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Getting There - Aneel's Travelogue

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Four Buses to Meteora Kalambaka, Greece, Saturday, 02 January 2010 9:00pm

There was a thunderstorm overnight in Delphi. I saw the sky flash, but no actual lightning strikes. I think that's because our rooms looked out over the valley, and the clouds here seem to hug the mountains.

I had breakfast with the others, then we said our goodbyes. I returned to the hotel to pack and pass the time until my bus left. It was lightly raining over the valley.

It's a good thing that I don't mind bus travel. The first leg of today's trip (Delphi to Amphissa) was a pleasant switchback-filled trip down out of the mountains. I changed buses in Amphissa, which went smoothly. The bus to Lamia was waiting for us at the Amphissa station, and we set off with only a 5 minute break. It was still raining up in the mountains, so we were treated to a spectacular double rainbow.

My bus luck took a turn for the worse in Lamia. We arrived at around 12:30, and I found that the 12:45 bus wasn't running (I don't know why), and the next bus was scheduled to leave at 2:00. It was almost 2:45 before it actually showed up, and it turned out to have been oversold. So I spent most of the 2.5 hour trip to Trikala standing. On the plus side, that meant I had plenty of time to finish the book I was reading. We narrowly missed the 4:15 bus out of Trikala, but that route runs hourly, so I didn't have to wait too much longer.

It was dark by the time I arrived in Kalampaka, so I only caught glimpses of the Meteora that were lit. I'm looking forward to seeing them in daylight.

When there aren't a lot of tourists in a town, you keep running into the same few over and over. In Delphi, that was a guy named Jordan from Pennsylvania (thought currently living in Jerusalem). He's staying at the same guesthouse here. He and his his friend drove their rental car up yesterday. We chatted a bunch about travel and he gave me the lowdown on Meteora.