After our week in Manikia Jana and Laetitia had to head off back home to the Lakes. 🙁 But Nick had booked another week of lovely accommodation for us a few hours north in the utterly gobsmacking destination, Meteora. 😀
Meteora is like a scene from the movie Avatar. Incredible towers of conglomerate rock piercing the sky. Even more incredibly many of the towers have inaccessible monasteries perched on top of them. There are only six monasteries remaining today, but once there were many more. And these days more friendly means of access, like walkways and stairs hacked in to the cliffs, have been created for tourists to explore. Back when they were conceived, 14th century, access was tough! For example, the Varlaam monastery that Ed and I visited was accessed by a series of wooden ladders over a 100m high lashed to the vertical cliff face!! If you were a monk here you didn’t want to suffer from vertigo!
The towers themselves were of course the focus for us climbers. And the conglomerate rock and the style of climbing on it is, certainly for me, utterly unique! There are virtually no features, cracks, arêtes, etc. Just a sea of tiny pebbles cemented into massive vertical expanses of cliff. Some of the pebbles are less well cemented. Of course on the classic more well travelled routes the pebbles are generally quite sound. But sooner or later every one is gonna fall off. So each and every hold has to be treated with total respect. This combined with the very bold bolting of routes, 20m runouts are not at all uncommon, leads to a level of concentration, commitment, and a little terror that ensures these climbs live long in the mind. Brilliant! Just don’t think you can climb comfortably at anything near your limit… 😉
Pillar of Dreams was for me the route of the trip. This amazing YouTube video hopefully gives a sense of the climb…
Another stand out climb was the top pitch of Eggs’ Dance after having started up the harder first three pitches of Dresden Eierschecke. Ed and I were joined on this route by Ed’s daughter, Hana. Hana is a climbing star, the previous week in Manikia she had red-pointed her first 8a!!!
We were a little unlucky with the weather. Every day saw a little rain shower. However, we did a reasonable job dodging the rain and got out to climb each day. Mid week Ed and I visited the Varlaam monastery, and on the last day we all took a walk from the Kastraki up to the Spindle and Sourloti.
As well as the venues shown above we climbed twice (Eastern Ridge and Ostria) on Doupiani, Pathfinder on The Bell, and Swiss Cheese on Bantovas.
