Another beautiful morning, we didn’t try to beat the tour buses to Epidavros and left the hotel in Nafplio just after 9AM for the 30 minute drive to the archaeological site.
There was a Rick Steves tour group staying at our hotel, in fact they were also in Momenvasia when we were there and were also heading to the ruins this morning and then on to the coast to catch a private boat to Hydra. That is one of the advantages of tours. They have ways of minimizing some of the impact of potential strikes by taking private boats that are generally cost prohibitive for the individual traveler. Our trip to Hydra was cancelled due to a ferry strike. See here for more information.
Back to Epidavros, at the site, an ancient healing center, we followed the Rick Steves’s walking tour in his guidebook. His tour mostly focuses on the theater which is supposedly the best preserved Greek theater in the world. It also has great views of the valley beyond from the top.
We stayed a while and watched the various tour groups come through. One of the caretakers at the theater scolded a couple of young Italian men for singing on the stage. I thought that is what you are supposed to do at a theater.
In fact the Rick Steves’s guidebook mentions tourists taking turns performing on stage to demonstrate the fabulous acoustics. Now group leaders are limited to dropping a pebble on the center stone. Wow!
The tiny museum was overflowing with Italian students, so we didn’t spend much time there and instead took a walk through the sanctuary rubble which turned out to be a nice walk on a pretty day.
True, there isn’t much left of the structures, although they are in the process of restoring several of them, and you need to use a lot of imagination to recreate the site, but I like wandering through the rubble to see the fragments that remain.
May 26, 2016
For links to all the posts in this series see the Greece page.
This looks amazing! Would be so interesting to visit!