It’s 8 o’clock when the alarm rings. It’s time for breakfast. The breakfast in the Tsikali hotel is simple, but complete. You have bread with butter and jam, grilled sandwich, orange juice… As a sugggestion, try to ask for expresso coffe, the breakfast coffee is awful!
Today we’ll visit the monasteries of Meteora. The Meteora area is made up of lots of stone blocks up to 600 meters high. These mountains are composed of sedimentary rock, since about 70 million years ago this land was the bottom of a large lake, after which, the area emerged due to earth movements. Once the area emerged, an ancient river was eroded the stone forming the impressive stone columns that can be seen now.
The monasteries in Meteora began to be built around the thirteenth century, at the time of the wars with the Turks, and they are built on top of these big blocks of stone. They’re designed as a defense method against external aggression. In fact, until recently the access to the monasteries were difficult on purpose, although as it’s no longer necessary, the monks built better stairs to allow the access for suppliers, pilgrims and (of course) tourists. Althoug there habe been more than 20, now there are only 6 active monasteries. They are really close, and there is a road that connect them. We’ll see all, but we can only visit two of them, as some are closed and we don’t have enough time for all.
Anyway. We check out and get in the car to start our visit.
Saint Nicholas Anapavsas:
Rousanos:
Great Meteoron (it’s closed today)
Varlaan
Holy Trinity
Saint Stephen
Among all, we’l visit Varlaan and Saint Stephen. You’ll need to climb a lot of steps to access them, and once there, you’ll have to pay 3 euros as an access fee. They have a firm dressing code, men need to wear long trousers and women need to wear a long skirt and cover their shoulders. If a skirt is needed, they lend you one at the entrance.
The monasteries are really beautiful, but the landscapes are really overwhelming. It takes us about 3 hours with our car to do the full visit, but if you prefer, you can hire excursions for a cheap price (about 25 euros) from Karampaka and Kastraki, they pick you up from your hotel and it takes about 4 hours. Actually there is a lot of people getting here by train and then hiring the excursion like the guys we met last night.
We start our way back. Luckily we hadn’t hire accommodation here tonight as we didn’t know how muck would take the visit. Our initial plan was go to Lamia and find and accommodation there, but as our Meteora visit and our way back to Lamía was better than expected, we change our plans to get back to Athens earlier. We’ll visit the castle in Lamia another trip…
In Lamia we look for some fast food and eat a very cheap chicken gyros (2.4 euros), delicious by the way, and while we eat, we pull mobile to find our overnight in Athens, we found a cool 4 stars hotel on the outsides called Athena …
Back to the car and to Athens. All the road from here is highway. Oh, have a look with the loose dogs, they can give you a scare, and the tolls of the highway are somewhat expensive (11 euros for about 200km).
There is not much more to tell today, the Atrium hotel is quite good, a little old but it is very broad and seems calm. We go out to dinner around the hotel, it seems a modest but very quiet neighborhood, and we fall into an “Italian-Greek” that is not bad. Maria has a ceasar salad and I have a Greek pizza (tomato, feta and olives), 21 euros.