lukebuehler.com About the life of a pilgrim

To the Holy Mountain

After a lot of anticipation my dad arrived in Thessaloniki, quickly we found a hotel to spend the night and decided to stay for two so we would have some time to talk. After a nice day exploring the amazingly European city Thessaloniki and realizing that the two million people living there are ahead of us Siwss in many ways we started our journey towards Athos. Immediately we plunged into a colorful adventure. To leave a big city by foot is not that easy, most city planers probably never thought, "Hey how should the pedestrians leave the town?". After all we found the way out, after a few hours of walking we decided to take the bus for a bit, but first we strengthened ourselves with a juicy meat sandwich along the street. Shortly after we've entered the bus an elderly lady collapsed in front of my dad, we could catch her just in time before she would fall horribly. She just lay on the ground for a few minutes totally passed out, in the common panic everyone kept telling us what to do in Greek without being willing to take action themselves. After we finally got to the coast where there were no more industrial buildings we continued hiking. As the night fell we were only a few kilometers away of our targeted town to sleep. To increase our safety we packed out our lamps so cars would see us better and as we were standing on a drive way to a house a car pulled in. The guy was curious what we were doing and we told him that we wanted to walk to Athos. Immediately he responded that we cannot find a place to sleep in the next town and that the way we tried to go was not good, for we planned to hike along the coast instead of taking the main road more inland. Kindly he took us in, his wife quickly prepared something for us to eat an then they found us a hotel for the night drove us there. An interesting coincidence was that his son is a monk on Athos in a monastery that I wanted to visit most and I actually stayed there twice for one night.

So after our little detour we hiked along he main road, sometimes talking, sometimes each pondering his own thoughts. There is much pondering going on in a pilgrim, you know, the feet just walk by itself and the thoughts wonder of to the hidden places where the busy man can never go. The furthest my thoughts wander when my body is still fresh in the morning and the freedom is almost physically touchable. But I must admit that wondering in thought is not always helpful because it can distract from the essentials. The essentials are the inner peace and freedom not outer and the ideas from far can easily disturb the mind by fantasies leading the mind astray.

Anyhow, we walked into the night and decided to hitch hike for a while so we would get to the port town in time to take our ferry. But no one took us strangers so we stood out in the cold for two hours until a bus came that brought us to our destination: Ouranopoli, the port going to the independent province of Athos which cannot be reached by foot or car. We took a little pension for two nights and waited eagerly for our departure to the holy mountain.