I was home from work at 4.30pm.

Tuesday. The same day Manu Bread reopened at Mowbray.

I had a cup of tea and a piece of Manu's opera cake.

I opted to shave my legs, which looked a little 'Lou Reed' (walking on the Wild Side).

Standing in the shower, I noticed how smooth and Greek summer-brown my legs still looked and wondered how much more I could write about Greece before I bored you witless?

I want to tell you more. Like how we went to Greece and didn't go to any islands.

We wanted to be like Leonard Cohen, who arrived on the island of Hydra in 1960.

We wanted to go to Hydra. However, recent pics of Hydra showed it heavily touristed and we wanted to be the anti-tourists.

We wanted to be more like Cohen in 1960 and see Greece beyond the tourist sites.

The Mani. Some dear friends who took epic hippy trips to Greece in the '70s talked to us about the Mani.

We started reading about the Mani's place in ancient and modern Greek history and decided that we would not go to Hydra.

We drove west along the south coast of the Peloponnese with the Mani as our destination. The Peloponnese is the chunk of Greece that looks like a cow udder.

The Mani is the sort of place tour buses don't get to.

One evening, the sunset on the Messenian gulf was so intensely beautiful that I cried.

That same evening, sitting among the olive trees, cacti and lavender, we heard jackals calling to each other.

The Mani's that kind of place. Where olives grow next to cactus and where the ocean sparkles ... day and night...and jackals screech in the dusk. It's a living edge of a place.

The Mani inspired ancient poets like Homer and writers like Patrick Leigh Fermor.

We drove our tiny hire car down to bays where the last of summer's beach umbrellas were optimistically set above rows of sun beds.

The beachgoers were local families and for the cost of a Coke you could hire a sun bed and swim for hours.

In the Mani capital, Areopoli, population 3500, we discovered a 150 year-old bakery known for a finely textured sourdough with crusts so hard that most residents over 50 are toothless! True.

There was cake. Lots of good cake. Greek orange pie (Google it), semolina custards, baklava, shortbreads, olive oil chocolate cake and olive oil orange cake. And really good, strong coffee.

The tomatoes? Fist sized. Dark red and loaded with Mediterranean flavour. When I asked how much for one, it was handed to me with a shrug and 'no charge'. He was right, what kind of woman buys only one tomato at the end of a Greek summer?

Honey. A mountain-wild, unprocessed and light-flavoured, uncomplicated creature of a honey.

Salt. Collected by two elderly women from a rockpool that was their wedding dowry.

Olive oil. Fruity and served in bowls alongside loaves of bread. I gained three kilos in three weeks.

I didn't take photos of food.

I took pictures of people and houses, streets and boats, villages and olive groves because above all the sensory joys of eating in Greece was the absolute grace and simplicity of living.

Greeks know how to live in a way that we've almost forgotten.

Perhaps it's their ancientness that makes Greeks more equanimous about their place in life.

The culture of "me" is more the culture of "we".