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Aug. 31st, 2010 01:32 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
hawkwing_lbI have been to Delphi, the world's navel, cradled by the jagged spines of mountains, looking down across red soil and green olive groves towards the sea.
I have been to Delphi, and learned thereby that I absolutely loathe organised group tours. They ruin the sense of solitude I find necessary for feeling an imaginative connection to the past. Plus I get the sense that Greek tour guides rather despise their visitors.
But Galacidi, where we stayed the night before we were bussed to Delphi? If I had time, I would write paeans to its virtue. The hotel, minutes from the water. Swimming in the clear deep sandy-bottomed water before breakfast, the sea all but empty, the land all but silent, encircled on three sides by scrubby red-dusted mountains bathed in gold light, their flanks cut by deep clefts of morning shadow.
The town in the evening, narrow streets and clean plastered brick, bright-painted shutters closed against the heat. A church on a height, red-domed, bells ringing; the island standing out in the bay, outlined against the blue shadow of further mountains, and the trees that reached the water's edge on one side of the deep natural harbour inlet. The gathering dusk, the stray kittens and wandering dogs, and the round and waning yellow moon that rose over the trees in the warm night.
I rather like Galaxidi. It was quiet.
I have been to Delphi, and learned thereby that I absolutely loathe organised group tours. They ruin the sense of solitude I find necessary for feeling an imaginative connection to the past. Plus I get the sense that Greek tour guides rather despise their visitors.
But Galacidi, where we stayed the night before we were bussed to Delphi? If I had time, I would write paeans to its virtue. The hotel, minutes from the water. Swimming in the clear deep sandy-bottomed water before breakfast, the sea all but empty, the land all but silent, encircled on three sides by scrubby red-dusted mountains bathed in gold light, their flanks cut by deep clefts of morning shadow.
The town in the evening, narrow streets and clean plastered brick, bright-painted shutters closed against the heat. A church on a height, red-domed, bells ringing; the island standing out in the bay, outlined against the blue shadow of further mountains, and the trees that reached the water's edge on one side of the deep natural harbour inlet. The gathering dusk, the stray kittens and wandering dogs, and the round and waning yellow moon that rose over the trees in the warm night.
I rather like Galaxidi. It was quiet.
