Safe Return Doubtful

I awoke just after 7:30. Had I been dreaming? I thought I had heard a rhythmic hand clapping. Roja had done a double-take also. Then, just as I put it to the back of my mind and dozed, there it was again. No mistake this time. I sat up and peered outside the window. It was the old Abbot from the monastery. He had brought coffee.

We chatted. He had enough English, just, that we could converse.

He was 87, and had sole charge of the monastery for the winter. In the summer, the high season, he had an assistant. Yesterday I had seen a coach party of 40 arrive to visit, but this was rare at this time of year he told me.

He said I was welcome to stay. I felt bad that I hadn’t asked his permission in the first place. He wore one of the most magnificent beards I have seen. I complimented him on it, to which he replied that he couldn’t remember a time without it, or ever trimming it. Then he returned to his chopping his firewood.

It had rained heavily most of the night, and was still doing so, thundery showers. It was another of those nights, that when leaving the van to use nature’s bathroom in the early hours the whole sky was lit up with lightning, without a break it seemed.

The rain did as it was predicted, and lessened mid-morning, ceasing all together just after 11. My reading, Guy Endore’s classic, A Werewolf In Paris, came to a natural break, so Roja and I headed out for a circuit of the village.

Such perambulations, unplanned village orbitals, I take on occasionally, and they are always rewarding; usually on rainy days like this, when any further traipse would seem audacious; in the mountains the thunder still rumbled, it was on intermission and planned to return.

It wasn’t long before Roja picked up a friend, a bitch called Ciara I soon found out, and she stayed with us throughout. I thought mistakenly, that she was the dog of two guys renovating a property, but it turned out the whole handful of people I met knew her also.

We took respite at the cafe. The only one open at the moment, and the place where I had had a couple of beers last night. We were made welcome, or rather Roja was. He has soon become a favourite amongst the locals and with the owner. The owner told me that it was a special day, one for annual celebration. The second of the waterfalls had returned overnight, having lay dormant since May (the second and fourth photos..). It usually returns a month or so earlier. The locals refer to the pair as being God’s tears; when only the left chutes the village below is sad, almost as if in pain, when two flow, there is happiness. It certainly seemed like that this morning. Pretty much everyone we passed gave us a rousing greeting. Sat outside the cafe in the village square I was soon chatting to a visiting family, with young children, from Patras, staying at the Mountain Resort. The place looks particularly welcoming on a cold autumnal morning like today, and they told me, was half price for the weekend, 50 euros a night for a family room.

I had always planned a lazy day, so was back at the van at the monastery for mid-afternoon, to watch some sport and catch up on some admin.

Just as the light faded, the old Abbot brought cake. We sat and chatted again, this time inside the van; he with the vast monastery and its associated buildings to live in and take care of himself, and me with just my 6 square metres. We were so different in so many ways. He, a man of God, and deeply spiritual, me, a man of the mountains, of secularity. And yet we found common ground to chat about; the simple solitary life, and sense of purpose. I think he was quite envious of the van, though not so much that he wanted to stay to watch Leicester Harlequins.