Northern Greece

By Deborah and Johan - We deserted the bikes for a few days. It seemed to make sense given those squiggly altitude lines all over the map between where we were and what we wanted to see! Anyway it felt pretty luxurious cruising into mountains knowing the effort it would have cost. Sunday was spent checking out the monasteries of Meteora - wow master engineers were at work here during the 14th century. The monks sought refuge from the Turkish invaders so went high indeed and to be fair you can’t see anything from the valley below. Checking out the eastern coast we decided the west coast that we were actually biking was by far the better choice. Although Mt Olympus dominated the scene revealing the home of the gods with no cloud coverage for 2 days solid which was pretty spectacular to drive around as this mountain with 52 peaks seems to rise up straight from the flat valley lands that surround it. 

Grand Meteoro monastery just a stones throw from the nunnery... I’m not saying anything but nice planning guys.

Amazing vistas






You see a lot more travelling on bikes that you’d miss in the car...  mostly road kill - I saw a snake as fat as my arm and about a metre and a half long! Oh yeah and a couple of turtles way too far from the coast to make me doubt my eyes! Definetly worth keeping an eye out for these moving “rocks”. Poor fellow was doing his best to get across quickly. 

Best of all is the abundance of wild flowers along the country roads; lots of colours.  😍 

The poppy fields are most striking. Poppies are everywhere in small bunches on berms in the country side but from time to time you come across these beautiful seas of red. 

My (Deborah) favourite moment so far on the trip... just a wee moment later it occurred to me I was maybe tiptoeing through someone’s opium field 🏃🏽‍♀️🏃🏽‍♀️

Mt Olympus showed his head. The seat of the gods according to all those God of War PlayStation games and oh yeah Greek mthyology. 

We hiked up the mountain to about half way to the top. You can hike up all the way and it’s totally doable but we didn’t plan enough time for the event so aborted the effort. You don’t get a lot of good views while on the track because the mountain is steep and you are in the trees until you get close to the top. Nevertheless it’s a beatifull area so we still enjoyed the 2 hour hike. 

Campgrounds are few and far between when you go inland. On the East Coast there are quite a lot of them but the ones we found all looked pretty shabby and most of them still closed for the season or abandoned all together (hard to tell the difference sometimes) - another reason why we like the west coast much better than the east coast. Due to the lack of camp grounds we made the call to look for a room instead. Some good deals this time of the year so for 33 Euro (only twice the price of a camp ground) we found a nice hangout on one of the large east coast beaches 

We drove back west using some country roads on the northern side of the Mountain which did give us some more spectacular views of the mountain and it’s snow covered peaks. Definetely the best side to see the mountain. 

Driving is easy in Greece. Good roads and a lot of tunnels to keep the motorways flowing well. It means you can get through the mountain ranges across the North quite quickly hopping on and off the motorways in areas where you want to have a look around. Tolls are quite reasonable too;. I think we spent approximately 15 Euros driving from west to east and back again. Some of this was on country roads though. 

On the way back to Igoumenitsa we visited Vikos Gorge just north of Ioannina. Beautiful spot; a bit freaky to walk to the view point along a 400 meter+ cliff face though; a slip up here would certainly be a once in a lifetime event. Apparently this is the deepest gorge in the world in comparison to its width. 

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