Didymoteicho and sleeping with the cows

One of the overarching dilemma's of this travel blog is what to post and how much. I could make it a weird Wikipedia duplication and only give you some facts of history with pictures; but then you would actually be better of not reading this. Or, at the other extreme, share only my personal experiences or thoughts and tell you about the people I meet, conversations I have, food I eat. You guessed it: I will do a bit of both.

Let's start on the 17th: really tired legs made me only want to cycle so much, and I definitely didn't want to go and do the impending 1000m climb in one go. So I decided to just start the climb and see if I could find a good place to wildcamp. Obviously it's rough mountain terrain, but that's not the issue, the issue is cows: cows everywhere. Just everywhere quickly accessible, shitloads of cow shit, or cows dingling-dangling about. (I tried a farm that I found but noone was home, so I pushed on.) These are some very athletic cows they have here in the greek mountains.

So having found a spot seemingly quiet enough, and having spoken to some cow-herders who said it was fine, except to be weary of police and "Pakistani" (?!), of course I was woken up at 12am by dingling of cowbells—unnerving at first but surprisingly soothing after a while— and then about an hour later a barking dog: great night.

(A second farmer the next day said that there are refugees hiding in the mountains and they can be dangerous. That's what the other one meant by "the pakistani". Luckily(?) it was raining all night.)

Obviously I wasn't terribly fit the next day, and minute village after village, no supermarket to be found. The only village — which also had affordable hotels and appartments — was didymonteicho. I thought of taking a train from there, but apparently these don't run anymore.

What's cool about this village: it has an ancient castle and fortress above it, which dates back, partially, to before christ. So sometimes you stumble upon sights worth seeing. In the netherlands and austria they would have made a museum out of this by the way; here it's just some walls an towers with maybe a table to give some background info. In any case, this fortress clearly was useful in many ways: you can see miles in every direction.

To finish off with some wikipedia copy-paste work: The castle is accompanied by several myths, one of the most famous is that of the Forty Arches, and is where Charles XII, King of Sweden, is said to have been imprisoned by the Turks.Read more