Day 19 – May 4 Wednesday

6.30am breakfast again & 7.30am start, with a rain shower or two as we headed south.  As we left Ioannina, we started climbing mountains & had a great view back over the lake & the city.  The first part of our journey was slow & laborious as the road was twisting & turning & climbing, however, the view was worth it.  The nearby really steep & rugged mountains had snow on them, with cloud lifting & fog clearing the scenery was very pretty.  We then turned onto a new motorway for around 50km & took advantage of the many long tunnels through the mountains that made our journey a little easier.  This is really isolated & a remote part of Greece, there was a sign near a tunnel warning of bears.  All too soon we turned off onto the tight & twisty local mountain roads again on the way to Kalambaka.  There were a large number of memorials on the sides of these steep mountain roads to motorists that lost their lives, it’s not surprising seeing the very steep drops without guard rails, it must be a nightmare in winter with snow & ice thrown in as well.

Kalambaka is a town of around 10,000 people that is mostly very new, it has grown in the last few years to cater for the tourists visiting Meteora, the cluster of monastery’s on mountain spires that dominate the town.  These are huge bare rocks that seem to rise straight out of the ground, with the only vegetation a tiny cluster of green on top.  We took the steep drive up the twisty road to visit a couple of the monastery’s.  They are amazing pieces of construction, a stone building clinging to the top of a rock spire.  It’s amazing how anyone ever got on top, let alone build a stone monastery there, these buildings are clinging to the rock that is a vertical spire many hundreds of metres tall.  There are about a dozen left from a total of 24 that were built.  We visited two of them, (where the nuns reside as the monks will not let women in, even here men must wear long or below the knee shorts & women must wear skirts) the first monastery had a very interesting church with beautiful religious paintings adorning every inside wall & ceiling space.  The most treasured icon was the hands of a saint in silver boxes inside a larger silver box.  We had a look at the wine cellar, a 12,000 litre oak barrel (yes, twelve thousand) that was simply enormous, I guess it had to last them all year.  The other interesting item was the windlass used to lift up & down everything, including the monks.  This was a solid looking wooden windlass, however, you would need to trust your fellow monks.  Today there is an electric winch for lifting heavy items, people now come in over the bridge & then up several flights of stairs.

The second was Saint Stephen’s Holy Monastery, however, is full of nuns as the monks all died out or left.  Again the church is covered inside with religious paintings, however, the primary religious icon here is the skull of Saint Stephen who was beheaded by Roman soldiers apparently (at the ripe old age of 113).  This monastery was well looked after by about 18 nuns, the day before we arrived they buried the Mother Superior.  As in most churches, no photos are allowed inside.  The museums of both monastery’s we visited had very interesting religious relics, one was a page from a religious book dated 605 (1,406 years ago).

Back down the scary mountain drive to Kalambaka with lunch at Mama’s kitchen (Restaurant Meteora), with us all trooping through the kitchen with a plate in hand & Mama serving us out of giant pots on the stove.  The traditional Greek food was simply delicious.  With full bellies we continued on our way towards Athens.  The road from Kalambaka was flat & straight for a long time, stretching along river flat farmlands growing mainly wheat (most of us on the bus fell asleep at this stage).  Then up another mountain range, then down the other side, these are really steep & a little bit scary.  The road kept improving, turning into motorway for the final stretch into Athens.  As we drove into the city we had a glimpse of the Acropolis before arriving at the Metropolitan Hotel situated down near the port.  It was a long drive but worth every minute to have seen the monastery’s perched up on those tall barren rocks.  Another very nice hotel.