2 Oct: Transit to Kalabaka

We woke up early today to catch the bus to Kalabaka. No disrespect to my missus but this shot kinda reminds you of that scene in The Ring where Sadako was combing her hair huh?

This is our hotel room. The balcony door is stuck so we can only look at Mt Olympus through the glass door. Rather than lamenting about it, you can say that the hotel room is 'more secure'.

It was early in the morning and the sleepy little town of Litochoro looked the part.

Seems like the timing was not exactly accurate. So we had to wait for the bus. Shuyi wandered off to harass the cats she saw the day before.

She found the cat's lair which doubled as advertisement for the taxi.

The cat wasn't far away.

do you really think you can hide from me? hmm?!

At this point, we remembered that we have forgotten about Frank! We wanted to do an Amélie for this trip. So we did a shot of Frank WITH Mt Olympus rather than ON Mt Olympus. Don't sweat the details ok?

I don't really wanna be here :O(

We took the bus which bout us to the train station. The difficult thing about planning for a Greece trip is the lack of information. The only ones you get are the bus and train schedule from Athens. From point A to others, you can find out. Other than that no information. There is also not much information on where the train or bus station is, especially for small towns like Litochoro. I skyped to the train station for information but the language barrier proved to hard to overcome. There is no email options either.

When we reached, I managed to get a ticket but there was no map of the rail system, the ticket operator (the most useless personnel ever) was not able to tell me if it is a direct train or if we need to change trains. Not even which direction we should be taking. They should have just replaced her with a machine. Oh wait. The machine would be much more expensive that her...

Anyway, we have a good 3 hours to wait. So we took out the laptop and watched Shuyi's favourite CSI series. I initially thought that we can head to Delphi, do a couple hours of it and still be in time to head to Kalabaka. Wishful thinking on my part. We'll have to do Delphi as a day trip from Athens.

CSI Las Vegas baby!

Finally it was time for our train. I asked many people for directions and concluded that the next train should be our train.

There were a bunch of army personnel on the platform and one of them spoke good english. He assured me that this is the correct direction and informed me that I would need to change trains along the way.

good job.

let's go already!

We finally got on the train and things seems to be going smoothly when the train stopped. The announcements were made in Greek (which was Greek to me) but a lot of people started getting off the train to wait. It was a good hour before we started off again.

Here is Frank on the train.

This is George, our hero of the day. He showed us how to get to Kalabaka. He looked like a tough G.I. Joe sergeant but was gentle and helpful.

Finally we reached Kalabaka.

end of the line, Kalabaka

Once we hit the ground, I immediately set up a task force to solve the question 'where is the hotel?'.

The task force consisted of a bunch of misfits. Little Johnny over there was acting like a diva. Eventually we came to a consensus.

走直转右.

Time to get a 2nd opinion.

走直转右?
yea. 走直转右.

When we were told that Kastraki (supposed to be a part of Kalabaka, where our hotel's at) was 2 km away, we thought that they were exaggerating the distance. But it seems that Greeks are good at gauging distance as we kept walking,

and walking,

I did some cool Michael Jackson moves at the mechanic and he countered me with his Saturday Night Fever moves.

owwww!

and walking,

and climbing,

and climbing,

till we finally reached the hotel. All the way while I was dragging the luggage up the slopes to the hotel, my helpful wife was happy to stay behind to take pictures of me.

We settled into the hotel and it would appear that we were their only customer. Down season indeed! October is a good time to go to Greece as summer holidays is over and gone are the crowds. The prices of hotels goes down along with it. The weather is nice and cooling as well. Just a light jacket will do the trick. The drawback is that it starts getting windy. Real windy. So much so that sometimes ferry will be canceled due to the strong winds. The wind would affect us adversely later on in the trip as well (more on that later).

The time was just right for dinner. On the way to the hotel, I saw a tavern with a huge roasting pit. It looked kinda old and homely as well.

'this will be dinner' i pointed to shuyi then.

is it a restaurant or a tavern?

The fire has already started and the racks of meat were glistening over the charcoal.

The burning logs of wood were crushed and spread under the kebabs.

The soaring rocks of Meteora can be seen everywhere in Kastraki.

The food came.

This is tazaki which is yoghurt with garlic and cucumber. It is served cold and is pretty good as an appetizer or as a spread for the bread.

Next came the traditional meatballs in tomato sauce. Couldn't say that it was fantastic but it wasn't bad.

Kebab.

The meal was pretty decent. What I liked about the meal were the rustic cut fries. I love it when it's cut like that.

Shuyi had a craving for tea so we ordered a cup and she savored every last drop of it. As in ask for refill and then squeezing out the last drop from the teabag kinda savoring. It rained a bit earlier on so it was a cold night. The hot tea really hit the spot.

kimochii~

Tomorrow, we visit Meteora.