Home » Greece » Overlanding across Africa in our Land Rover Defender, Greece

19th - 28th june

Overlanding across Africa in our Land Rover Defender, Greece

Andy Lees
2006-05-14 16:44:25

Displayed times (last time: )

ioannina - 19th june

after departing from the ferry, it was great to be out into a sunny greek morning. the landscape was very different to the one we'd left in italy. it was drier, more barren and less cultivated. the roads were wide and empty, curving gently through the low mountains.

for me though (andy), the journey was tainted by the untimely and unceremonious expiration of a tortoise. it was in fact the first wild tortoise i'd ever seen; just for a split second - my concentration absorbed by trying to overtake a lorry - before it crunched under both wheels.

i'm writing this now, not to make light of it, but more by way of confession. it was quite upsetting. i hadn't run over anything before, and to kill a tortoise of all things seemed particularly despicable - slow moving and gentle that they are. i cursed the lorry and vowed to pay more attention. oh well, nothing to be done about it now. better than the indignity of a pet shop jail sentence perhaps.

by the time we arrived at our campsite by a lake it was nearly forgotten. we spent the afternoon relaxing and testing out the new telephoto lens on the local wildlife - birds, snakes and frogs.

we shouldn't have camped so close to those reeds though. come nightfall those frogs made a serious racket - there must have been hundreds of them. we thought they'd keep us awake all night.

turns out it wasn't the frogs we needed to worry about though. at about 5am, the dj turned up the volume at the all night party going on just across the water. it drowned out the frogs completely. we couldn't decide if we were annoyed at being woken up, or not being at the party - it sounded pretty good.

vikos gorge - 20th june

in search of rivers, forests and ravines we went to vikos gorge located in the vikos-aoos national park in the remote pindhos mountains. the gorge was a lot bigger ...