G’day folks. Welcome back to another blog on the recently renamed ‘Andy Roams’. Clearly, I need to take a trip to Rome – imagine the alliteration possible there! But today’s blog is not about Italy, rather another country known for ancient civilisation, and that is Greece. Today I am writing about one of its biggest tourist drawcards, and a place I wasn’t even aware of before I began doing research into the place and a friend said I should definitely go there.

Have you heard of the Monasteries of Meteora in Greece? They are a total of 24 monasteries built on top of this sixty million year old rock formations in an incredibly beautiful part of the country a couple of hours from the capital Athens. It’s incredibly scenic and stunning, the monasteries date back to the 14^th century and six of them are still in operation today, and people come to this part of the country to visit them.

You can visit them by getting yourself to the villages in the area and exploring. From Meteora you can find guides, but if you’re time poor you could do what I did and take a very long day tour from Athens as your starting and finishing point. And it is a long day, I think pick up was around 745 – 8am and we returned to Athens after 9pm. There is an awful lot of driving and if you wanted to do the place justice I think staying somewhere at Meteora is the go. It wouldn’t hurt to have a car too!

So the tour. Okay, so I booked this tour through ‘Get Your Guide’ whom you may have heard of before. Basically and app/website that links you to tours in all parts of the world, like Viator and there are a few others. It was $80AUD which was a fair price I guess, probably around $50USD. It was described (well the title was) as: Athens: Meteora Tour with Local Guide and Greek Lunch. It sounded a little cosy I thought, personal.

It wasn’t. It was a large bus with around 35-40 others. The drive in each direction is around FOUR hours. So that’s eight out of fourteen hours in a bus, actually more because the bus takes you from monastery to monastery. There was a short stop after a couple of hours for people to grab a snack or perhaps breakfast. And yes, there was a cavalcade of large buses so everyone stopped around the same time and there was a 20 minute wait to get food and a longish wait for the loo. MUCH longer for the female loo too! So I grabbed a roll and we were moving before id finished it. Then another stop just outside Meteora for our lunch at around 12pm or just after. It was a buffet, it was decent but I’m not sure whether it was good enough for them to include in the title of the tour.

It was not until after lunch, around 1pm, that we were joined by our tour guide on the microphone speaking to the whole bus. Some left the bus to join a different tour so not quite as many (still at least 30) on the tour from here.

But at least we were actually going to see what we came here to se. Now is a good point to explain that the weather wasn’t great on this day. I had so many perfect, sunny days in Greece, but it rain a lot and the clouds were down over these rocks and mountains quite a bit. I didn’t get the postcard shots but there was atmosphere, the real downside was that visibility was low. We abandoned a planned stop for photos on the way out because there was nothing to see.

Thankfully the first stop, which was or photos and views, was when the clouds were a little less populous and not as low. Our guide rattled off so many amazing facts through the day – and she was amazing did a great job – that my brain can’t really remember a lot. Just that the monasteries have been through a lot over the centuries. Closed down by the Ottoman Empire at one point, housing resistance and then bombed by the Germans in World War II, they’ve been through it all.

As I said, six still in operation, we visited three. I’m fairly sure we were originally to visit four, but I think we were running out of time and had to skip one.

Monastery of Great Meteoron

Finally, probably at around 2pm, we got to our first monastery, one of the first and oldest of all of them and one of the biggest too. It’s construction was completed in 1356, and it sits 415 metres above the valley floor. Yes the rocks really jut upwards, it’s incredible and unique scenery.

I can’t remember how many steps we took to get to the top but it would have been a few I guess. I coped okay on this day, I think my fitness was better than at the start of the trip but still accessing some of the monasteries is not super easy and sadly if you were wheelchair bound not possible I would say (St Stephens might be an exception there).

There’s a nice church and a small museum – most of the active monasteries which receive guests have a museum, they are all generally filled with relics and bibles and other ecclesiastical stuff. Photography is allowed in some places and not others. The views from this one are the best probably of the three because we got great views of neighbouring Monastery of Varlaam which featured in the James Bond film ‘For Your Eyes Only’ and is another of the working monasteries, but we did not visit it.

Monastery of Rousanos / Saint Barbara Nunnery

Yes, out second monastery was converted into a nunnery, and after a short bus trip we ascended 215 steps to this one, plus crossed a rather cool bridge to the smallest of the monasteries the tour took me too. Google Maps shows me amazing photos of how this is built on an almost overhanging rock. We think of all the amazing things we can do today thanks to advances in technology, but these places were built nearly 800 years ago onto rocks 400 plus metres above the valley below.

This one was small, and although out guide hinted we might be allowed to take photos inside buildings, there were nuns at the ready telling people off left, right and centre. Oh, and I should mention this one had a gift shop, and for each monastery you had to pay 5 Euro for entry, in cash.

Monastery of St Stephens

We moved on to the last monastery we would get to see, that of St Stephens. The rain had come and the clouds were lower. The good thing was there were no steps to the entrance but I still wouldn’t think wheelchairs would be easy to use here. We mostly saw a courtyard and imagined there was a great view over the far wall but it was pretty much all clouds to the visitors.

Like each monastery there were a lot of tourists, often in smaller confined spaces. It’s probably not fun for those with claustrophobia or fear of crowds. Personally this kind of environment quicker winds me up inside but with many tours every day. It may be unavoidable.

With your own transport though, stay in perhaps nearby Kastraki which receives its fair share of tourists, you could time it to come in the morning to the monasteries before the Athens busses arrive. That may be a way to avoid huge crowds, but there will be others staying in Kastraki doing that too I imagine.

So after 2 – 3 hours in and around the monasteries it was time to return to Athens. Many slept on the bus. There was another stop. We got back around 930pm I think it was which was slightly early, they forecast 2200 as the finish time.

Summing up, looks it’s a brilliant place, brilliant views and experience. But it’s another European experience shared with some many people at the same time bustling for selfie positions and the like that I can say I would NOT recommend doing it the way I did unless you really had no option. If you can give yourself two nights there – one day would be enough to see the monasteries –  then that would work out much better allowing you to access the monasteries in the morning.

I will be doing a more detailed vlog about Meteora at some point this year as well, for now I just have half a video on it mixed in with Athens. It’s a tough one really to judge. You will see tonnes of options if you Google ‘Meteora Day Trip from Athens’ and all the apps/websites will offer you a bunch of options which I am pretty sure are all practically identical. That’s travel these days I guess.

Thanks for reading today. Take care wherever you are in the world right now and… May the Journey Never End!