Mani

 Wed - Thu 11th - 12th Oct

According to the Landy’s tracker, we are at 2,577 miles and have achieved an average speed of 31 miles per hour and fuel use has been 27 miles per imperial gallon (5.9 miles per litre or 9.4 km / litre). I think that economy is good considering it’s been very mountainous and stop start. The most we have ever achieved is about 30mpg. Now we have a new fuel injection pump and working overdrive. Perhaps the return, which will be all motorway, will show an increase. We will see. The tolls will balance out any cost saving though and I don’t like motorways but they save a lot of time.

We are at the literal turn-around point of the trip. It’s the tip of the Mani peninsula and according to sources in Greece, it is the southernmost point of mainland Europe. Apparently there’s another one somewhere else in a different European country but we are happy with ours and we went to the other one last year.

Just as we found that Stoupa pulled us towards it, so the Mani did yesterday. We just had to drive south to the end, yet again. There is something so special, so remote, and so harsh, in a southern European way, that we had to come back.

The villages have square stone towers, the fortresses for each feuding family. It seems that fighting was a major pastime in the olden days. Many towers remain and of course replicas have cropped-up. I did struggle with the levels at this build. It’s in Limeni but looks as though it might be swimming with turtles sooner rather than later. I could not get my head around what ‘they’ have done. Limeni is lovely and I hope that the new builds stand the test of time.

This is a famously photographic spot.

and it comes complete with roaming goats

The Mani gets better as you drive south and the reward at the end is a great view of Porto Kato, which is in closing down mode now and no one is eating whilst siding on chairs in the sea.

We stayed for a night at Camping Meltemi, (click here for website) another high spec. site charging €23 all-in (with ACSI card). It’s on the east coast, ‘opposite’ Stoupa. There are non further south. It is perfectly targeted at the demanding Germans with its hi-spec toilet facilities, on site restaurant, shop and daily bread. The lady at reception was certainly German and she was interested to hear me say “the special wind” as she wrote Meltemi on a piece of paper. I continued for some reason, saying “yes a northerly”, to which she expressed some surprise. So I said that it is a northerly that comes down the Aegean and even went as far as to explain the placement of the necessary high pressure to the best of my ability. 😂

There’s some satisfaction in explaining something to an interested German, as they often seem to come back with a disagreement or try to say something better. I could not talk normally to a guy in Stoupa. I was apparently wrong about the distance back to mid-Europe via the ferry compared with overland and also the cold weather expected soon in Germany “vil be kolder than in Englend”.

Also of course according to him, we can hardly do anything anyway now that we are “Brexit”. Well one thing we have that you don’t have are lots of stamps in our passports. Ha gotcha!

It’s a nice place, with direct access to a very long but featureless beach and for that reason, Dawn sat me here. The sunsets are ‘over the horizon’ but the sunrise was good and the light on the southern Mani looked great with it.

However, time moves on and we worked out the return trip and when it needs to start. We have a few days spare now. What to do? We can continue a tour, which is quite hard work, or we can totally chill. Where better to do that than Stoupa and it’s only “over there”…

and that is where we went and where we stay.