Picking up where we left off yesterday....
We went on a little hike with the intention of finding some climbs for us to do later. We ended up spending about 4 hours wandering around under and between giants cliffs, not really knowing exactly where we were until the end. We only spotted a couple climbs. We never saw any climbers. In fact, we've yet to see anyone actually climbing (although we did see some guys with climbing gear in our camp this morning). I thought this was supposed to be a climbing mecca?
Yesterday evening we made the mistake of taking a little "nap" around 6 or 7pm. When we woke up it was almost 10pm. We managed to find a place that was still open (I thought Greeks ate late...but a lot of restaurants here seem to close at either 10 or 11). Unfortunately, so far we've been limited to eating at the more tourist-centric places, which have English menus. We've stopped in at a couple places that had only Greek menus, and decided it would be a lost cause. Between us we could probably figure out menus in 6 or 7 different languages, but Greek isn't one of them.
Today we got up early, packed our backpacks, left our hotel, and walked down the road about 1 km to cheaper digs. We're at a campground now (Vrachos Camping, in Kastraki, for any Drinkies folks that might be out there), living out of our tent, but it's a pretty nice campground. It has great showers, common eating areas, a swimming pool, a restaurant, and a small grocery store. We'll see how long we can handle sleeping on our ThermaRests. It's less than half the price of the hotel room, though.
After setting up in the campground, we grabbed our climbing gear and headed to a climbing area that Jacqueline had scoped out in our 30-Euro climbing guide. Did I mention that this guide was 30 Euros? Did I also mention that it was published 17 years ago? You'd think that wouldn't matter too much with climbing, as the rocks aren't moving anywhere. However, when we went to find our climb this morning, we came across a gate and a sign saying that it was land belonging to a monastery, and it was closed. Arg. We wandered around a bit to see if there wasn't a path we were missing, but couldn't find anything.
We headed back to another area that looked promising. I started up what we thought was the beginning of a nice easy climb. The climb was easy enough, but after finding only one bolt, then a rap ring about 5 meters later, then nothing for another 20 meters, then another rap ring, I decided that we probably weren't on our climb. I came down, Jacqueline ran up the climb on top-rope a couple times, then we looked around some more and finally found the real start of the round. We went up a couple very nice pitches, but decided that since not only was it getting too late for us to finish the climb (it was about 3pm and we had 8 more pitches to go), but we had also neglected to bring sunblock and were starting to get a bit crispy. So we rapped down and called it a day, going back to the campground to shower, and then here to get ice cream and my Internet fix.
If we don't find a better climb to do, we will probably head back up our aborted climb tomorrow morning. I'll let you know...stay tuned.
Cheers,
-b & j
Posted by brad at May 15, 2003 08:24 AM