Mycenae and beyond

The original Game of Thrones
Nov 7, 2015
3 min read

It’s been a bit of whirlwind trip so far. We’ve seen a lot, moved a lot, and we probably could have stayed a third night in Nafplio, but we decided to move on again.

This time heading back to Athens to catch a nine hour overnight ferry to the island of Crete. First we have one more stop. We catch the 10am bus from Nafplio to Mikines.

Mikines is the modern town next to the ancient ruins of the Mycanaean civiliziation. The Mycanaeans are the guys from Homer. King Agamemnon and the like. The non Trojans in the Trojan war. They’re credited with being the first Greeks and were kicking butt and taking names in this area from around 16-1200 BC.

Remember this thing from your History books?

The ruins aren’t quite as much to look at as Delphi, but they are on the way, and again the natural scenery is top notch. These ancient civilizations picked the best places around for their cities. And these are not easy places to build. The effort and manpower this must have taken some 3500 years ago is hard to wrap your head around.

There’s a little museum on the site that had some interesting finds. Here’s a list of names, some 3,000ish years old. Those were people...

Figuring out how to get back to Athens was a bit of a grey area up to this point. Some misinformation on the internet, and mixed messages from everyone we asked, we knew it was as simple as catching the Athens bound bus, but no one was quite sure on the times. We caught a 5 euro taxi to the small village of Fichti, a quick 3km down the hill. The instructions from the taxi driver were simple, go into the bus station/restaurant where they sell bus tickets, ask for two tickets to Athens, then wait at the stop, and ask the bus driver if there were enough seats. If so, get on. If not, go back into restaurant and have them reprint tickets for next bus. Luckily for us the next bus was now, and there were exactly two seats left.

We sat next to two Americans from California and chatted about our travels the whole way back to Athens. Once at the bus station, we had to catch the city bus #51 to the city center…which pulled up right as we paid for our tickets. Like the way down to Nafplio, the timing could not have worked out any better if we had planned it that way.

Next it was down to the pier to pick up some ferry tickets and keep ourselves busy until the 9pm departure. It wasn’t exactly “The ship of dreams” , which is a terrible reference, but it was actually a pretty nice ship.

There were smaller, faster, choppier boats we could have taken, but we opted for the slower, bigger, more stable car ferry. The cabin berths were a bit out of our budget, so we picked up two “airplane seats” and then made ourselves comfortable however possible.