This office takes reservations for one day in the Mani and Arcadia, six of them on one dry peninsula

Stone where there is almost no soil

The Mani is the middle of the three peninsulas hanging off the Peloponnese and it is mostly rock. There is so little earth that the terraces exist to hold the little there is, and the houses were built upward because ground could not be spared for width. Whole villages of towers face each other across a slope, with slits instead of windows on the lower floors, and one of them, Vathia, stands empty on its hill while people argue about what rebuilding it would mean. Inland and north the country turns green and high: Arcadia is pasture at altitude, with folding huts, dogs that work rather than greet, and cheese made where the flock happens to be. Between them stands the Taygetos ridge, which is why driving round takes so long.

Two days were dropped for honesty

Two candidates for this region are not on the site. One was a cookery afternoon in a restored tower that had been restored for exactly that purpose. The other was sold as a fishing morning, though nobody aboard had fished commercially in years and the nets went over the side for the photograph. Neither is a scandal and both were pleasant. They simply were not days that would have happened anyway, which is the only test applied here. What is left is an olive harvest that runs six weeks and then stops, a slipway where hulls are genuinely being repaired, a shepherd's round beginning at 06:00 because the animals do, and a village nobody has tidied up for visitors.

One heavy day, then something small

The ridge day is fourteen hours on foot with two thousand four hundred metres of mountain inside it, private only, and it takes the following day with it whether you allow for that or not. Take it and leave the next day loose, or take the emptied village instead, which is five hours of level walking and mostly looking. The olive day and the slipway sit well in one week because they ask different things: one is standing under a tree working a pole, the other is watching larch go soft over steam. What you pay for a day covers the day itself and any moving about inside it. Beds and the road between villages carry their own figures, printed next to the day and never folded into it.

What people ask before picking here

How fit do I need to be for the ridge day?

Fit enough to walk fourteen hours carrying your own water, four of them in the dark, on loose rock. That is not a figure of speech, and the people running it will turn a party round if the pace at the first col is wrong. If it reads as too much, the shepherd's round covers eight hours of comparable ground at a working pace and is finished by 14:00.

Can I stay overnight in one of the tower houses at Vathia?

No. The village is empty and unsafe in places, roofs included, and this office will not put anybody inside a building nobody maintains. The day looks at it from the paths and from the outside, which is the honest version of what is there. The bed that night is in a village twenty minutes away where the houses are lived in and the water runs.

Is the olive day available in spring?

No. The mill runs cold for about six weeks between late autumn and the turn of the year, and outside that window there is no harvest to join, only trees. This office will not sell you a picking day in April with a demonstration bolted on to it. If your dates are wrong for it you will be told so in the first reply rather than the third.