Kalamata

We continued our round-trip around the peninsula of Peloponesse with a stop in the Southern city of Kalamata (interestingly also the name of many Greek restaurants outside Greece). Our travel guide had warned us of the ugliness of the city caused by a recent earthquake. We expected destroyed houses, fallen trees, and cracks in the streets but saw nothing the like - which does not mean the city looked beautiful. The promenade all along the beach looked nice but was packed with tourists.

This was probably one of the few places where we had the biggest problems with the language. At the train station, nobody spoke English. In the city center, we had to ask our way through for quite a while before we found someone who understood and could explain to us where to go for a campsite. But the bus driver did not speak English and we saw ourselves going nowhere, with no clue where to get off. Then the bus driver started to speak German which was so refreshing that it made us truly happy. We remembered that a big part of the Greek population had lived and worked in Germany and, thus, many of the elders still spoke German.

We rated our campsite as ok (there was a larger field with apple trees right next to it) and were majorly surprised when we bumped into the German couple that we had talked to in Brindisi for almost a day (while we were having 1kg of dry cookies). They told us about some interesting caves somewhere off of Kalamata that you could get to by car or maybe by bus. That day, we walked across the whole city to the bus central to check out the prices and logistics for such a trip. It was (A) very expensive and (B) the bus wouldn’t have taken us right to the caves.

This idea was scratched off of our list and after a beautiful sunset behind the mountains of Kalamata and a windy night in our tent, we took off the next morning to catch the train to Korinthos.