Hello friends. It's hot here 33. For the last 2 months I've heard how wet and cool spring has been, which can be good for cycling.

Greece used to be a place for walking, and it still is far from Athens & on the islands, but since I was last here they have bought many cars & SUVs. Their new and rebuilt roads around Athens are sometimes impressive, but have tunnels and don't allow bicycles.

The old road from Tripolis to Korinth is blocked by the new road so 20k outside Tripolis I was forced into a 700 vertical metre climb from Nestani to Karya which is half unpaved. The one man walking in Nestani looked at me & asked if I could make it.

I did, and the village square with the taverna in Karya made it worthwhile.

All-in-all I'd say Greece is OK but not great for cycling, and best furthest from Athens.

But back to Corfu where I finished the last email. Everything in Greece was twice the cost of the equivalent in Albania, but westernized, predictable, and still friendly.

On my first morning it was dry & bright. I bought breakfast in the Lidl supermarket, and ate it at the apartment while I dried my cloths & and searched the Internet somewhere to stay.

I booked a little place in Liapades, partly because I assumed few people would have heard of it. Google maps gave me a route to cycle there, which lead from road to farm track to this delightful olive grove, where it stopped.

It took an hour of scouting to decide the best way out.

At Liapedes I stopped at the dot on my accommodation map and an old man beconned me and opened a door to an adequate-looking room with basic kitchen & bath. He left and I realized the place looked different from the pictures on the Internet, but that didn't matter to anybody else.

A German girl was in the next unit. She was walking the Corfu Trail. We chatted in English & ate supper together.

The coast there is beautiful.

I left after 2 nights taking the route that Google chose for cars, which got me to Mantouki in lots of time for an early ferry to the mainland. There was time still to ride to Ancient Olympia, and look round the archeological sites.

I was aiming for Preveza, where the road takes a tunnel under the sea to Aktio. Following instruction I stood my bike in front of the security camera beside the sign saying No Bicycles, and waited until a yellow van appeared, loaded my bike, and drove me under the water - friendly & efficient.

Barb, a sailing friend whom Jan & I met in California in 2000 got as far as Greece and stopped here. She had just relaunched her boat from the yard in Aktio so we lashed the bicycle to the foredeck and sailed to Vonitsa together with the young "Workaway" US girl who had been helping with boatwork.

It was good to meet a friend, and Vonitsa is a lovely place. Mooring end on to the stone wall brought happy memories. So it was hard to drag myself away, but I had come to Ionia and arbitrarily decided to to see Odysseus' home. I cycled over the causeway to the island of Lefkada, and to Vasiliki on the southern tip, where my maps mark a boat leaving for Ithaka.

That boat only runs in August, so next morning, it was back north for a big ferry from Nydri to Fiskardo on Kefalonia, from where I still hoped to get a boat across the short gap to Ithaka. , but again I had no luck and cycled the 40k over the mountains to Sami (Odysseus thought he had problems getting to Ithaka?). Nearby was the Melisani Cave (inhabited in mythology by nymphs) & the site where "Capt Correli's Mandolin" was filmed.

I was more interested in the large rock in the middle of the road above a cliff to the beach. I was riding down fast but the rock developed hair, looked up, & a large goat scampered off.

I ignored the cave & took a ferry which arrived on the wrong side of the hills on Ithaka, but it was all fun & worthwhile.

Barb had recommended a Dutch woman called Ester Van Zuylen, who leads walking trips, and next day I enjoyed wandering round the excavations which indeed fit well with Homer's description of Odyseus's palace.

My next goal, apart from exploring & having fun, was to get south to the tip of the Peliponese where my father & his friend Celia used to go to Gerolimenas in the spring to see the flowers.

I had good rides back to Lefkada, over more steep hills.

Then the ferry to Killini, and a couple of days by the medieval castle in Methoni.

I enjoyed Kalamata enough to stay an extra day & catch up with laundry. It fit my liking of a town which is not quite famous enough to draw many tourists: university city a few miles from Messini & the new airport. I liked the Greek technique for painting road lines when a car was in the way.

The day that I rode from Kalamata to Gerolimenas, I traveled from lush treed hillsides to arid limestone mountains dropping into blue water. Both pretty! I asked this couple whether they had food for lunch & got a lovely bowl of spinach & potatoes.

I did not find good accommodation in Gerolimenas, so I rented a stone house in a little village 14k up the hill called Lagia.

I was happy with that choice, but for a third night I rode back down via Porto Kagio to stay at Gerolimenas, which was pretty, but seemed to have become famous enough to have a few too many tourists.

I had 10 days left before my flight back from Athens and my backside was getting sore from over 2500km on the saddle. I headed for Gythio, but, where the roads divided, the route to Sparta had a much smoother surface, so I went there & got to meet Jim - an American / Greek who rented a floor of his apartment building to me. He thrust gifts on me of dried herbs & olive oil, and we sat & chatted on his balcony. Next day he drove me to see the hilltop castle at Mythros and around the springs near his birth place.

Sparta is surrounded by mountains up to 2000 metres. When I left for Tripolis I avoided the main road and climbed through little villages & many olive groves.

Next day is where I started this letter between Tripolis & Korynth - twice as much climbing, and steeper, so I spent an extra day in Korynth and watched small boats passing through the famous 1881 canal. It is cut 90 metres down, & amazingly passes through an urban area with no fence & only a dilapidated sign in Greek warning you not to fall in.

I discussed the alternatives for getting through Athens with my Korynth hosts and next morning I took a smooth and cheap train ride to Athens Airport and spent 4 days on the coast near there. The Meltemi N winds blew as steady and strong as I remember from when we sailed Harmonica in the Aegean Sea.

I easily found a bike shop which gave me a cardboard box for my bike, packed it & throughly taped the top shut, flew back on Wednesday, and discovered on arrival in Calgary that the bottom of the box was still open. Amazingly I lost almost nothing - thank you baggage handlers!

Dave Hutchinson