Reserve a stay in the Mani for a week, three weeks or a season

The Mani is a limestone finger about 45 miles long that runs off the bottom of the Peloponnese and ends at the last cape on the Greek mainland. You can reserve a stay in the Mani through this office at three lengths, seven nights, twenty one nights or fifty six, and they are not one holiday at three sizes. A week is a place you look at. A season is a place that starts expecting you at particular hours.

There are no trees to speak of on the inner half. The rock is pale grey, it holds the day's heat until midnight, and the villages are built out of it: square towers three and four floors high with slit windows, put up by families who were arguing with the family two hundred yards uphill. Most of the towers stand empty. A few have been reroofed and let. Between them the ground is walled into pens the size of a living room, because that is how much soil there was in any one spot.

Water is the whole story. Nothing runs on the surface here. Every old house has a cistern under the yard and a channel cut round the roof to feed it, and in the villages above the coast road the village supply is cut from two until five most afternoons in July and August. Your house will have a tank. You will be shown the tap for it on the first day and you will think about it for the rest of the stay, which is a fair description of what living on this rock is like.

The finger, the two gulfs and the road down it

Areopoli sits at about 800 feet on the western side, fifteen miles from Gythio and forty nine from Kalamata, and it is the only town on the inner half with more than one of anything. The open air market is Saturday, 7 a.m. until about 12:30, in the square below the church, and by nine the four growers with tomatoes have sold out and are drinking coffee. The bakery opens at 6:30 and the village loaves are gone by nine, after which you are buying tin bread. Two fuel pumps, both closed Sunday. The regional bus leaves for Gythio twice on weekdays, once on Saturday and not at all on Sunday, which is worth knowing before you decide against a car.

South of Areopoli the road narrows and the map stops helping. It is fifteen miles to the road end above the last cape, and the final four take twenty five minutes because the asphalt is one vehicle wide with passing places cut into the rock. From the road end the path to the light is about forty minutes each way over loose limestone, there is a Roman floor under a bramble a hundred yards in, and for the last ten minutes the sea is on both sides of you. Gerolimenas, twelve miles down, is a harbor of eight or nine buildings where the small boats land in the late afternoon and the catch is sold off the quay on Thursday and Sunday.

A week, three weeks and a season in the same village

Seven nights gives you one market, one run to the cape, two or three coves and one evening when the wind drops and the towers go orange for about eleven minutes before the light goes. That is a good week, and it is also the whole of the first impression: the towers read as architecture, the sea reads as color, and you go home with nine photographs of the same doorway.

Three weeks bends. Somewhere around day nine the shape of the day stops being set by what there is to see and starts being set by the heat, which means you are out at seven and again after six and the middle belongs to the shutters. By the second week you know which of the two coves holds shade until eleven and which one is empty because the track down is rough. The bread van comes up to the ridge villages on Tuesday and Friday around ten, and by the third week you are standing there at five to. Somebody will have told you that the house with the cracked lintel was their grandmother's, and then walked you through it.

Fifty six nights is a different kind of thing. The per night figure moves from about $351 to about $197, because a room let for eight weeks is not stripped, cleaned and turned round every Saturday, and the figure follows the work that is not being done. What the length buys is a change in your position. You get the whole of the fig week, the last days of August into the first of September, when the trees behind the houses are picked over by everybody including you. You get the sea at 79 degrees through the second half of September, long after the July crowd has gone. Stay into November and you get the olives, nets down under the trees from about the fifteenth and the press at the head of the valley running past midnight, and for six weeks the valley smells of it. You also get the ordinary parts, which are most of it: the fifth Wednesday running when nothing at all happens, the afternoon the water goes off and you had not filled the jug, and the point around week five when the woman who lets you the house stops charging for laundry because counting loads has become silly.

The house, the owner and who sends the bill

What you are placed in is a stone house of two bedrooms with a roof terrace and a cistern, in a village of between forty and two hundred people, or the upper wing of a family pension above a square with the family living downstairs. No aircraft, no bedroom, no hull and no vehicle described on this page belongs to Slow Latitudes Bookings LLC. The company running your weeks holds its own licence, sets its own terms and invoices you itself, on paper it wrote, and nothing at all is collected at this end.

On a week the linen is changed once, at the end. On three weeks, twice. On a season the owner comes every tenth day, and by the third visit she lets herself in, leaves the towels on the stairs and carries the empty gas bottle down without being asked. Firewood is by the crate up to three weeks and unmetered from November on the long stay, because a stone house on this rock in January wants the fire lit at four in the afternoon.

Booking the weeks and who invoices you

Name the weeks you actually want and putting a number on those exact weeks runs two to four working days at this end, because the answer depends on which house is free for the whole run rather than for the middle of it. Getting there is on you, and this agency puts no flight on any figure; from the airport at Kalamata the drive is forty nine miles and about an hour and forty minutes over the shoulder of Taygetos, which stands at nearly 7,900 feet inland of you and holds snow into May. If a summer boat along the coast forms part of your weeks, that passage is held and billed by the company that operates it, under its own licence, and it sits outside every figure above. Entry rules are between you and the authority that issues them, and this office does not advise on them.

Slow Latitudes Bookings LLC works from 9422 Common Street, Suite 2, Baton Rouge, East Baton Rouge Parish, LA 70809, by telephone on +1 (225) 766-2418 and in writing at bookings@slowlatitudes.com. If something here has gone stale, and figures in a village with eleven letting houses do go stale, write to corrections@slowlatitudes.com and it gets corrected. Louisiana is a long way from this rock, which is why the answers come back in writing and why they take a couple of days.