Day 63: Trikala to Meteora, September 2nd.

Up at 8 for a short cycle. Only 25km today. I packed and picked up some snacks from the supermarket, including a red velvet croissant! It was decent. Then I was off. It was a relatively uninteresting day. The first half I spent cycling in a straight line towards Meteora. At a certain point I decided to follow beeline and turned off. It did the typical thing of only taking me on unpaved roads. I don’t know why it does this.

By 10:30 I could see Meteora looming in the distance. By 11:00 I was through the town and setting up my tent in the campsite. I showered, then headed out for the monasteries. I did not know what way I was going, so wondered through town until I found myself on a hiking trail. I passed a few people going the other way, climbed off route to “the Dragon’s Cave”, then hiked up to Varlaam monastery. I slipped through in a crowd without paying for a ticket. The view was spectacular; a vast vista of monasteries perched on huge rock pillars, surrounded by hills, trees and town. I felt like I was in China or somewhere. In fact later on I played the Kung Fu Panda soundtrack...

I also took a quick look around the museum and bought an overpriced souvenir. Then I hiked back down and up to Great Meteora Monastery. The buildings and view weren’t as cool here, but the church was amazing; full of painted domes and glittering chandeliers. A quick walk along the road, an encounter with a bus driver (Dmitrius) later and I was in Roussanou Nunnery. Small, but cool views.

After that I sped through a hiking trail in half an hour in order to get to the next monastery before closing. On the way I had to scramble through narrow canyons and down steep hills, standing on the side of trees to keep my balance. I made it to the Holy Trinity Monastery, sweaty, and with half an hour to spare. This one was super cool. You could walk right to the edge of the rocks and look down. After that I visited the biggest and last of the 5/6 monasteries I saw that day – St Stephen’s.

I took a long, foot bruising walk to a gyro place. It was closed, so I foolishly got one from a spenny restaurant rather than walking down the road to another cheap place. I instead bought ice cream and crisps from a shop, got back to the campsite, and went for a swim in the pool. Some bike repairs later and I got a pint and a Greek salad from the camp restaurant, called Lewis, and wrote this.

A little while later Amy called and we chatted for a long time. That was nice.

Video of this day