Pyrgos to Zacharo

Friday 2nd April
Pyrgos to Zacharo
The build up to Easter continues and if you haven’t painted your house white by now it’s too late as the celebrations now move into religious mode. Since Wednesday the churches have been continuously full with people going in and out lighting candles, kissing Icons and, we think, taking communion. They are beautifully decorated and late on Thursday night people were involved in decorating the churches with flowers and candles. The priests seem to have been chanting nonstop for two days now so I don’t know if they take it in turns as you would think their voices would give out. Good Friday is one of the most important days of Holy Week for the Greek Orthodox religion. The church bells toll in a slow manner for 24 hours beginning after a service late on Thursday night. The Greek Orthodox followers fast for two days before Easter, and some women keep vigil in the church all night. We thought that the shops would be shut too but alongside this tradition there was frenetic activity to get everything ready for Easter Day. Apparently they give each other gifts so the shops were doing a roaring trade. It somehow seemed less commercial than Christmas at home but that may have been as there were no awful piped Christmas carols being played in every shop.


Easter is taken very seriously here.



We want to spend the weekend in a village/town where we would get a good feel of the Easter celebrations so we headed South West along the coast to Zacharo. This is only 20 miles along the main coast road but we decided to avoid that and follow a series of gravel tracks on the plain. It was yet another beautiful day and we spent hours on the plain bumping and weaving our way around potholes and several herds of sheep and goats.







The sheep dogs and sheep have such a good rapport there is quite often no sign of a shepherd at all. There were some drainage dykes which were full of birds. We had a fabulous day bird-watching and saw a flock of purple herons, woodchat shrikes, a pied flycatcher and lots of warblers, wheatears and other species. There were also some huge crickets the size of bats which flew along beside us banging into us, and swallow tail butterflies.


Swallowtail butterfly
Not so sure now we've found a better one - anyone know what this is??
Today is the first time we have heard the crickets singing so they obviously think summer is on the way.
After a very enjoyable day we made it to Zacharo and since we had time on our hands decided to ride around the inside of the Kaiafas lake. As we progressed we were staggered by the smell of boiled eggy fart which is explained by the myth that Nessus the Centaur washed his wound there after being injured by Herakles’s (Hercules) poison arrow and that turned the lake sulphurous.




A fabulous green frog!







The sulphorous Kaiafas Lake







Very smelly sulphorous water
It’s obvious when you think about it, but if people hadn’t written all this stuff down 2,500 years ago we’d think it was just a sulphurous spring somewhere far underground! The caves where the sulphurous water comes out of the ground is also renowned as being the home of nymphs since antiquity but we didn’t see any so presume they were out doing good deeds.



Fairies or maybe just a hermit's cave
We were just saying that this place seemed to be the perfect peaceful place to spend Easter when around a corner we met a group of men all supporting a colleague. Initially we thought he’d probably had one ouzo too many but suddenly all hell broke loose and clearly there was something more seriously wrong with him. There didn’t seem to be much that we could and they were all yellin’ and shoutin’ hysterically summoning who knows what, so we peddled on expecting at any moment to be forced into the sulphurous ditch by an ambulance.
We had picked a hotel that advertised itself as having a restaurant, but on arrival it was a motel on the side of the national highway, and there was nowhere to eat. This wouldn’t usually matter except being Easter weekend most places were shut and we weren’t into fasting mode after 30 miles on the bikes. We pedaled off in the opposite direction to town and went to the only fast food place open and were grateful to have anything at all.