Arrival in Pylos 1st June 2006

Arrived in Pylos by bus after a long and slow rail journey to the railhead at Kyparissia.

The hotel is very nice indeed and we have a room with a balcony overlooking the Med! So can’t complain! There are not as many oldies on the course as we had anticipated but everyone seems extremely pleasant and the younger students are just delightful. We have been for a walk into the town centre , - about 2 minutes away. There is a lovely piazza and it is strange to think that my uncle would have come here on occasions and that he would have been very careful not to get picked up by Italian or German troops. He was initially imprisoned in the new castle here but escaped, so a visit there is a must. One can see part of it from the hotel.

Pylos is simply a delightful small town with exceedingly pleasant inhabitants. It faces to Bay of Navarina which has many Turkish and Greek ships both relatively modern and of antiquity on its bottom, and it stretches like a climbing white rose up the hills along the Bay. Percy and his mates witnessed what was probably the latest battle at Pylos as Allied planes bombed an Italian cruiser and its attendant refueling tanker as they were moored at the Pylos dock. Hard to imagine on this azure, cloudless Sunday in June ’06. The cruiser got away but the tanker was destroyed. And just a few metres from where we are standing.