Annie's Adventures

As the last vestiges of sunlight fell upon the monasteries of Meteora, perched perilously high atop ancient pillars of rock, it was one of those existential, ethereal ‘Gap Yah’-type moments – or, at least, it would have been had I not been fearing for my life. Sitting so close to the edge of the 1000ft high sandstone pinnacle, I knew that it wasn’t just the beauty of the sunset making my heart race.
All that was missing was Roger Moore’s Bond daringly scaling the side of the towering cliffs; instead, I got to witness a couple of equally fearless Greek Orthodox monks ziplining across a chasm in a basket. Though I had scorned and, indeed, laughed at the method these Action Man Monks employed to reach the more inaccessible monasteries, after the effort it took to get up the mountain and stairs, I only wished that I had donned a cassock and taken the shortcut myself; clearly, overindulgence in the traditional Greek delicacies of the town below had not paid off (I still rue the day that I discovered baklava).
Once the scene of the Bond movie ‘For Your Eyes Only,’ Meteora was, for me, almost the scene of an impromptu feminist rant when, at the entrance to the imposing Grand Meteoron Monastery, women were handed a divinely hideous wraparound skirt. The only thing that stopped me in my tracks (mostly because I was laughing too hard) was the sight of the male visitors in their high-waisted trousers, for everyone's eyes to see!
Though the serene environment was a far cry from the bustle of Athens, traffic levels were similar; the cacophony of different car engines and blaring horns were, however, swapped for the incessant bleating of what seemed like the entire global population of mountain goats which formed a roadblock stretching halfway down the mountainside.
Though my visit was certainly a unique opportunity and becoming a witness to the majesty of nature in seeing the sun set over the spectacular valley was quite incomparable to anything I had experienced on my travels in Greece (although seeing a girl project a majestic arc of vomit at least 3 metres on the party island Mykonos came a close second) it was only as I stood up to leave in the gloom of the impending dusk that Meteora had its greatest impact on me: I learnt that whilst lathering one’s feet in bug spray may be highly effective in warding off mosquitos, side effects may include slippery flip flops, bringing near an untimely death from falling off a cliff, James Bond-style. It was a close shave.