Just Another 3 day Weekend, in Greece

What I can say except that a great bonus of being located in Kosovo is that fact that it is relatively easy to get out. To celebrate the Muslim holiday of Eid, everyone here had 3 days to scatter to any of the great regional destinations. From the international crew I am hanging with, the travel menu options for this past weekend included your choice of a spa visit to Montenegro, shopping in Bulgaria, clubbing in northern Greece or the combination package, which I put together with my now very close friends from Australia, Belgium and Spain. What better way to make some good friends (or bitter enemies) than to spend 4 days together in a car driving over 1200 km?

Friday night we bolted out of Pristina with no clear agenda in mind other than making it to Thessaloniki Greece which should have been a mere 4 hour drive except for the fact that I took the crew to one of my sheep client's restaurant and he served is up a killer lamb diner with all the traditional fixins. Fortunately the drive was uneventful except for the fact that when we passed through customs I was planning on telling my driving friend that the Greek translation for 'Have a good night' was 'I am a tree'. Guess you had to have been there since we were all laughing hysterically. I'll be sure to save that one for the next roadtrip... Our very late arrival put us in at around 2am with only the energy to find a VERY basic Class D hotel (communal bath) where we all fit in one room with single beds for under $50 euros. Except for the tossing and turning of my 6ft 1 friend unable to fit in the bed next to me and the Greek shouting match in the lobby of the hotel at 4am, it was a well earned sleep.

Our first day out was rainy and chilled but we enjoyed being in a European city with western shops everywhere, proper streets and the smell of ocean air. A short hike took us to White Tower which was almost as exciting as the Starbucks Coffee located diagonally across the street (Gosh you would think I have been out in the bush for a year). Not sensing the true adventure we were aiming for we all decided to head inland towards Mount Olympus in hope of better weather and a chance to hike around Greece's tallest mountain.

Less than two hours later we were selecting which post-card to purchase of the beautiful mountain that was sitting right in front of us veiled by the rolling fog and steady rain. No matter. A good reason to find a local eatery and dive into a sampling of Greek salads and perfectly cooked lamb. It was a no brainer to decide to head to the highlight of our adventure: Meteora. For those 'Bond' fans, one of these mountain-perched monasteries was featured in 'For Your Eyes Only'. Ironically I had been here before as a poor post-college backpacker in 1993, but all I could remember was that on that day too, it was cold rainy and too much fog to actually see the monasteries. This time the weather was going to cooperate since the skies cleared as we approached this magical town the following days full hike up and into 4 of the 6 still open to the public. It is hard to describe the awe one feels in not only how these beautiful sacred places were created but also the lightness of being that high up in the air with the villages far far below. The pictures tell the tale best...

Well almost. See after we had our calm adventure of basically walking up to and from the monasteries like tourists, we decided to try and find a small dotted-line trail from our map that was supposed to lead us back to the town where we were staying. As it turned out, the guide book was over 3 years old and at best these trails were goat tracks (literally). The first set of trails I was able to navigate my crew to without too much difficulty (except one nice fall and turning the corner to be scared to death by a turtle). The next set proved to be much more allusive. We tried one set of trails 3 times before giving up to return back to the road. Now our one other hope was a more direct trail which we clearly saw marked and decided to take. Well, for some reason it went clearly up one of the mountain passes to a 'saddle', but then seemed to fad into a very faint trail, which we took since it clearly headed into the original valley we had hiked up from. So deductive reasoning would suggest just going down right? Well, that is exactly what we did and for the next hour we scrambled down the side of a mountain with me using every keen sense of wilderness training I learned from Boy Scouts decades again. I was having to look in the dried creek beds to find the outline of a shoe print, notice broken branches where people had passed before, strips of rock where the moss had been removed by peoples' shoes and tree branches whose bark had been worn from peoples' hands using them as a guide towards their next step. It was pretty fun for awhile until I started to think it was all in my head and we were completely 'buggered' as Natacha would say. Eventually we all stumbled out of the dense forest onto our original trail completely covered with scratches, thorns, aching muscles yet a very keen sense of accomplishment and a craving for an ice cold beer to celebrate.

Our final day involved 9 hours of driving but included a fantastic stop off at Macedonia's Lake Ohrid, which I will certainly plan on hitting again soon since it is only 4 hours from Pristina. See for yourself. Just a perfectly normal, average, 3 day weekend:-)