No relation to Olympia Dukakis

Well as you can imagine there is talk of nothing else in Greece besides the Olympics. The Banseys have also been caught by this excitement and can only imagine that this will reach fever pitch by the time we reach Athens tomorrow night.

Today, we thought we would get in the mood with a day trip to Olympia. We're currently staying in Pyrgos, a pretty, small town on the coast about 100km south of Patras. From here we caught a bus to Olympia. The journey should only take half an hour, but our bus was packed with Greek pensioners who'd made the journey to market and were on their way home laden with goods. This stretched the trip close to the hour mark as they were dropped off at various tin sheds in the middle of nowhere.

We finally reached Olympia and had a quick look in the Museum which housed the antiquities found at the site as well as giving an overview of the history of the ancient games. We then wandered down to the site itself. As you can imagine it was besieged by American, German and French tourist packs all following their leaders like sheep. If there is one reason for independant travel, then surely this is it. Luckily for us the site is large enough for you to wander off in any direction and lose the hordes.

Whilst the ruins haven't been excavated to the extent of say, Pompei, there is plenty to see and the feeling from being in this place of history was definitely worth the journey and wandering around in the Greek midday sun (mad dogs and Englishmen.... and Aussies). You can understand why they have no trouble lighting the Olympic flame from here. In the aforementioned Greek midday sun we had the hilarious site of a German presenter having to film a piece where he had to run the length of the ancient running track before saying a few words to camera. The cameraman obviously had it in for him as he had to do it twice whist we were there. After the second attempt, the presenter did his run and speaking part and then headed straight for the shade of an olive tree (definitely the smartest way to escape the heat).

A good site with more info about Olympia can be found here.