OK I know, my last post suggested that I may pick up the blog again after a bit of a gap. That didn't work very well. A combination of laziness and the endless periods of lockdown and other restrictions certainly didn't help morale either. Hopefully this time I shall do better.
We'd been planning a long trip to Greece for 3 years now. I'd looked around on the internet for a tour operator that could help us put together an itinerary. I found a US firm called Zicasso who immediately referred me onto an Athens based firm called Antelope Travel and in particular Anthony who was my direct contact and a wealth of knowledge.
Neither of us had ever visited Greece before and given how the last two years had basically been lost to recreational travel globally, we figured we may never have a chance to visit again so we decided to spend a long time there now and visit as many of the ancient sites as we could as well as throw into the mix plenty of R&R. Anthony asked for our personal preferences on a whole range of things and began to put together an itinerary. I bought a guide book as well and briefly contacted another agency who provided a basic mainland itinerary and then lectured me for not agreeing and paying up at once. I took their ideas but of course ignored them totally.
I don't think we are that picky or difficult people but suffice it to say that any time there is a language differential involved, I have difficulties effectively communicating so it took several go's before an itinerary that fitted our goals was formulated. Things like 'Why do you want to go to Olympia? There's nothing there' being a prime example... the answer of course being that it is the site of the original Olympic Games and I want to run on the track in what remains of the stadium. OK? That's why we want to go there. Another was that we wanted to visit the sites of the several battlefields that had historical global impact for the west: Thermopylae, Marathon, Salamis and Lepanto. The last two were sea battles of massive historical importance and were the most difficult (in actuality they weren't, quite easy when you are on the spot actually) but the first two were land based but Anthony said there's nothing at either location these days (again he was wrong but he was right about few going to visit the sites). I ended up saying 'Don't care just please include it in the itinerary.' I think I said 'please' by the end of the to-ing and fro-ing on this. I definitely said 'thank you' and absolutely avoided having a telephone call to discuss things as from experience I know this is where the opportunity for mutual misunderstanding is greatest. At least with email you have a permanent record where you can look back and see exactly what it was that you had said when the party of the second part has memory failure. It works for the party of the first part as well.
One of Indy's friends who has a Greek wife suggested that we should avoid driving as traffic is bad and the drivers crazy so I put it to Anthony that we would like to have a driver for the mainland part as well as tour guides for the major locations. In retrospect this made no sense for traffic is only heavy in Athens and getting around was actually pretty easy and also added quite a bit of cost to the tour, but by the same token we didn't have to think about directions or finding parking anywhere.
We wanted to visit some of the islands. Now there's hundreds of islands in the Aegean, Mediterranean and Ionian Seas and visiting all of them would be impossible. So I asked for suggestions from Anthony first saying that we did not much want to go the tourist party islands (Mykonos) or the tourist trap, Santorini. However Anthony convinced me that Santorini was so different that we shouldn't miss it (he was right incidentally).
I also said that we wanted to travel by inter-island ferry as much as possible too as in the early iterations he had suggested flying between the islands.
So our itinerary was largely assembled when Covid struck and put things on hold.
Fast forward to this year, 2022. Vaccines done, lockdown over, restrictions being gradually lifted. I contacted Anthony again and Yes he did remember us. In the time since when we had last been in contact I had added some extra things, one of which spawned another 'Why do you want to go there?' moment. Turns out that it wasn't that it wasn't worthwhile adding, it was just that nobody from his company had ever included it in a tour before so they knew nothing about the places. Ha!
We studied the calendar and fixed the dates which enabled Anthony to book hotels and travel details. Last thing was payment ... Gulp ... and then at the end of April we lifted off from Penang on our summer tour.
I hadn't found the opportunity yet to say 'It's All Greek To Me' but felt confident I'd get the chance soon! Here is the final itinerary. 35 days in total!!
No comments:
Post a Comment