Meteora and Olympia

Meteora has a really amazing landscape with huge stones jutting out of the ground.  On top of several of these are monasteries and nunneries.  The buildings were built around the 14th century AD and are still in use today.  We visited 4 of the remaining 6 today, the last two are closed on Friday's. One of the monasteries was reached via about 50 steps and then a short bridge but the rest by hundreds of steps down to the bottom followed by hundreds more up again.  They all had either a gondola system, lifts and/or a hook to lift heavy objects or people who couldn't do the walk.  Many of the rooms were covered in paintings on every surface - but unfortunately photos were not allowed in those rooms.

The next day we visited one of the two monasteries that were closed.  It was worth seeing, though similar to the others.  We then set off for the 5 hour drive to Olympia - or at least we thought we did.  We have two GPS Apps on our phones, one couldn't find the right street and the other didn't provide voice instructions as we went.  We used that one initially, but after about an hour we were not happy with where we were going.  A lot of checking and double checking of the two GPS' and we decided we must have missed a turn somewhere.  Why it didn't tell us to turn around were not sure, but we swapped to the other GPS and typed in the town of Olympia rather than a street.  We were forced to back track all the way to Meteora before heading 90% of the way to Delphi and eventually to Olympia where we were able to find the hotel.  A 5 hour trip had turned into 8!  We checked in, found a restaurant for tea and after a short walk into the main street and back, went to bed very  tired.

Olympia is the sight of the Ancient Olympic games and there are remains of many of the 8th Century BC buildings.  The current Olympic torch is still lit here each four years. As well as the building remains there is the original running track - we chose not to race.  We also saw the remains of 16 statues of Zeus that had been built using the fines imposed on athletes who had been caught cheating. Their names are inscribed on the bases as deterrent to other athletes.  Unfortunately today only the bases remain.  The area was destroyed around 426 AD, firstly by a Christian Emperor - who disliked all the statues to different gods such as Zeus - and later by a couple of earthquakes.

Next to the Olympic site was a museum containing many artifacts that were found there.  Many of the objects were similar to ones we had seen in other museums but it was interesting all the same.  The size of some items still astounds me though. The sundial in the photo below was on top of many of the buildings. I was hoping for/expecting to see stuff about the history of the games,but there wasn't any of that.

After a quick lunch we started the 4 hour drive to Athens.  The first part was over a mountain on some very poor skinny roads, but the later part was on a Tollway with 130km limits.  Quite a contrast.  We made one stop along the way at the Corinth Canal.  This is a 90 metre deep trench built in the 1890's similar to the Suez and Panama Canals.  We saw one small boat come through, pity we couldn't see any big passenger ships.

We arrived in Athens a bit after 5 and had took a walk around, but more on that next time.