The Most Beautiful Motorway in the World?
Added on Thursday, April 24th, 2008 by Carole Nash Editor
The Most Beautiful Motorway in the World?
The road out of Igoumenitsa that climbs from the exit of the port directly into the mountains is superb. It is the beginning of a trans-Greek motorway that will link the Adriatic with Turkey.
Apart from sea routes and air freighting, this will become absolutely the most important gateway from southern Europe to Asia.
It’s not finished but the work encompasses the highest level of surveying and road construction. The only reason it has taken this long to be built must have been because of a change of heart of political will. The money has been found and it must be costing billions. The valleys it traverses and the mountains it bores through has to be seen to be believed. When finished, it will become the most beautiful motorway in the world.
Perhaps it is a Greek thing, but the old way of life still pervades amongst so much new. This could be a theme of ‘Parallel World’, the ‘old’ and the ‘new’. The modern and the traditional. Road building is the spit and sawdust of any colonial power but in the times when colonialism meant anything, the roads then largely followed contours in the most extreme way. Now, roads hang in mid air, supported by pillars of Brobdignagian proportions.
Yet old ladies still clutch their vegetables in their aprons on the ground far below. Lovers still eat by the sea. Homesteads nestle in the mist on a level with the new road and clouds that make invisible the tops of mountains. At the end of the day, the Greeks have a drink by the sea.
