solstice @ labyrinth

a night of music-making in the chapel

stelios knows this region well, and so he invited us all to go camping next to a sweet little chapel on the hillside above the town where he was busking. we played tunes and made up stuff for a few hours. we unfortunately had neglected to buy wine, so the energy of the party was somewhat compromised without the influence of dionysos...


i played finger cymbals...



and i turned the lectern into a drum.... mary surprised herself by playing the bouzouki well... i think it was her first time ever on the instrument!



but stelios is a MASTER musician; he was generous and patient enough to play with a bunch of hippies from the north... you ROCK, stelios! (well, in a traditional cretan kind of way...)

panorama from olympus

stelios master of lyra

my friends pete and mary introduced me to a fabulous fellow: stelios the lyra-player.... here he is busking for his fellow country-men in a quaint-as-heck village (on the southeast slope of mount olympus....

food of the gods

i took chocolate to the top of mount olympus and made an offering of it to zeus et alii, because the official linnean name of chocolate is cacao theobroma = food of the gods.




my new friends mary and pete shared a bit of the offering, and later we shared several liters of wine at the Refuge.

snow fields on mount olympus

keep in mind that this is QUITE high: 2800 meters or so.... this snow has already been melting off for a few days, but there is still quite a bit left on the trail....

magic appears

i mentioned to my hiking companions that there are chamois (a.k.a. gemsen) in this area, and then they were there-- we saw them just a minute or two after we referred to them! . a few minutes later one of my buddies mentioned birds, and then several crows swooped down on us.... a bit later we were talking about the lack of butterflies, and then we noticed a pair of them.... so i chanted "world peace... happiness for all sentient beings... world peace... happiness for all sentient beings..."