InsideOut Travel—Driving in Greece

by Jesse Krist

The Greek people tend to have a "live for the moment" attitude about life, and evidence of this is highly apparent on their highways and city streets.

Driving through the disorganized streets of Athens in our little blue Renault made my heart sink with fondness for the relative sanity of Phoenix and even L.A. traffic. It’s like driving in one of those crazy video games where the objective is to try and run people over with a car.

In congested traffic, many Greek drivers don’t believe in turn signals, pedestrian right of way, or even stoplights. If there's a traffic jam up ahead, it's perfectly acceptable to drive on the sidewalk in order to bypass stopped cars, especially if you're on a motorcycle.


	Zen and the Art of Minor Accidents
	by Jesse Krist The Greek people tend to have a "live for the moment" attitude about life, and evidence of this is highly apparent on their highways and city streets. Driving through the disorganized streets of Athens in our little blue Renault made my heart sink with fondness for the relative sanity of Phoenix and even L.A. traffic. It’s like driving in one of those crazy video games where the objective is to try and run people over with a car. In congested traffic, many Greek drivers don’t believe in turn signals, pedestrian right of way, or even stoplights. If there's a traffic jam up ahead, it's perfectly acceptable to drive on the sidewalk in order to bypass stopped cars, especially if you're on a motorcycle.				Once we got outside the city limits, things improved considerably. The road to Napflio—about 150km from Athens, consisted mainly of a huge autobahn. Unlike the German version, however, there were posted speed limits. While the stress level certainly wasn't as high as driving in the city, the autobahn can be a bit intimidating. Greece is a surprisingly mountainous country, and, once in a while, we had to drive through tunnels. I kept having apocalyptic visions of a terrorist blowing up the tunnel and myself dying under a big pile of rubble. I wondered if I would ever get to have real Greek baklava and Ouzo again. Maybe it was my prayers to Zeus or pure coincidence, but no tunnels exploded. “As I was making my way through the tiny streets in Napflio, I accidentally struck an old woman's car. ” A couple of days into our odyssey, the driving conditions started to make me wish for the pure nihilism of Athens traffic. On the way from Mycenae to Mystras, it was obvious that the infrastructure was not as 20th century as we had seen up to that point. more >> << home
	March 2004 Copyright 2003-2004 InsideOut Travel Magazine << disclaimer

DRIVING IN GREECE

Zen and the Art of Minor Accidents

by Jesse Krist