We've started a new adventure. We have joined a tour run by Busabout that will see us travel through some Eastern European countries in the company of other like minded independent travellers. Travel is by bus and ferry with a guide. Our 26 lively bunch of fellow travellers come from Australia, New Zealand, Canada, USA, UK, Scotland and South Africa.We left behind the hookers, smog and jammed packed streets of Athens and soon our bus was heading West then Nor...

"You just have to see the changing of the guard in Athens" our friend Anna had said in Mykonos. “Why, what is special about it?” I asked. “You will see!” she said.Athenians have Attiitude with a capital A and never is it more evident as in the changing of the guard. Just check out the pics! The guards dressed in an amazing uniform, strut, march, scrape and kick in a bizarre choreography and it happens every hour. We are told that these gua...

 After a night at a travellers style motel at Stilida, and a sighting of Mt. Olympus the highest mountain in Greece, we are now in Athens and finding it very "down at heel" with frantic traffic and unhappy people. We found one last UNESCO monastery, the 11th Century Monastery of Daphni, in the outskirts of the city, but were disappointed to find that it is under massive renovation and the mosaics for which it is famous could not be viewed. They did however have ...

"Avan, I don't think WE are going to the Monasteries of Mount Athos - no women are allowed!"I had borrowed a more comprehensive guide book (Fodders) from our Texan friends at Meteora, which (bless their hearts) they gave to us to keep when we parted company, and it gave information that we had not known before, that the whole peninsula where the Mt. Athos monasteries are located, is off limits to women. "Well you will have to go on your own", I said, but then...

In the last stages of sunset, we turned a corner and the magnificent shapes of the mountains ahead foretold that the clifftop monasteries we were coming to see, were going to be spectacular. We drove around the perimeter road of these monasteries in the fading light, awestruck and humbled. Built on impossibly high spiky peaks,what possessed the monks to attempt such difficult building projects in the 1300's? By the 16th century there were 13 monasteries in a...