Into the Gyrozone — HaffsWay Around The World

Trying to encapsulate Greece as a whole is actually kind of like eating a well-stuffed gyro: when you really dig into its rich and varied parts, it becomes nearly impossible to wrap up neatly and avoid spilling tzatziki on one of your few pairs of shorts. That being said, its rightful column needs to be on record (finally!) before it fades into ancient history.

Though we've become a bit more accustomed to culture shocks over the past months, making the leap from Abu Dhabi to Athens was jarring in the opposite way we've known prior. We welcomed the familiarity of customs, the heat index decrease from unbearable to just hot, and the arrival of Anna and Alyssa- our first visitors from home since we left New Zealand (shout out to Alyssa for being our only repeat rendezvous!).

The first major chunk of our Grecian journey began with a train ride from Athens up to the one and only Mount Olympus, in hopes of an up-close meet and greet with Zeus and friends. As someone with an interest in ancient history and mythology, I got chills looking up at it for the first time from Litochoro, the quaint seaside town that serves a springboard for the two-day trek to the top. More so than other places we've been, my passing knowledge gave me an acute awareness of the place's literally ancient significance to so many. By this point in our travels, I've used up nearly my entire arsenal of adjectives for landscapes and natural wonder, but in that respect Olympus deserves more of the same.

View of Olympus from Litochoro, which marked the start of our trek.

...And (spoiler alert!) one from the top!

The forested gorge we meandered up through on the first day boasted crystal streams, a remote monastery, and an ideal lunch oasis restaurant (which marks the end of the road and 'start' of the trek for...ahem... less serious adventurers). After a fairly steep and rocky trail consumed much of the afternoon, we finally arrived at the mountain hostel, familiarly donkey-supplied and similarly cozy. A vast majority of the 50 or so fellow trekkers were also planning to summit Mitikas (Olympus' highest of many peaks) the following day, so seemingly everyone was chowing down on heavy plates of pasta, fresh greek salad, and beer- perhaps the beginning of a theme.

Just your standard tiny mountain cave chapel.

Carbo loading at its finest, with the solar-powered mountain hostel in the background.

Early the next morning we set off on the rocky trail to Zeus' doorstep, knowing that we'd have to not only do some tactful scrambling to get there, but get all the way back down to the road as well. The views from the top were breathtaking, made all the more rewarding by the adrenaline-fueled steep ascent that was the last half hour of the 'hike'. We signed the visitor book, felt wispy clouds rush up the mountain and over us intermittently, and rejoiced with selfies and snickers bars atop the ancient world. Ultimately, we were just happy to have gotten up there before most, as the tricky, meandering climb down was made more treacherous navigating around an increasing number of individual trekkers and one tethered climbing group.

View of the final climb, perhaps even more daunting from this vantage than from the slope. As one Greek friend we met told us about summiting Olympus, "being in shape is good, but what it takes most is courage."

Anna leading the pack (that's the Aegean Sea on the horizon).

Girl power! ..Or Wild women! Or Adventurous Athenas!

Lightening the mood by channeling my inner Zeus.

After a pretty draining descent, we treated ourselves to a much-needed lunch at the restaurant conveniently located where the start of the trail meets the end of the road. I would like to blame my exhaustion for making the mistake of ordering what I thought was a bottle of beer but turned out to be a small bottle of Greek liquor (tsipouro, cousin of the more well-known ouzo). As we all know, there's nothing more thirst-quenching on a hot summer day after miles of hiking than a lukewarm carafe of pungent, anise-flavored booze. Despite my dismay, I'm not one to let perfectly good tsipouro go to waste. It was certainly not what I had envisioned as ideal post-climb refreshment, but the taste slowly grew on me, and it segued into a great afternoon all the same.

One thing we noticed early on in our Greek galavanting was how boisterously friendly so many Greeks were toward us. Multiple times along the hike other trekkers would insist on us stopping to share in some trail snacks and chit-chat. Then there was the time I sat next to a 19-year-old on the train and, after discussing everything from basketball to language idiosyncrasies to relationships, ended up with a Facebook friend out of it.

Never was this inherent welcoming spirit more obvious, though, than with our legendary taxi driver Sakis (SOCK-eese). Sakis is an exuberant ultramarathoner somewhere in his late 50s, and had originally given us a short ride from the train station to our seaside hostel the day before we set out on Olympus. An experienced Olympus-climber (Olympian?) himself, he gave us his card in the event we needed another ride. Fast forward to us sitting at the mountain cafe, full from lunch and a bit loopy from exhaustion and adult beverages- in desperate need of a ride for the remaining 8 miles. Sakis made the winding drive down a memorable event of its own, first greeting us like long lost friends ("LOWRA! WILL! AHNA! Tell me everything about your trip!"), and then dramatically regaling us with tales of Greek history in his adorably thick accent, answering our Olympus mythological questions along the way. Before we departed, he sent Anna and Laura ahead so he could privately tell me what boiled down to 'maybe one day you come back again with a little one', a fitting end cap for our interactions with the man who we decided would be the penultimate reciter of children's tales.

After saying goodbye to Olympus, we headed over to Meteora, a dual geological and cultural wonder that almost needs to be seen to be believed.

There's one monastery in an improbable location... Of the 13 total.

While we had some more amazing Greek food in Meteora, the clear star of the show was our guided hike and tour of the so-called 'floating monasteries'. Built between the 1300s and 1500s to stave off attack from vandals and Turks alike, most were only accessible via climbing ropes and ladders or by pulley-based elevator. Even more spectacularly, they are still well-maintained and in use today. Thankfully for us, they've since decided to add legitimate bridges and staircases to make them accessible to those of us who don't regularly practice free climbing.

Oh yeah, did we mention they keep skulls of deceased monks there? Well, yeah... There's a bunch of skulls. On a shelf. Totally normal.

A fine start to dinner in the shadow of the wild rock formations

After Meteora we made our way back to Athens to rendezvous with Alyssa and pay homage to the token tourist historical sites. In spite of the mobs, the Acropolis and Olympic Stadium proved especially magnificent, and the sheer number of excavated sites made for a few tiring days of walking, learning, and mandatory picture-taking. Of course, we made a point of getting a healthy amount of gyro and souvlaki eating as well.

Columns on columns on columns! (At the one and only Acropolis)

Temple of our old friend Zeus (Zay-oose, as Sakis taught us). The Acropolis looms behind it.

Turns out we can make a pretty decent meal for ourselves too!

Santorini, aka that idyllic, oft-photographed island with the blue roofs, was our final Greek destination- and it did not disappoint. Formed from heavy volcanic activity and adorned to be a visual paradise, Santorini provides everything we could ask for in a vacation destination: great food, hiking, wineries, shopping, beaches, and even some ruins. Of course, all of this also meant lots of other folks flocking to experience this as well (and a noteworthy tourist tax compared to other parts of Greece). Our greatest challenge on this island that offered so many possibilities was simply beating the heat. With temperatures that regularly approached triple digits (not to mention the sun being directly overhead), we had to plan our physical activities (read: walking) around the beginning and end of the day as much as we could. Our major exception to this rule, however, came in our long, scenic ridgeline hike to Oia (pron. EE-ya), as three hours during the day was likely to be sweltering no matter how we sliced it. Major credit goes out to Alyssa for enduring this too, as she began to get sick along the way. Fortunately, Greek salad and cold drinks on a shaded terrace cured most of our ills, and we got to snap pictures from vantages that Oia is famous for on Instagram and elsewhere.

The view from our hillside Airbnb in the middle of the sunny isle.

What a proper Greek salad is supposed to look like. Take notes, America!

View from Oia, after walking from the town on the far right of the ridge

One of many beautiful cafes on the island.

I even sniffed out the island's microbrewery, imagine that. Strangely enough, they were allowed to sell beer on site but it could not be drank on the premises... which, we were informed, did NOT include their outside stoop.

Alyssa and the widely mentioned Santorini sunset- both world famous.

Overall, very hard to beat- Greece as a whole was one of our favorite countries.

Even our final, lazy beach day provided plenty of excitement. A rental car that we weren't allowed to drive without an international driver's license, our perfectly located 'plan b' beach club with sport-courts and straight to your umbrella food service, and the rarely seen move of walking to the airport afterward. As we packed into the tiny Santorini terminal overflowing with a wide variety of summer travelers, we felt ready to move on to the next place. I cannot say whether this realization happened before we found ourselves sitting on the concourse floor drinking beers, feeling like we were just one upside down hat away from amateur panhandlers, or after- but I'd like to think all the action we crammed into our odyssey would've tired out even the mighty Zeus.