Hotel Phaedra – Hydra

Hotel Phaedra - we enjoyed this friendly, small hotel (really more of a B&B). The owner, Hilda, was fun to talk to and full of useful information. The room was great, the breakfast good, and location perfect - up from the harbor a few steps in a quiet location. Well, really all of Hydra is quiet because of the absence of motorized vehicles – donkey hooves clacking along the cobblestone street just doesn’t constitute as noise – to our ears. Check out her profile on TripAdvisor.

Hello Hydra

We both woke at 5 am unable to sleep in our Athens’ hotel and decided to go for the 8am hydrofoil (Hellenic Seaways) to Hydra. What a welcome relief to pull into Hydra’s harbor around 10am and leave the noise of Athens behind. We checked into our hotel and then had most of the day for exploring. There is only one map that we could find and is the defacto “island” map and is shown below. It has a pretty good layout of the towns (not many) and roads (not many) on the island. It doesn’t really give the hiking trails, but it’s a small island, you can’t get too lost, can you? One side of the map is the whole island (detail shown below) and the other side is the main town, Hydra. The map can be bought at any of the shops along the harbor.

Greece Guide Books

 

Besides the countless web sites we used, we used three books when planning the trip to Greece. The are: The Rough Guide Greece, 11th Edition, The Eyewitness Guide – Athens & Mainland (2007 edition), and Le Guide Traveler di National Geographic Grecia (in Italian). We took all three with us on the trip. 

The Rough Guide pros: good background information on culture and history and good detail on complicated hikes. The Rough Guide cons: restaurants seemed geared to low end – in other words we didn’t like the restaurant choices and some of the hours listed for archaeological sites were not correct (especially the winter hours). 

The Eyewitness Guide pros: nice glossy visuals, especially visualizations of ancient ruins. The Eyewitness Guide cons: scanty information on hikes. 

The National Geographic Grecia pros: pleasant Italian prose of only a handful of places to visit (sometimes less is more). 

If we had to take just one book, I guess we would take the Rough Guide. We were largely constrained in choice by what we could find in local bookstores so we did not review all guides.

Taking a Picture at the Parthenon in Athens Greece

We were a little bewildered when Mark held up Starcase Sandy for a photo in front of the Parthenon and got a whistle blown at him by a guard. It turns out you can’t hold up an icon (like this doll) in front of a monument – even if for educational reasons. It was explained to us as disrespectful. It was a head scratcher for us. We never once read this rule anywhere or heard about it. Interesting. I doubt most of our 3.5 readers will be carrying a paper doll anyways so it may not matter. Maybe we were censored for good reason: transporting a paper doll over international borders is just plain odd isn’t it?

National Archaeological Museum of Athens

Jockey of Artemision
  
We had about 2 hours in the museum before it closed mid-afternoon. (In general, winter hours of many sites and museums seem to be 8:30 to 3:00 approximately. So getting up early is definitely useful.) You can take a taxi or the subway from the Acropolis to this museum. We walked and it took about 20 minutes.

The National Archaeological Museum has a lot to see. We could have easily spent 4 hours and not have seen it all. If you have lots of time, maybe go two days in a row for a couple of hours? The museum has something like 60 rooms. There is sort of a main route through the museum and then opportunities to take side routes. (Don’t forget there is an upstairs part.) Standouts are all the usual site items because they are incredible:

- The Poseidon of Cape Artemision
- The Antikythera Ephebe
- The Jockey of Artemision
- The controversial Mask of Agamemnon
- The fascinating Antikythera mechanism

It’s good to review your kouros from kore and your chitons from your himations before you go. Cameras with no flash were allowed.

Antikythera Ephebe (left) and Unknown Statue (right)

Diadumenos (left) and Unknown Statue (right)

Antikythera Mechanism (left) and Artemision Bronze (right)

The Acropolis et al.

Okay, everything opened today. We started at the Acropolis around 9:30am or so and it was already crowded (by our standards). But perhaps there was pent up desire since everything was shutdown yesterday? Anyway, it is a must see. But be prepared though, it is quite the construction zone. There are people everywhere and it can be a bit busy. If you are expecting some kind of mystical connection when you enter, it might not happen in these conditions.

The 12 Euros combined ticket gets you into several places:
a. Acropolis
b. Ancient Agora
c. Theatre of Dionysos
d. Roman Agora
e. Kerameikos
f. Temple of Olympian Zeus

We visited (a), (b), (d), and (f). We had to fit in the National Museum in the afternoon, so we skipped two sites.

The Ancient Agora and the excellent museum on the site was a standout for us. The well-preserved Temple of Hephaieston (in the Agora) is a pleasure to walk around and enjoy. What’s more, the Ancient Agora had way less people so it was more peaceful. Later in the day we hit the Temple of Olympian Zeus which was enjoyable as well (no museum here, just the main temple ruins). You can easily walk to and between these ruins. Best advice we could give is to easily leave a day for just six places shown above and not try to fit the museum in the same day. (We had to leave the next day, and didn’t want to miss the museum.)