Today, our plan was to visit the monasteries in Meteora (meh-theh-ora, NOT meteor-a!) in the company of a private tour guide. We had breakfast but the hotel, being a fairly small one, did not have a lot of vegan choices but we appreciated the fact that they'd been told about us and taken the trouble to buy some almond milk for our coffee and cereal. The hostess was good enough to point out all the items (which was very few) that we could eat.
We were picked up at the hotel by our driver (I forget his name) who took us to Meteora. Our guide (Catherine) was waiting for us at the entrance of a monastery (Roussanou) but she said that we would be visiting it at the end. The plan for the day was to visit the Varlaam, Great Meteoron and Roussanou monasteries in that order. Varlaam and Great Meteoron are two of the highest monasteries in Meteora where Roussanou is much lower down.
We started by visiting the Varlaam monastery. This monastery was accessibly by climbing about 150 steps from the parking lot. At present, 7 monks live in the monastery but we didn't see any of them. A service had just completed to honor the recent death of an abbot of the monastery, so we saw some people dressed in black making their way back. We explored the monastery and learned about the way the monks would get their supplies from more than 1000ft below using a rope-and-pulley arrangement that was activated by a human-powered winch system.
The next stop was the Great Meteoron, the largest monastery in Meteora. At present, about 6 monks live in it but the guide told us that, at one time, there were more than 200 monks that lived there. The access to this monastery was far more difficult. It is situated at roughly the same height as Varlaam but the access to it is by climbing down about 150 steps and then climbing up another 200 or so steps. The parking lot gets super crowded, so our driver dropped us off and went off to wait in a quieter place. We went with our guide for a tour through the monastery. There were a lot of similarities between Varlaam and the Great Meteoron in terms of the church, the living quarters (which we didn't have access to), the kitchen and an open yard at the entrance to the church. Views from both were phenomenal because they tower over the other monasteries. and provide stunning views of the landscape.
The final monastery we visited is not a monastery (for male monks) but a convent (for female monks). Only 2 of the 6 monasteries in Meteora are convents: Roussanou and St Stephens. There are two entrances to Roussanou - one from above and another from below. Our guide had the driver drop us off at the higher entrance and asked him to drive around and pick us up from the lower entrance, so we didn't have to do any climbing. The path down to Roussanou wound through a forest so there was a lot of greenery and the temperature was also a bit cooler in the shade. Roussanou is a much smaller place and it didn't take us very long to explore it with our guide's assistance. After we were done, we climbed down further to the lower parking lot where our driver was waiting. We bid farewell to our guide Catherine and boarded our van with Dmitri, the driver. He took us to the same observation deck / viewpoint that we had gone to on the previous evening. The weather was much brighter and clearer and there was hardly a crowd. We took advantage by snapping a few more pics all around and after that, we were ready to go back to the hotel. Dmitri asked us if we would be interested in going to the other monasteries but we politely declined because we felt that it would be too much of a good thing and we could risk ending up getting bored.
When we reached the hotel, we directly got into the car (because we'd already checked out in the morning) and started making our way to our next port of call, Thessaloniki. But, on the way, we planned to stop at a monastery on the slope of Mt Olympus (home of the ancient Greek gods). The name of the monastery is New Holy Monastery of Saint Dionysios of Olympus. We had to exit the highway at a small place called Litochoro and go up a winding road to the monastery. We followed the route recommended by Google Maps but when we got there, all we could see was a group of buildings that did not really look like a monastery. Perhaps there was a mistake in the destination I used in Google Maps or this was unlike any other monastery we'd visited on this trip. Either way, we didn't feel the urge to go looking for the real one, if it did exist. Google Maps can behave a bit flakily when we are in remote places with winding roads. We'd experienced this already in the narrow alleys of Athens and we would experience more of it in Thessaloniki and Santorini. By then, we were also feeling hungry and remembered that we had some pizza / garlic bread leftovers from the previous evening, so we stopped at an empty clearing by the roadside just outside the "monastery" we'd visited and had lunch.
After lunch, we decided to press on and complete the 90-odd minute drive to Thessaloniki. This proved to be an easy drive on a mostly empty highway with Bollywood music playing via Spotify, except for the last tollgate before Thessaloniki which seemed to be backed up a really long way and was moving very slowly. There were several lanes open at the toll booths so we weren't sure about the reason for the backup, By a weird coincidence, just when we arrived at the toll booth and we had to pay the toll, the lady said that they were opening up all lanes to be toll-free, so we could just breeze through.
When we reached our hotel (Electra Palace), we asked the doorman where the nearest parking garage was and he gave us a small map with directions. Even armed with the map and the verbal directions, we still got lost and had to go a long way to reach the parking garage. We paid in advance for one day and made our way back to the hotel. The hotel is located in the center of the downtown area near a place called Aristotle Square. We were "upgraded" to a hotel with a side view of the sea. The view wasn't great but we had a balcony we could sit in and feel the fresh (and hot) air. Anyway, since there was still some light outside, we decided to walk around the busy shopping/commercial area that we were in. We passed by a fully vegan restaurant (called Roots) that our Google research had completely missed. We thought of having dinner there but we weren't hungry enough for a full meal. What we were looking for was more of a snack-ish meal. We couldn't find anything we liked so we got some sorbet and went back to the room.
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