Patras > Corfu (Greece) > Saranda (Albania)

This morning I motored out of Porto Heli and meandered back to Patras, stopping for Sunday service in an Orthodox Greek Byzantine church in a small town on the way. The church looked modern but inside it looked the way these churches must have looked since the beginning of the era – mosaics, paintings, valuted archways, frescos. The priest – dressed in black robes and a big black hat – was doing his thing in the inner sanctum and the villagers were sitting and standing in pews. The priest chanted and sang, the villages stood up and sat down, I was grateful to be inside out of the sun in this sanctuary but it was time to move on. I didn’t get far – a historical pointer marked the road to an ancient Byzantine chapel and I followed it, crunching down an asphalt/gravel road through an olive orchard until I spied a wrought iron gate in some trees near a large depression in the earth. From the main road I’d assumed it was a sinkhole, and it was.

The gate led to a low narrow staircase that twisted down into the earth and emerged into the sinkhole. A path led around the edge of it to another doorway, which opened into a tiny chapel dug out or simply placed into a natural niche in the earth. Metal candelabras and paintings of Mary with |Jesus, offerings of olive oil and water, and again, a cool sanctuary from the hot hot sun. Who came here? Who made this place? Farmers tending the olive orchard, shephards tending sheep and goats – I’d had to stop for a herd a few miles back. It was a fine refuge.

A couple of hours later I’m in Patras sitting in a cafe on a strip of road facing the bay. It reminds me of home – San Francisco – think the Golden Gate Bridge looking to the mountainous Marin Headlands – only the bridge is a golden, four pointed suspension bridge much more modern than ours, and there are the ruins of a Mycean port at the base, not a fort. I enjoy an iced coffee frappe on a wicker couch under a palm tree and the fresh cool breeze from the Ionian Sea, and then am off again to buy my overnight ticket to the Adriatic on a Minoan lines ship, grand and luxurious (it goes to Venice). Tomorrow I’ll in be in Corfu, then Saranda in Albania. Hopefully I’ll be able to upload photos and more dispatches to http://www.motorcyclemisadventures.com/adriatic/

Carla