Labours of Hercules Bike Tour of the Peloponnese in Greece Concept and Route

In April 2018, I will set out on a bike tour of the Peloponnese which is in part based on the Labours of Hercules. Visiting key locations in the Peloponnese connected with the myth, I’ll look deeper into the origins and meaning behind the legend, as well as exploring the beautiful Greek landscape. This video is an introduction to the Labours of Hercules bike tour, where I describe the concept and rough route. It will be part of a complete playlist which will document the entire bike tour.

Hi there is Dave here from Dave travel pages calm and this video is an introduction to my next bike tour which is a boat tour of a Peloponnese region of Greece I’m basing this tour on the twelve labors of Hercules and I’ll be visiting key locations in the

Peloponnese that are connected with the myth the tour itself will be about 25 days long and during the journey I’ll look deeper into the origins and meaning behind the legend as well as exploring the beautiful Greek landscape before I go any further though we need to talk about the name the original

Greek name would have been Heracles or ear achlys which roughly means glory to Hera over thousands of years though Hercules has become the most common form of the name used outside Greece to keep things simple I’m going to use this well-known spelling of the name as well

So if you’re Greek and you’re thinking it’s really Heracles I do agree with you but most people know it as Hercules so for the rest of the tour I’ll be referring to it as the 12 labors of Hercules bike tour so why am i doing this tour then good question well I’ve

Always been interested in mythology whether it’s Greek mythology or Norse mythology and I thought this was a great opportunity to not only explore a little bit of the Greek landscape Greece is where I currently live by the way but also to see how the myths tie-in with

The landscape and to be honest it also gives me a fantastic chance not only to horribly mispronounce place names but also the names of ancient mythological figures we’ll start by going over the twelve labors now if I get all of these right in the pronunciation right it will

Be a miracle so to begin with let me explain about the twelve labors like most people you’ve probably heard that there were twelve labors of Hercules and you can probably name a couple of them such as slaying the lion or wrestling with a ball actually there were ten

Labors to begin with but it was considered that Hercules had cheated on suit so two more were tacked on to the end there was no definitive order of the labors as the mythology would have been passed down orally and we take our order of the labors from a book called the

Biblioteca which is by Apollodorus here we go we’re starting to pronounce the names wrong already aren’t we so I’m going to take this order as the order of the labors but in terms of the bike tour it’s really not important because I’ve had to create a route which in

Of all the points mentioned in the mythology and that that Roux is basically circular anyway now go over to 12 labors here so we’ve got number one slave in the me and lion to slay the nine headed lernaean hydra three capture the Golden Hind of Artemis four captured the erymanthian

Boar five cleanly algae and stables in a single day six slay the Stymphalian birds seven captured the bull eight steal the mares of Diomedes nine obtain the girdle of Hippolyta queen of the Amazons ten obtained the cattle of the monster garyun eleven steal the apples of hesperides and twelve capture

And bing bring back Cerberus from the underworld so now we know what the labors are where did they take place well it’s mythology so really there’s no definitive place but we think that at least six of the labors took place in the Peloponnese with the rest taking

Place in various other parts of the world known to the ancient Greeks at the time one of them even took place in the underworld the six Hercules labors in the Peloponnese obviously form the core of my bike tour and that’s enabled me to build up a rough routes so as you can

See from the map on the screen that’s the route I’ll be taken around the Peloponnese and I’ll be cycling in a roughly anti-clockwise direction starting and finishing basically on my doorstep here in Athens there are some sections of the route where I’ll be backtracking on myself but that’s just

The nature of trying to plan that or in this fashion I should have twenty five days out on the road and so far I’ve allocated 21 of those days and I’m left four days spare for now this route should include all the places in the Peloponnese mentioned in the labors of

Hercules myth this includes the main places such as Nemea but also small towns and villages that may have been mentioned in just one or maybe several versions of the Hercules myth I’ll be making a blog a day on this bike tour much in the same way that I did when I

Cycled from Greece to England I’ll also be posting regularly on Facebook Twitter and Instagram and if you want to follow along on the journey you’ll find some social media links in the description below if you liked this video please thumbs up and subscribe to the channel and hit that notification bill and then

You’ll get regular updates of when the next video goes live the next video should describe the kit I’m gonna take with me on this bike tour the Peloponnese and then after that the next series of videos will be the blogs so thank you very much for watching and

I’ll catch you in the next one cheers for now