Kalambaka, Greece, Europe

Today was an absolutely brilliant day! It was just one of those days where everything seemed to go right. I like those days. It started out with a 7:30am wake up call, breakfast at 8am with Sheila and Rob downstairs at the hotel, and then a bus from Kalambaka up to Meteora. The bus was scheduled to pick us up from Central Square at 9am and it showed up at 9:20am, but that was no big deal. It just seems to be how the Greek schedules work here, so we’re all a bit used to that now.

We got the bus up to the top of the rocks and the first stop was at the Holy Monastery of the Great Meteora. This is the monastery furthest to the west, and the other monastery that the bus could drop you off at was Monastery of Saint Stefanos, which is all the way to the east. We didn’t really have a set plan of how we were going to go at these sites for the day, but we decided to start at the Great Meteora. This ended up being a great decision. Great Meteora is the largest, and probably the most impressive of all the monasteries.

There are six monasteries that are tourable today, but there were about twenty back in the day. Most of them have fallen away off the cliffs, or they are too decrepit to allow visitors. Each one is perched on the top of a huge rock column, which is just unbelievable. Most of them were built back in the 1400’s, so to think about how they first got up there, and then had to get all the supplies to the top if this rock to build something. It is just amazing.

We paid our €3 to get into the monastery and spent about an hour walking around inside. They each had a church inside with some incredibly ornate paintings depicting what I assume are stories from the bible. We walked down from Great Meteora to the next monastery called Varlaam. This one was a little bit smaller, but also very impressive. We paid our €3 each to get in there as well and it was worth it. Each monastery also had a small museum, but the artefacts didn’t have enough writing next to them (in English) to know where and when they were from. It was still very interesting to see.

The most impressive thing about these monasteries to me was just the landscape and surroundings. Everywhere you looked it was massive rock formations that looked like something out of the movie Avatar. We got very lucky with the weather as well because yesterday was very cloudy, and the forecast for the next four days is rain, and we managed to get a mostly dry day. It was grey for most of the day with the sun only poking through a couple of times. But every time it felt like it was going to start downpouring, and we even felt a couple of raindrops, it just stopped. The weather was definitely on our side today.

We left Varlaam and had to make a decision to go up a road or down a road to get to the next monastery. We chose to go up the road, which again turned out to be a great decision. We got to a highpoint overlooking the first four monasteries and found a perfect rock to sit and have lunch on. We had brought up some sandwiches from a bakery in Kalambaka, so we had a nice little picnic with one of the best views I’ve ever seen.

The next monastery we saw was meant to be closed on a Wednesday, but for some reason it was open today and we got there with only an hour to spare. Monastery of Roussanou was the smallest of the three we got to go inside, but I think it was the nicest. It looked the most modern inside, as if they had just renovated it, and the church pictures were so different from anything I’ve seen before. The first room you walked into was all pictures of death and torture, and then the next room was all nice normal church pictures you see in any other church. It seemed to be a room of hell followed by a room of heaven. I’ve never seen anything like that before but again, there was no writing about it so we’re not exactly sure what the reasoning was behind it.

We left the third monastery and were going to try to catch the last bus down into town around 2pm. Our timing was perfect because instead of getting the bus on the way down into town, we caught it on the way up. This meant that it brought us back to Great Meteora, but then it brought us all the way east so we were able to see the monasteries that we hadn’t been able to walk to. We didn’t get to go inside them, but the scenery was really more important to me anyway.

We got the bus down into town, grabbed a gyro and beer for a quick snack, and then came back to the hotel for Sheila and Rob to pick up their bags. They had a bit of time before catching their train to Athens so we bought a couple of beers and sat in the Central Square for a while and chatted. They are some of the nicest people I’ve ever met and I really hope I can visit them someday in Montana. They made the last couple of days here so much better just with their company alone, so I can’t thank them enough for that. We exchanged information and they headed off to the station and I came back to the hotel.

I was hoping to meet other travelers who are on their way to Thessaloniki tomorrow too, but there were no other travelers hanging out at the hotel. This is why hostels can be better at times because it just makes it so much easier to meet people. Hopefully I’ll find some people on my bus tomorrow going the same direction, but it’s only a three hour ride anyway, so I can handle that on my own.