Reservations open for a seven night stone village trip in the Mani for April, May or October

Why the houses are built like that

A stone village trip in the Mani begins with the masonry, because the masonry explains the place. The towers are laid up dry, limestone on limestone, with clay and small chips packed into the joints. There is no lime mortar in the older work at all. Walls run close to a meter thick at the base and taper as they rise. Floors are timber, roofs are flat slabs, and rainwater is led off them into a cistern cut below the house.

The height was not for the view. Families here feuded for generations, and a family that could raise one more storey than its neighbor could shoot down into the neighbor's yard. Windows on the lower floors are slots. Doors are small and set high off the ground. When a truce was agreed, the losing side sometimes had to take the top floor down again, course by course.

Most of what stands now is nineteenth century work. Some towers are restored, some are propped with steel, and a good number are simply there, empty, with scrub growing out of the third floor.

Several hundred chapels, most of them locked

The peninsula holds several hundred small Byzantine chapels. Most are eleventh to thirteenth century, barrel vaulted, built from the same limestone as the houses, with fragments of brick set into the walls in patterns. Some carry frescoes under a century of soot. Agios Ioannis Prodromos at Megali Kastania, Episkopi near Stavri, Agitria out on the western shore.

Almost all of them are locked. The key sits with someone in the nearest village, and finding that person takes a morning you had planned to spend elsewhere. The guide on this trip has three or four standing arrangements and no more. Expect to get inside two chapels in a week, and to look at the rest from the doorstep through a grille.

That is not a complaint. The outsides are the better half anyway. You can read how the vault was cut, where the small blind arches sit, and where an ancient block was dropped into a wall a thousand years after somebody else squared it.

Walk the kalderimia between Kardamyli and the gorge

The old mule paths, the kalderimia, still link the upper villages to the shore. They are cobbled with set stones, and where nobody has repaired them the stones have shifted. Ankles matter more than lungs on this ground.

The standard day out of Kardamyli climbs to Agia Sofia and Exochori, drops into the Viros gorge and returns down the bed of it. Call it fourteen kilometers and five hours with stops. The gorge is dry from May onward and you walk on white rounded stone the size of a fist. It is slow going and it is loud, because every step moves something.

Behind all of it stands Taygetos, which reaches 2,404 meters and keeps snow in its north gullies into May. This trip does not go up there. Two of the seven days are walking days and the rest are village days. Nobody is measured on distance, and one guest usually spends the gorge day asleep in Stoupa instead.

The road south is slower than it looks

Areopoli to Cape Tainaron is about fifty kilometers. On a map it is nothing. On the ground it is an hour and a half each way, on a road that turns back on itself every two hundred meters, with a wall on one side and a drop on the other. Meeting a delivery van means one of you reverses.

The second thing to know is that the Deep Mani is largely empty. Vathia has more towers than residents. Several villages have no shop, and the ones that have a shop keep it open when the owner is in it. In October some of the coastal places have already shut for the winter and will not open again until Easter.

There is no shade to speak of south of Areopoli. April can deliver three wet days in a week straight off the sea, and the wind comes hard down the ridges in any month. Bring a proper shell and do not count on drying anything overnight.

Where $1,485 else goes

This departure sits on the $1,485 rung, and it is not alone there. The office keeps every trip at that figure on one page so the number can be seen doing different work in different parts of the world. It does not rank them and will not tell you which is the better buy, because that is not a judgement a figure supports.

• The whole of the $1,485 rung
• All eight figures side by side
• Every departure in one table