Wednesday 28 April 2010. We dock in the port of Piraeus, Greece. The Gateway to Athens.
The Ocean Village is berthed next to Costa Victoria which I presume is fairly new to the Costa line as it was the first time we had seen her.
It was window cleaning day on the Costa Victoria - fancy that as a job? We have been to Athens before and therefore were planning on just having another day walking around the area of the port. Lots of taxi drivers touting for business with some bizarre conversations as they saw it...
"Taxi? You English? You want to go to Athens?"
"No we're just going to walk..."
"What?" said in an astonished tone of voice, "it's 10 kilometres!!!"
The port itself is huge. We walked around about 2 and a half sides of it then retraced our steps and that took 2 hours solid walking. But it's a pleasant walk. We stayed on the side of the port only crossing roads wherever there was an entrance to the port. There are trolley buses here - a sight I just about remember in Manchester as a boy, though the Manchester trolley buses were double deckers.
The main road was fierce with traffic and even crossing the port entrances - even when the little green man was lit(!) - was not always straightforward. Whilst the green pedestrian man is lit, the main traffic lights still allow traffic to turn right into the road you think is safe to cross!
There were a lot of big ships in the harbour, at least one other cruise ship, the Silver Whisper, and a row of four liner-sized ferry ships.
The path we walked on was separated from the main road by a screen of bushes and trees and there were few people wandering about. More or less the only ones we saw struck up a conversation with a hesitant "Excuse me - do you speak English?"
"Eengleeesh? Ah yesss, I speeek Eengleesh!" I answered in my best Mexican bandit accent (see any spaghetti western for examples) "We come from Blackpool...!"
Oh look! Little red toilet brushes on a bush!
When we returned to the ship, the Ocean Village was being refuelled. Access to balconies on that side was forbidden due to the risk of fumes. Luckily we were on the other side! So we spent our final afternoon once more on the cabin balcony, reading, listening to music, my iPod safely tucked in my shirt breast pocket for safety! (see the entry for Rhodes)
Tomorrow we would return to England from Crete but it had been a relaxing holiday which was what was needed. In fact I was on my fourth book of the week. After three of the Bolitho series by Alexander Kent (only I could spend a week at sea reading about sea battles...) I had started the third in the Jason Bourne series, The Bourne Ultimatum.
There's one more article in this series to come and in that we'll take a look at the Ocean Village herself.
