25 March
2025 – The Corinth Canal
Miles
driven today = 93
Total Miles
to date = 2,350
Bye Bye Peloponnese. We will definitely be back, but for this trip
it’s time to move on. So we set our nose
towards Athens and within a little over 30 minutes we were pulling up a short
walk away from one of the bridges which cross the iconic Corinth Canal.
Here’s a
few things I have learnt today about this 6.4km stretch of water cutting
through the narrow isthmus of land which previously connected the Peloponnese
with the rest of mainland Greece…
The first
person to start digging the Canal was Emperor Nero in 67 AD.
Apparently he cast the first turf with a
silver shovel.
However it took another 1,826
years before the canal was finally completed on 25
th July 1893.
Prior to
Nero, in the 7
th Century BC, a stone trackway called a “Diolkos” was
installed to transport ships between the Ionian and Aegean Seas.
You can still see evidence of this at the
Western end of the Canal.
The canal
is 8 metres in depth and 21.3 metres wide at the surface so most modern
shipping is too large to pass through it.
The rock walls rise a maximum of 90 metres above the canal at a near
vertical angle of 80 degrees.
After a
quick coffee we hit the toll roads, which we’ve found are surprisingly pricey
for motorhomes. We are generally categorised
as Class 3 which is almost 3 times the price of a normal car. The total bill today was north of €20 for a relatively
short stretch of motorway driving.
We had no
real intention of stopping other than at a service station near Megara for lunch, and bypassed Pireaus and the greater Athens area to the North before making our way
past the airport to the coast at Artemida.
We are at
Camperpark “Davis” which is quirky and rustic to say the least.
Instead of the usual array of feral cats and
dogs we have chickens and a horse.
The
only thing that isn’t rustic about it is the price of €25 a night without hook
up but batteries are fully charged so we are saving ourselves the extra fiver
for tonight at least.
But it’s
the only place I could find on the coast which is currently open and has reasonable public transport
links into the centre of Athens, so we’ve booked ourselves in for 3 nights with
a view to getting the fortnightly wash out of the way tomorrow with Thursday
set aside for a trip into the big smoke of Greece’s Capital and a look around
the Acropolis.
Today is
Greek Independence Day and every taverna we have seen has been literally
bursting with people celebrating, so we’ve amused ourselves with a stroll along
the coastal path, which has all but eroded into the sea in places.
We’ll explore a bit more tomorrow once we’ve
got the washing done and all the locals are back at work nursing their
hangovers.
Comments
Post a Comment