Greece has always evoked images of sea and sand thanks to its islands and modern coastal resorts, where most of its 13 million annual visitors go to swim, sun bake, drink, and dance to delirium. But as outdoorsy tourists increasingly seek pristine and blood-quickening walkabouts in the rugged mainland, Greece's mountains -- particularly the storied Olympus -- are emerging as the newest landscapes in the country's tourist brochures.
''It looked like the Greece I wanted to see," said Kelly Hitchcock, 24, from Sydney, who was into her second week of a however-long-it-takes backpacking trip around the world. ''I wanted to see something dramatic and authentic and old, someplace different than the whitewashed buildings and beach sand that I see in the movie-cut image of Greece."
She read about Olympus in a travel book over a sleepless night at the Thessaloniki airport in northern Greece. The passage described a forested paradise cut by the clear Enipeas River, which burst into waterfalls near an old monastery and reached over 9,500 feet beyond the clouds to the mythic throne of Zeus.
The next day, early last month, Hitchcock was on a train to Litochoro, a village at the foot of Olympus near the familiar blueness of the Aegean Sea. I was on my way there, too, driving the five hours north from Athens to find my own authentic paradise in the country where I was born.
Greece has always ached with a deep nostalgia for the old-world life. This feeling runs strongest in the mountains, where the impenetrable land cultivated fiercely traditional people. In 1802, the women of Souli in the Pindus Mountains threw themselves off the cliffs of Zalongo to avoid capture by the invading Ottomans. World War II resistance fighters carved the word ''oxi" (Greek for ''no") onto a mountainside in Epirus as an answer to Mussolini's invading army. Even today, Greek Orthodox monks live in monasteries teetering on the bare-rock pinnacles of Meteora in Thessaly.
