We spent almost 3 months in Greece, from mid Jan to mid April, mostly on the mainland, although we did go to one island, Evia. The most surprising thing was the weather, it was a lot colder than I was expecting! Although we did have some really beautiful weather too.

This was our route (only approximately, you can only have a limited number of points on Google Maps):

We got the ferry from Bari in Italy to Igoumenitsa and then fairly quickly travelled down to the Peloponnese, assuming it would be a little warmer there, although it wasn’t much different. We stayed on a campsite in Gythio for a month over the worst of the winter, the campsite has a large shared room with heating where we could spend our time when it was too cold and wet!

Click on any photo to enlarge, then you can scroll through the large versions.

The campsite near Gytheo was right on the beach and the sunsets were amazing.

Greece was full of wild flowers.

We went for some great walks with beautiful views.

Another sunset at Gytheo.

An amazing rock fortress, a tiny island with a bridge across.

We were amazed to see this tortoise in the wild - although it turned out to be the first of many.

Love the shape of this rock!

The cave at Didima was a massive crater, although hard to show the scale of it on the photo.

There was a passageway into the crater, quite amazing.

Epidavros

I've already posted some photos and raw food info about Athens.

Amazing hot springs at Loutra Edipsou (Evia Island).

The water is very, very hot, but it feeds into the sea so you can find places where the hot water mixes with sea water for the perfect temperature.

Beautiful river near another hot spring at Thermopiles (back on mainland).

Olive trees with snowy mountains in background at Stilida.

Lizard - this and the next few photos are on the Pelion Peninsular, one of my favourite parts of Greece.

This was on a beautiful walk from Kissos on the Pelion Peninsular.

More wild flowers on the walk from Kissos.

Waterfall near Kissos.

Fakistra Beach, so beautiful!

Milopotamos, another beautiful beach.

Another stunningly beautiful place, Nestos Valley, a natural park along the river valley.

Another view of Nestos Valley.

Nestos Valley again.

The waterfall at Edessa.

Prespa Lakes - Two beautiful lakes in this very remote part of Greece.

These last few photos are all from Meteora. An amazing place with massive rocks,

and beautiful nature.

More rocks at Meteora.

And More rocks at Meteora.

The reason Meteora is famous is because there are monasteries built on top of the rocks, in very in-accessible places.

Although for me it was the wild nature that made this another of my favourite places in Greece.

Hope you like them, please feel free to leave your comments or questions below.

I got a little behind with travel updates – for now I’ve skipped forward to Croatia, which was November – December last year. Croatia is a really beautiful country, and the local food from the markets was of amazing quality.

Click on any photo to enlarge.

Croatia has over 1000 islands, this is a little island called Lošinj, just below Cres island. It was really beautiful here.	I was very supprised when I found that Pula has a Roman Amphitheatre, in amazing condition. Plus other Roman buildings.
	Near Pula is a wild peninsular called Rt Kamenjak. Wild and beautiful.	Pazin is an interesting little village, but the best bit is in the ravine, really beautiful but so cold as not much sunlight.
Pazin ravine.	More coastlines on Krk Island
Plitcitce National Park was one of the most beautiful places I have been. A completely unique landscape with lakes and waterfalls, made even more beautiful due to the November frost.
More in Plitvitce.
And more Plitvitce.	Waterfalls in Krka National Park.
Forest in Krka National Park		We got a ferry from Makarska to Brac island.
An amazing beach which sticks out into the ocean, called Zlatni Rat (Golden Beach) on Brac island.	Korcula town on Korcula island, a short ferry trip from Brac island.	Dubrovnik is amazing, the old city is surrounded by the castle like walls.
Another view of Dubrovnik	We went for a great walk along the coast from Dubrovnik.	The sunsets in Croatia were almost always beautiful, the colours this night are amazing.

The nature here in central Portugal is amazing. You can hear birds signing and other animal sounds all the time. Yesterday, I saw this, I’m not sure what it is, sort of half butterfly, half something else! It sat there for ages while I took some close up photos. If anyone does know what it is, please let me know in the comments.

Some beautiful scenery in this part of the world. This is the final part of this section of our trip, from Bagneres de Bigorre we drove through the Pyrenees into Spain, across to the Spanish and then French Basque Country then along the Spanish coast to Santander where we took the 24 hour ferry to Portsmouth – we then spent a month in the UK, mostly in London.

Ainsa, our first stop in Spain. I have a friend who was staying there and she took us to visit a local lady who was growing all sorts of food plants, we ate some delicious figs and I got to try fresh stevia leaves for the first time (first photo), they are amazing, so sweet! The dragonfly was dead on the ground, but it gave me a good opportunity to take some photos.
The road out of Ainsa towards Jaca was amazingly beautiful. We just kept stopping to take photos!		Parque Nacional de Ordesa y Monte Perdido
Parque Nacional de Ordesa y Monte Perdido, in the Pyrenees on the border between Spain and France – well worth a vist, amazing waterfalls.
Back in France, Saint-Jean-de-Luz	The Atlantic coast of France here is beautiful. This is Lac Blanc, a little inland from Vieux-Boucau.	Bayonne was a very pretty city.
Bilbao: Outside the Guggenheim Museum were several sculptures, including this dog made out of flowers and giant spider. And of course, the obligatory photo of the Guggenheim Museum!

This was a beautiful part of France. Châteaux, mountains, hot springs, French markets and lots more, from 17th August to 5th September 2010. Click to enlarge the map or photos.

Carcasonne has an amazing fairy tale Château, and is generally a very pretty place, but once you go inside, you are greeted with tacky souvenir shops.
This is the Château at Peyrepertuse, it’s an amazing old Cathar Castle built in the 11th Century.		We’re big fans of hot springs, although at Rennes-les-Bains we only found the warm springs (still beautiful), this photo is nearby.
This is not far from the campsite we stayed on near Foix. In the evening we followed a footpath and went for a great walk, founds lots of wild food and saw wildlife like this butterfly.
In Saint-Lizzier near Saint-Girons, lots of interesting plants, including this kiwi vine.	Bagnères-de-Luchon, beautiful place in the Pyrenees.	Sunset from campsite at Bagnères-de-Bigorre.
Bagnères-de-Bigorre. We spent a week here, it was a beautiful place and I had some work to catch up on. Lots of walks in the surrounding countryside, some amazing views and wildlife and a great market on Saturday. As well as the amazing mushrooms and spider, we saw a hummingbird moth, which looks a bit like a hummingbird, but it was flapping its wings too fast to be able to take a good photo of it.

Today we went to Gibraltar – I’d heard that the Upper Rock Nature Reserve is the only place to have monkeys in the wild, specifically Barbary Macaques. I wasn’t really expecting to see them, but there were loads of them! At one point, I was walking along, happily eating an apple when one of the monkeys came up to me, climbed up my leg and grabbed my apple. Unfortunately this all happened too quickly to get on camera, but I did manage to take the following pics of the monkey eating the stolen apple: