A bit of fast manoeuvring meant Ilana and I succeeded in joining Giovanna's tour to the Diros Caves. It was so worth while for another interesting day out (and at almost $100 for each shore excursion we have done on Seabourn Odyssey, you want to be sure you have your money's worth!).
As an aside, there was a five-and-a-quarter-hour bike ride in Bari that cost $599. $599!! For that I would want to take the bike home! On ultra-luxury ships you don't pay for drinks or gratuities, but they make up for that in other ways.
Gythion, the port nearest the caves, is famous for its octopus - a speciality in the restaurants - and being the "land of the gods", but as we drove to Diros things definitely went downhill. We were driving though the land of the Mani, a land forgotten by the gods.
It is certainly a hard place to eke out a living. No water so even tough-old olive trees are stunted, a landscape that no livestock other than goats can survive on and, in Turkish times, from 1460-1827, a lawless society.
It all started when one man's goat ate another man's olive tree. Olive tree man shot the goat, goat man decided here was no point in shooting the tree so he shot the olive man's son and after that anyone was fair game and society revolved around revenge.
It meant the Mani were not very sociable. Not very surprising! Their front doors were on the first floors of their houses; if they liked you they lowered steps so you could enter, if not they probably shot you!
Giovanni also told us about nearby Sparta, where men were "owned" by the city and spent their lives at war, while boys were trained to fight from age 14. The Spartans were conquered just once - by the Romans in the 2nd century BC. Sparta ceased to exist until 1827, when Greece emerged from Turkish rule and a new city was built on the ruins of the old one.
And then finally we arrived at the Diros Caves - discovered apparently when a hunter chased a fox down a hole and found himself in an underground palace.
The caves are 14km long so you don't cover them all - it's a 1,200-metre boat ride though low caverns - we had to duck most of the time or risk being decapitated - and a 300-metre walk.
Next stop on this Greek Islands cruise is Mykonos, made fashionable in the 1950s by Aristotle Onassis and where the motto apparently was "let them do what they want as long as they pay for it".
Giovanna said you have to arrive on the island by yacht or you are "just one of the crowd".
Heaven forbid that I should ever be that! I just hope the Yachts of Seabourn's yacht I am on counts, even if it does hold 450 passengers!
Jane Archer
