Day 598: Mount Athos

Couple of hours driving first up, southwards towards the town of Ouranoupoli. Our WHS for today was Mount Athos, a site that proves problematic for visitors! The site itself is a long peninsula of land with a large mountain at the end, and the coastline and flanks of the mountain are topped with a series of Orthodox monasteries. Many of them have existed for over a thousand years, and are super important to Orthodox tradition.

The problem for us is that the monasteries are basically hermit communities, and basically off-limits! Women are not allowed to enter at all, and only small numbers of men each day - even then Orthodox pilgrims are prioritised.

We knew all of this in advance of course, so our next best course of action was to do a cruise along the peninsula leaving from the closest town.

So we arrived around lunchtime, and had a delicious Greek feast on a beachfront restaurant while we waited for our departure time. Not sure if I've mentioned before, but Greek food is such an integral part of Australian culture that you forget how good it is! Gyros, souvlaki, moussaka, dolmades, tzatziki, grilled lamb, lots of fresh seafood etc. We shared a few enormous entree dishes of Greek salad, grilled eggplant topped with feta and diced tomato, grilled haloumi, and several large grilled squid. Fantastic, and not too expensive either.

The cruise itself was quite nice, under the spectacular cliffs of Mount Athos and marvelling at the monasteries although we couldn't get super close. It was way too windy out on the water to do any filming, so we did an intro/outro on the dock and I'll just do a voiceover later. Lots of great footage though.

The cruise finished around 5pm and we just grabbed a couple of bread rolls for dinner before heading to our apartment in a building nearby. Off again in the morning!Read more