Lip service – Day 27

I didn’t worry too much until I realised that the bottom of the cistern was only resting on the toilet bowl and not attached to that either! 

Result? Very wet feet and a flooded bathroom floor.

Pissed off, I threw a towel at it and slammed the door. 

In the morning it had mostly dried out so I was very careful not to flush it again until all ablutions had been completed. I wasn’t going to be hopping around like Jeremy Fisher.

Yesterday afternoon, another cringe-worthy experience.  Testing my inner stoic.

The windy days had given me chapped lips so I added lip balm to my mental shopping list. 

The pharmacy had some but it was 10 euros. I couldn’t find any in the mini market so I asked the girl at the checkout using Google translate. She reached above her counter and showed me some. She said, ‘We only have this and it is Cola,’ making to put it back. I gestured that I would  buy it. ‘You still want it?’ she said. I nodded and she looked at me dubiously as she bagged it. 

I put it on in the street. Silly girl I thought to myself that’s Cherry not Cola. But on returning to my room I looked at myself in the mirror to discover I had bright pink lips. She hadn’t said cola she had said coloured! Not so silly after all.

All day long I’d been applying this stuff and it had been working well. I’d been smiling at waitresses and chatting to people in the street made up like Danny la Rue. One man in the supermarket had goggled at me.

Next day. Out on the road at seven 

Once inland the clouds disappeared.  We travelled along A roads. But you could see bits and pieces of the new highway in the making.  A bridge to nowhere. A graded slope.

Then police had blocked the highway. Out of a dusty side road appeared big military trucks with serious-looking rocket launchers. Sabre rattling from Turkey was being ramped up. More hard man politics. The news was full of it. I hadn’t really watched TV but you could see it in the cafes and bars.

This was an empty landscape of domed hills. A quarry here, a solar farm there but lonely. Good riding country. I spotted a shepherd, leading his horse with its wooden saddle.

 

After a couple of hours of bowling along mostly empty roads we came to the start of the Meteoran rock formations. Like something out of a John Ford movie.

10 million years ago, the tops of those rocks had been the bed of an inland sea.

According to Lonely Planet, ‘By the dawn of civilisation the rocks had eroded into fantastic shapes and caves, which in the 11th century were inhabited by hermit monks. Eventually 24 monasteries were built on these peaks, six of which are open to visitors.’

The name Meteora means suspended in the air. These monasteries are the closest thing to their Tibetan equivalent as you can get. The day hot under a Swiss chalet sky.

Meteora. It’s a kind of ridiculous place really. Heavily curated and with a tour bus herding instinct. I thought the geography looked a lot more interesting than the monasteries. But visited two of them anyway.

Originally they were reached via ladders made of olive wood  that could be rolled up. And later windlass and pulleys allowed pilgrims to be pulled up in nets. 

James Bond had climbed one of these in For Your Eyes Only. Roger Moore hand over hand up a rope in a polo necked sweater and shoulder holster. 

Oooh Jemms…! 

The rock face was sheer and wider at the top than the bottom. Joe Simpson would have lit a cigarette and turned back.

Anyway, why bother when there’s a road to the top? Well, almost. At Agios Stefanos you walk up a paved path for a kilometre to a miniature doorway and then along an open passage cut into the rock. All very Lord of the Rings. 

At the monastery itself, fit Norwegians carrying babies and elderly – but spry – American ladies with scrambling boots on their bone-thin ankles.

I thought how much G would have loved it. Just her cuppa. But any expectation of a religious experience was nullified by loud voices comparing numbers of steps gathered on Apple watches.

Down below, in the village of Kastraki, the scale felt imposing but safe. After all, it had taken 10 million years to get to this point. No boulder was about to take out the town. 

I settled down in the shade with a beer – at what turned put to be a very good restaurant- and tried to gather my thoughts. 

Then a good looking girl strode in and the two – previously chatty waiters – went into freeze frame. She marched straight to the owner, sitting like Jabba the Hut in the dark interior and made a hasty negotiation. An inclined head from him was all she needed and almost immediately a gaggle of 20 Brits arrived for lunch. 

They faffed and fussed about where to sit. Then made bad calls on what to eat. Soups and salads and bottles of water. I thought, why even bother? Their conversation evasive and lumpen.

I ordered the very fine pork chops and chatted in schoolboy Italian to my neighbouring table. A couple from just south of Venice. They were – I guessed – in their seventies, and still very much in love. She wagged fingers at him and he made her giggle back. 

Life is sweet, as they say.