SPARTA, Greece — The neighboring table’s conversation bounced seamlessly between fluent Greek and English. It was a group of Greeks from America — a couple from Massachusetts and a few people from New York. They were unpacking the mythological baggage behind their “Spartan” ethnicity. I eavesdropped what I could and gathered they were probably visiting local family. But I couldn’t tell if the whole group flew to Greece together, how long they were in town or if any of them had known each other longer than the duration of their dinner.
Across Sparta’s center square, a statue of Leonidas overlooked the restaurants, coffee drinkers and kids playing football. The sun tucked itself behind the distant Taygetus mountains, which I’d be climbing the next day.
A bee stung me as I bought sunscreen from a pharmacy the next morning. Bad omen. I had to sit and wait a few minutes to see if I was allergic, it was my first time being stung. I didn’t have a reaction, though if I had, a pharmacy is probably one of the best places to go into shock.
Neck still throbbing from the sting but freshly lathered in sunblock, I boarded a bus to the start of the trail at the foot of the mountain range. To get to the refuge, I followed a section of the E4 trail — a cross-European thru-hike route — so the path was smooth and well-marked. For most the morning I walked on an empty dirt road.
Over the next seven hours of fir trees and steady ascent, I saw no other hikers. At one point the trail entered a green clearing and circled a black bear who was camping out in a patch of bushes toward the middle. I grunted a few times to let her know I was passing by, she grunted a few times in response. We carried on.
A smiling middle-aged Greek couple met me as I neared the refuge. Normally the refuge is closed on weekends, but by chance, I was passing through the same Wednesday night as another big hiking group, so they had arranged to be open. The woman showed me to the sleeping room. I chose the top bunk in the corner furthest from the door. She, still smiling, made me a warm plate of spaghetti.
Eventually, the pack of 17 hikers flooded the bunks. The friends from Montenegro, a Southern European country of about 600,000, make up a hiking group that travels to different trails in Europe. Their members range from men in their early 60s to women in their 20s. None of them knew Greek, so they spoke to the hosts in broken English. I had a brief stuttering conversation with one of the ladies about Texas, hiking, and how I didn’t know Montenegro existed. I went to bed early.
I got half-decent sleep for being in a room of a dozen snoring strangers. I rose with the dawn and ate a simple breakfast the smiling woman prepared for me.
Back on the trail through the forest, I wanted to distance myself from the Montenegrins, and I paced fast to get to the Profitis Ilias peak, the highest point of the range.
Approaching the summit, the fir trees quickly shrink to brush, which even quicker turn to stones. It takes about 2 and a half hours to get to the top of the mountain, which holds some small rock huts that house a few Greek Orthodox icons. For a few minutes, I was the highest thing in the Peloponnese, altitude-wise.
I started scrambling down the opposite side of the mountain, following a trail that would go down through Vyros Gorge — a canyon ancient Spartans used as a road. The path would lead me to Tseria, a village on the other side of the range where I had an Airbnb booked for the night.
At times, hiking downhill is harder than hiking up. The ascent is exhausting. It steals your breath and kills your thighs. But the descent strains your knees and puts you one bad step away from breaking an ankle, cracking your skull or both.
After another hour of carefully finding footholds down from the summit, the trail evened out into a lush, spring-fed field. The land was easier to walk through, but the trail started to disperse into random animal paths and water runoffs. The markers I had been following progressively grew harder to find. I spent about 45 minutes wandering around the pasture trying to find the right way.
Eventually, I gritted my teeth and cursed the trail makers, relying on my phone’s GPS to find the nearest dirt road which would eventually intersect with the trail again. I was frustrated, and I neglected to refill my water at the springs, not realizing they would be the last water source until the village.
The downhill dirt road eventually got me to the start of the gorge. For about half a mile, the trail skirted easily through the forest around the rocky base of the ravine. But soon, the markers started dispersing again, sending me down rabbit trails (not made by rabbits) that would lead to dead ends. I wasted more time wandering around, in denial that I’d have to scramble over the boulders at the bottom of the canyon.
I gave up on the trail markers and climbed to the bottom of the gorge, starting what would become 5 hours of crawling over rocks. My feet blistered on the uneven hard ground, and my legs started to stiffen, hungover from the 6,000-foot climb a few hours before. The sun was hot. My water filter was broken, and my bottles were empty except for a few ounces of unfiltered rain runoff I had found and downed. Within two hours, I was half delirious with heat stroke.
At some point, as the late afternoon sunlight climbed the canyon wall and left me and my dry throat in the shadows at the bottom, I acknowledged how bad my situation was. In everyday life, it’s not often I face a tough moment that I can’t just walk out of. There’s always the option to quit the job, drop the class, ditch the sketchy restaurant or leave the party early. Here, I just had to keep walking. So, for the gorge’s five miles, I did.
Around 8 p.m. I made it to the path up from the gorge and into the tiny roads of the village. I staggered through the streets for a few minutes and into the nearest restaurant to buy a bottle of water. The concerned locals, probably worried by my blood-dried nose and chapped lips, guided me to my Airbnb.
I showered, made quick work of the cake and cookies the host had left out for housewarming, and slept for the next 12 hours. In the morning, I politely withdrew my application to be a Spartan.
