Acropolis, Athens

Beograd, Yugoslavia

The train journey from Venezia to Athens was overnight; note the working steam locomotive in the engine shed in Beograd (Belgrade) even in 1981. Athens was a culture shock, a bustling business city, not only even hotter, another currency and another language but another alphabet so we had trouble even reading the signs. We stayed in a hostel and found we picked up crabs from the beds but enjoyed a boat trip for a day out to the island of Aegina.

Acropolis, Athens

Bar on Aegina island

The bridge across the Strait of Corinth carries a narrow gauge railway. We continued to Olympia and camped just outside the ancient Olympic site. Olympia proved to be a very pleasant location, hot but relatively fresh with paths through the farmland and woodland around the ancient site. We halted our travels for a full week and savoured the joys of Retsina wine and Ouso.

Corinth canal

Temple of Zeus, Olympia site

Sprint start

Olympia camping

Onwards and to our furthest point away from home; through the Diakopta Gorge and to the Kalavita Mountains where we left our packs at a village station, took food, water and sleeping bags and walked up in to the mountains for a night camping outside next to a shepherd’s hut and his olive tree. We found our own peace that night on a bare mountain so far away, but it was colder than we expected.

Olympia rail station

A night on a bare mountain - Kalavita Mountains

Sunset - Kalavita Mountains

• Kôln - Koblenz - Firenze - Pisa - Sienna - Venezia. Inter-Rail 81 pt 1
• Pompeii - Kandersteg - Paris. Inter Rail 81 pt 3

RIP Chris C (1959-2018)

I was carrying my Pentax MX 35mm single lens reflex camera with Pentax lenses: a 50mm f.1.4 standard lens, a 28mm f 2.8 wide and my 200mm f4 telephoto. Manual exposure and manual focus. The negative film is KodaColor II, 100 ASA, type 5035, it was the leading brand at the time for tourists. I bought the first ten rolls in London and then purchased locally.
Our naive travel adventure shines through although some negatives are rather the worse for wear despite my protecting the films from the heat. This applies particularly to where I posted the exposed films back to the UK for processing by my usual professional lab, this was to save carrying weight and also get them developed promptly. It seems it would have been better to continue to carry them myself. The developed negatives have been stored since in a domestic environment in Paterson negative files.