39:52.54 N   20:44.53 E

 

Tue 6th July: Vikos Gorge, from Monodendri

 

In Monodendri we stayed with Panosh and his brother Leftheras, who run their family hotel, the Ladia Hotel.  They were lovely and really helpful, and (reluctantly) negotiated down from 50 euros to 30 for a night, and were openly concerned about the plight of Greece.  Their hotel is a clone of all the others that have been done up in the makeover! We have the impression that an ambitious local development agency has learned the trick of how to extract money from the EU, without regard to the sustainability of the local economy.  So in this village there are no proper shops for things like bread and toothpaste, loo paper and food.  you can buy cheap souvenirs (from India) for Euro prices, but you cant buy a bottle of milk, or a pair of walking socks, or plasters, in this hiking area!!  We dont know where the locals get their stuff.  The local people have obviously invested fortunes in developing their homes into hotels.  There are now many many beds for every available tourist.

 

All that asid, we set off  from Monodendri early and climbed downhill steeply for 45 mins.  We expected to have an easy stroll along the botttom of the gorge, but this turned out to be a vain hope.  The bottom was very narrow, extremely rocky, and we went up and down all the way.  You couldnt look at the view without falling over, and one km took an hour at one stage.  Eventually we reached the junction with the Klima Gorge, and thereafter the going got slightly easier, until we started the climb back up to the village of Vikos.  This was an ascent of 600m in full sun, straight up.  After a 5hr walk we were kn.....d!  But we did a pretty good time compared to the “official “ time so we thought we had done well.

 

The Gorge is truly fantastic, over 1km deep, less than 1km wide, with sheer rock faces each side, like a lost world.   We arrived in Vikos and went to the home/cafe of Kostas and Dora.  He had been a headmaster and she a teacher in Athens for 20 years (quite a scary bloke) and they have retired to their family home on their government pension, to make a bit of extra selling mountain tea, herbs and cold drinks.  They made us really welcome and told us lots about the area, and pointed to a dot on the skyline, apparently the refuge we are hiking to tomorrow.  interestingly, their attitude was that everything is fine and they are attracting loads of foreign visitors.

 

Our lovely host from Monodendri, Panosh, came to pick us up (a very long drive along the hairpin roads that every movie director loves) and brought us back to Monodendri  for the night, ready for our big uphill trudge tomorrow.