Trikala and Meteora - 17-18 September

When I arrived back in Athens I headed straight to the train station in an attempt to catch the morning train to Trikala but I was a bit late as the ferry had been a bit slow. Trikala is a city about 10 miles from the Meteora monasteries with frequent buses between the two and it was much cheaper than Kalampaka which is directly below them so I had grabbed a hostel there. Unfortunately all the rest of the trains for the day were booked out and so I headed to the bus station to see if I could get catch a bus there instead. I luckily managed to jump on the 11.30am bus and I then spent the next 5 hours jammed on a bus next to a big dude. That aside it was quite a good trip and meant I got in at a reasonable time which was great!

I spent the afternoon exploring Trikala including the fortress overlooking the city and sorting out my onwards journey. It was actually a really nice city. It didn't have many tourists and felt a lot more Greek than anywhere else I had been. It also had extremely cheap and amazing food which is a massive positive! That night I got chatting to the other people in the hostel and it was extremely interesting. Everyone at the hostel was travelling by themselves, enjoyed hiking and the outdoors, had been on some epic adventures and all in all were very similar to me. It seemed that Meteora and especially this hostel (as it was further away then most but gave information about how to walk them all rather than just do the tour bus between them) attracted these types of people. This made for very interesting conversation and meant I went to bed with a number of new places that I want to visit!

The next day I was up early to catch the bus to Meteora and found that Eric, another guy at the hostel, was also on the same bus as me. When we got to Kalampaka we found that we had an hour before the next bus up to the top so we headed around town for a bit. Here we found a food market with the most amazing olives and tomatoes for stupidly cheap!

We found that we were planning to do basically the same route and so we decided to head off together. We started at the Great Monastery and had a look around the various museums it had to offer. The church inside was completely painted with frescoes, lots of which were depicting the death of the Neo-martyrs of their faith. This was like no church I had ever seen before with some of these images being extremely gruesome! From here we then headed off the beaten track as we set off to find one of the monasteries that our hostel had told us about but that isn't on the map and has no road to it. After getting some directions from a local store owner we set off down a track with some vague directions but little idea where we were meant to he heading. However after a few false trails we saw the statue in the distance that we had been told would mark the monastery and we headed for it. Instead of being on top of the cliffs like all the others, this one was set in the middle of the cliff and was quite amazing. We spent a while exploring the area around it as we couldn't get inside before we headed back along the track to the main monastery again. It had been nice to get away from the crowds though and have the whole place to ourselves!

We then headed to Varlaam, the next big monastery and here we stopped on top of one of the big stones looking over the valley for our lunch of homemade Greek salad sandwiches. Unfortunately Varlaam was shut on Fridays, but after the first one we had decided they looked much more impressive from the outside anyway as inside you didn't really feel how close you were to the cliff edge. On our way to the next one we passed a large cave in which you could climb up inside the cliffs to a higher vantage point looking over the valley to the next monastery which was amazing. We had soon reached back to the road however and had a couple of km slog up the road to the next one. It was also the middle of the day and stinking hot by this point and we decided to try hitchhike our way up, thinking it would be relatively easy especially since everyone would be going to the same place. However everyone just drove straight past and we ended up walking it ourselves, wondering what it was about us that was scaring everyone away. Funnily enough we then recognised the people who had driven past us when we went inside the next monastery which was a nunnery and we secretly hoped they felt bad for driving past, although they probably didn't. The church in here also was filled with the graphic and greusome images of Neo-martyrs deaths which was crazy.

From here we walked up to the top of the mountains where we found the sunset viewing point. It was still only the afternoon so no sunset for us but it was a good vantage point from which you could see 5 of the 6 main monasteries.

We then walked along the road to the last two main monasteries (we had missed one of them as it was out of the way and shut on Fridays). These two were actually quite cool inside with gardens as well as less gruesome scenes in the churches. We had also timed our day perfectly as we got to the last one just 15 minutes before closing. Finally we headed down the mountains back to Kalampaka where we had a beer as the sun was setting. After getting ourselves a nice traditional Greek meal of stuffed tomatoes, grilled cheese and grilled fish we jumped on the bus back to Trikala extremely satisfied with our day. Back at the hostel we had another great night chatting and exchanging travel stories with everyone.

All in all it was an extremely successful trip to Meteora where I managed to see most of it in a day and also met a lot of very interesting people!