Meteora

Elsewhere beyond Athens…

After 2 weeks of volunteer work I decided I had had enough and I left for backpacking in central Greece instead. The destination – Meteora!

It turns out that the bus is still the preferred mode of travel in these parts, just like back home.

Puvan and I booked ourselves on one to the hill city-cum-regional transport hub of Trikala, which is linked to Kalambaka, the base city from which we would explore Meteora. Meteora is a place peculiar like no other. Its name actually identifies a host of Christian monasteries dating back to the 1300s. Were they just ordinary monasteries we would not have been so attracted but these are perched precariously on an awe-inspiring, mountainous, rocky landscape. James Bond even had a movie made here. It is also where Linkin Park’s latest album got its name from. Being on a balcony of the Great Meteora, the largest of them all, which has a pretty Zen like interior dotted with many potted plants, bells, arches, shrines and lazy resident cats, there was absolutely no doubt in my mind where the monks here found their peace and perhaps revelation from. We were so high up the houses, trees and farms on the ground below looked miniature, as if we were looking down from a low-flying plane. It is unimaginable to have been given the seemingly impossible task of carrying all the building material all this way up. It begs to ask what motivation or rather belief the monks must have had. I heard that back then the stairs which we used to climb up did not even exist, only ropes and nets to hoist things (and the occasional monk) up!

We actually trekked our way up to the first monastery which was a good one hour uphill on a messy cobble stair) and went from one to another, which were separated by many miles of a single trunk road, by foot. Tourist buses zoomed by as our sweat wet yet another square inch of the dusty ground. Masochistic as it may sound, it felt more satisfying making all this altitude with your own energy, and all of you know the next time when I return I might be 50, if ever!

Taking pictures on the rocky cliffs we felt concerned not only for the shelf-lives of our cameras, but our own lives too as the wind sometimes threatened to sweep everything off!

The one night we spent in Kalambaka we had the good fortune of staying in a hotel with attached bath, air conditioning and TV for only EUR10 (RM 50) a head! Had the Olympics drawn all the tourists away to Athens?

In the afternoon the next day we left again by bus to neighbouring Ioannina (4 hrs away) with the hope of an even bigger conquest – the Vikos Gorge in Zagoria. Vikos Gorge and the national park it resides in are like Europe’s own Grand Canyon. The journey there on roads snaking along mountain sides was quite perilous. A needless overtaking manouvre on a bottleneck bridge jammed up a section of the road for nearly an hour and we had the first class view of things. A family car had tried to overtake a trailer on a tiny bridge and ended up partially squashed! The trailer’s driver who at first was not at fault later turned villain when he refused to budge his vehicle till the police came an hour later!

The only thing we knew before hand about Vikos was that a 7 ½ trek through the gorge awaited. It had to be worth it – where else would you see vertical slopes reaching 1 km high in places!

Little did we know that the whole surrounding area consisted of 2 national parks, and that the Gorge was only one of the highlights in one of the few remaining wildlife refuges in Europe. Unfortunately summer was not the best time to traverse these places, with rivers drying out at this time of year and buses only running the route to the gorge villages twice weekly. We half imagined slumping on the cracked gorge floor with hungry vultures circling overhead. One local even told us frankly to our question of how many people are there exploring the gorge: “At this time of year, just the two of you.” Yikes! Mental note: We would have to come back again sometime.