and hips most of all - but this is of no consequence, for we have a most important quest today! We seek the wisdom of the Oracle at Delphi, that ancient symbol of wisdom, and not even the scoffing of those who see our desire to climb 900m of mountain to ask questions of some slowly eroding rocks will keep us from achieving this goal. It seems there are milestones enough to reach past Athens...
...so we start off the day by searching for the piano bar where we sat and took coffee and made tentative first stabs at catching up on long-overdue blog posts. Livadeia being rather sizeable, our search is unsuccessful; instead, we are brought into the downtown, where most cafés open at 0800 - and it is 0700, as we woke up as early as possible to give ourselves additional time to cross the mountains. Fortunately, we find one café that is open, and we stop for a cappuccino (Valkyrie) and hot chocolate (Evan) before heading out of town. 900m. How hard could that be? After all, we just recently completed 1400m from Kalamata to Sparti...
...and, as predicted, we charge up the mountain slowly but surely to reach Arachova at the top by 1100. The view over the valleys below is spectacular. We use that word quite a bit, but every instance of it is entirely appropriate - in fact, it may even be insufficiently superlative to express the wonder of the mountainsides dipping into the olive-lined floors, their faces spotted with clusters of houses and castles that cling on for dear life against inevitable erosion and gravity. And yet this is not our goal; first, we must give up some 300m or so of elevation down a series of treacherous switchbacks before reaching the archaeological sites at Delphi. We visit the complex of Athena Pronaia first, stopping on a stone bench for a bite of leftover orzo salad and Kalamata olives - but we are soon told that this ancient site is no place to eat, so we pack up our foodstuffs and head back up to the bikes to eat. Our hunger sated for now, we bike along past the ancient gymnasium and over to the complex to Apollo, the main draw for tourists seeking a slice of history in these remote-but-not-too-remote-to-reach-by-bus-from-Athens mountains.
We are not surprised to find these ruins in relatively good shape - in the days before paved roads and combustion engines, it would have been difficult indeed to march an army up here, let alone besiege a terraced mountainside complex. The stadium in particular is well-preserved, but it's quite the hike to reach it; looking down on the temples and treasuries and theatre below, we've reclaimed maybe about 200m of the elevation lost from Arachova to Delphi. On our way up, we pause to ask our questions of the Oracle - there is a temple to Apollo about halfway up the path, which we face to make our inquiries in silence. Many tourists to Greece visit two sites: the Acropolis in Athens and the complex to Apollo at Delphi. The former is of course the most widely known, but the latter is not far behind - and it shows, for the paths are clogged with tourists from Germany and England and Japan, all lumbering along with chattering tour guides. At least the density of tourists drops as we head higher...
...and we walk back down the long path, taking care not to slip in our near-tractionless flip-flops on the smooth-worn stone. We pass the museum, but do not enter; although the museums at these sites often display the most interesting artifacts uncovered from the excavations, we have neither desire nor time to visit - we must get as far out of the mountains as possible before it gets very dark and very cold, and we much prefer the great outdoors to dusty indoor confines. In any event, even the landscape here falls under the UNESCO World Heritage designation...
...modern Delphi is a non-event, stacked from end to end with the usual array of tourist-frequented hotels and restaurants and useless trinket shops. We do pause outside a bakery, where we purchase a loaf of bread to polish off the oil-vinegar-brine combination left in Tupperware after our post-lunch snack of Kalamata olives, and are approached by a woman from Montana who is thoroughly impressed that anyone would dare climb these mountains with fully-loaded bikes - but the conversation is short, and we are soon heading down the long winding road to Amfissa. The main road does not actually enter Amfissa, but rather sticks to the periphery before veering off to the right, around through a small valley, and back into the mountains. Our exhaustion mounting, we pause for a short nap in a gravel lookout spot before continuing on...
...and on and on; this climb is as hard as the one into Arachova. To start with, it circumnavigates a midsize valley while steadily rising; once above this town opposite the spot where we took our nap, it doubles back to pass a couple of gas stations and, wonder of wonders, a fountain with cool fresh water. It then slowly climbs into the mountains above, winding back and forth along the face for what seems like an eternity. Finally, we reach the end of this valley - and are slowly climbing along the side of one yet larger. The road continues to wind up and around the mountainside, up and up and up until it finally reaches the top next to a large mine for metals of some sort. We are quite worn out by this point, and are relieved to find that the ascent is finished; we are treated to a long downhill into the small highland town of Gravia.
What now? It is growing dark, and although Gravia is out of the most mountainous part it is yet elevated enough to experience cold nights this time of year. We pull out our warm jackets and mull this over; likely it will be too cold to camp comfortably, so we decide to search for warmer lodgings. Crossing the same mountain range twice in a day seems like adequate justification for seeking shelter in a nice warm hotel! Sadly, a ride through town takes all of five minutes and reveals nothing of this sort - there are a few cafés, a taverna, and a couple of food markets. We spot a gas station just out of town, and decide to fill our fuel bottle in case we end up camping after all...
...as is the case with many of our predicaments, the solution lies in asking for help. We ask the gas station attendant if they know of a hotel in the area; they do, and it is back through town and off to the left. These directions are not quite precise enough to find our way there, but they might do well enough to find someone else to ask - so we roll back through town, ignoring the locals who doubtless are sharing a laugh at the expense of two apparently lost and increasingly chilled cyclists, and take the left indicated. There is a small shop open just down this street, so we pop in and ask for directions to a hotel. As luck would have it, they have a sign out front advertising the hotel, which runs nightly live music shows (piano and guitar!) during the summer and winter high seasons; it is further down this street, roughly 3km out of town. Not too far, but still...
...yet there is no other choice, and so we find ourselves riding out into the countryside. We pass a couple of houses, but nothing that looks like the hotel, and we start to wonder if perhaps this place does not in fact exist - but we reach it at last. Trudging up the steep driveway with our bikes, we see by degrees an inviting place indeed: restaurant out the back overlooking the valley, manicured lawn, outdoor patio for warmer seasons. This is orders of magnitude more opulent than our tent and sleeping bag - and priced to match, at 90€ per night. Yikes! Still, we can count on one hand the number of times we've treated ourselves to a nice hotel stay on this trip, and having both reached our 10 000 km goal and climbed the mountains into Delphi, we feel it is well-earned - and the room has a fireplace to boot, so we are soon ditching our sweaty cycling attire in favour of our slightly less sweaty town clothing. The smell of burning wood is an unequalled pleasure, and not something that we've really had on this trip. Most places proscribe outdoor fires for fear that they will set the forest alight, and building the fire takes more time and energy than we usually have at the end of a long day on our bike seats.
We relax in the room for a bit, chowing down on the remains of our olives and some walnuts from the snack jar to stave off hunger. With town 3km back up a very dark and cold road, the only sane option is to grab a bite downstairs at the restaurant - but Greeks seldom eat before 2000, and even that is usually considered early, so we kill time watching movies and showering and writing blog posts and playing adventure games until 2000 finally rolls around. Down in the restaurant, we order a sumptuous meal: tzatziki, special house salad, saganaki, and an enormous mixed grill plate. Although we almost always cook vegetarian meals - making exceptions on very few occasions for seafood bought at market - we have relatively few qualms about eating meat here in Europe, where the standard of care afforded livestock is far superior to the brutal treatment given by North American factory farms. We down it all with hot grog, a sort of spiced rum-water concoction that is deliciously warm. Such luxury!
Significantly warmer and better fed than we were when, not two hours earlier, we staggered in from the cold and dark, we allow exhaustion to catch up with us at last. We retire to the room and collapse on the beds, sinking in underneath the warm blankets as the last embers fade in our still-smoking fireplace. A much-needed night of proper rest awaits us...