May 14: Delphi
Today we walked to Delphi. A taxi driver named Demitri collected us from the hotel to drive us back to Livadi, where he left us on the side of the road to walk through the deserted village.
This walk couldn’t have been more beautiful. It started out flat and never got really steep. It alternated forest and sunlight. It wasn’t cold, and it wasn’t hot.
About 45 minutes outside Livadi, we walked past the Corycian Cave, site of the worship of Pan and maybe Dionysos, but Chris couldn’t be bothered to climb up to it. Sounds like a reasonably fun outing if you’re in Delphi for a couple of days and want a strenuous adventure.
Today, I found myself needing to run into the woods for a nature break ridiculously often, like every half hour. I remembered the horta we’d had for dinner the night before, and I wondered if it had included dandelion leaves. Dandelion leaves are a notorious diuretic; they are called pissenlits in French (in addition to their more usual name, dents de léon, which gives us the English dandelion) because they might make you wet the bed…. The Italian version is piscialetto, which means the same thing. Fortunately, there was a lot of forest cover today.
The hardest part of the walk is the zig-zagging path down the cliff face. It’s not actually that hard, but it is rocky and entirely exposed to the sun. It would be hot in the summer, especially if you chose to walk up it to visit the cave.
Down in Delphi, we moved into Hotel Parnassus, which was mobbed with a group of Dutch retirees. We had a top-floor room with a sunny balcony. We immediately took advantage of this to wash out some clothes and hang them to dry out there. One difficulty of moving every day is that clothes don’t have enough time to dry overnight. A sunny balcony where clothes dry quickly is a godsend.
Not that we didn’t have time to wait for clothes to dry, because we were staying two nights in Delphi. We had to visit the sites!
