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My parents and brother have been to Crete a few years back. They told us about it, commenting that the food was boring and the whole island
was relatively unspectacular, including its archeological apogee, Knossos. The time, however, was not sunk, as they said, because they did end up taking a detour to
Santorin, which they said was beautiful: great vista, great food, great places to stay.
Despite the mixed review, this idea struck us as good as any. After all, our weekends together in our apartment are typically nothing short of amazing, so we couldn't imagine how doing a road trip anywhere the weather is nice could be any worse.
Actually, the weather was the only thing we were worried about: Supposedly in the middle of summer Crete can get really really hot. Still, it's an island, and it follows that beaches should be abundant.
A month before the two weeks planned, it occurred to me to reserve flight tickets. Unfortunately tickets in a price range on the safe side of financial ruin were no longer available for this time. I had to book a flight to Athens, followed by a ferry ride to Herakleion, the capital of Crete. I have already been to Athens in the summer, and have remembered it as hellishly hot and generally unpleasant. Still, Ildiko has not seen the Acropolis yet, a condition she was eager to set right, which made the city a welcome target of opportunity in the end. Fortunately I did get two places on a direct flight from Herakleion to Zurich to come back.
Despite some bad memories from last summer involving spending a night in a mosquito infested parking lot in the company of two stray kittens and an enormous bullfrog, we again decided to try to 'rough it' for at least part of the trip. Perhaps we are deriving a romance bonus from inconveniencing ourselves -- given that our decision to periodically forfeit decent accommodations did not even have significant monetary benefit, I can't explain these bouts of masochism in any other way.
We planned to go camping for parts of our time in Crete, and I bought sleeping bags, mats, and even little pillows at Ildiko's request (no kidding!) in preparation. I borrowed an old tent from my father, which we of course forgot to take along: Packing our backpacks the night before was an exhausting affair, and we only slept two hours before having to make our way to the airport.
Athens' underground public transportation system surprised us in being perhaps the nicest and cleanest in the world, at least from what I have seen so far. I understand it has been put in place for their recent Olympic games. Above ground, Athens was hot, though nowhere near the 42 degree extreme I have remembered from my previous trip. We stayed at a small hotel not far from the agora. We basically saw the acropolis and surroundings, as well as the national museum. In the Greek agora Ildiko found a tiny but beautiful pottery fragment with a glaze pattern we identified to have been used in the 5th century BC!
A nice coincidence was a chance encounter with a wonderful little Toulouse Lautrec exhibit. He is probably my favorite artist, and we have missed his works at the Paris Musee d'Orsay during our engagement trip over new year's, as it was temporarily on loan to other galleries. The Athens exhibit was a collection of prints from a private collection, quite thorough and well presented.
On the evening of the second day, we made our way to Piraeus port, where we had deck tickets on a night-ferry to Crete. I always wanted to try sleeping on the deck of a big boat, and it ended up being just as refreshing as I expected! Arriving in Herakleion, we got to the last bit of the pre-planned portion of the trip: Two nights reserved in a local hotel.
During this time we took a trip out to Knossos, which was indeed a bit smaller of a site than I had imagined, with all the actual artifacts off-site in the Herakleion archeological museum that we also checked out.
Then we rented a car for five days at a local agency -- given my experience with commanding four wheeled vehicles still being sporadic at best, and with traffic on the island's small cities best characterized as 'crazy', I went for an automatic. I am almost used to getting ripped off with automatic rentals, but the problem of the Hyundai we got was unprecedented as far as I was concerned: It guzzled almost ten liters per 100 km (30 MPG) and uphill acceleration was probably competitive with an ox drawn cart. I am not sure how automatic transmissions work, but I wonder if it is possible for the torque converter clutches they use to get worn out in some way. Anyway, the car did get us from point A to point B safely, and we ended up extending its lease to the remainder of our stay, albeit after negotiating for a significantly lower daily rate given the inappropriate fuel expense.
We drove west from Herakleion along the northern coast, checking out the cities of Rethimnon and Chania, where we camped for two nights in a tent we got in Athens. Despite some nice diversions like a glass bottomed boat trip (we listened to anecdotes of the chipper captain -- for example he remarked that sea urchins had "food inside" -- and saw undersea mud in different places in and around the harbor), the best part of these towns was the ice cream: My parents only saw this northern part of Crete and understandably returned somewhat underwhelmed.
From there we went south -- all the way. On arriving in Paleochora we went down to the beach right away! The beaches up north were dirty and unspectacular, so this was our first opportunity to finally go swimming. Only late in the evening did we start looking for a place to stay overnight -- we came across a villa off the beach road that advertised accommodations via a shoddy little roadside sign. It can't be anything but a big stroke of luck that we chose to investigate -- the place was run by an elderly couple, and we got a very nice room directly on the seashore for something like 35 euros a night. There was hardly anyone else staying there. Initially we only planned to stay a couple of nights, as we planned to see the southeastern part of the island as well as Santorin. But the days kept rolling by, as we spent them on the beach, shopping at local grocery stores for simple but good foods, having dinner at different taverns in Paleochora, or just hanging out on the seaside balcony of our room, painting aquarelles. We kept extending and extending, one day at a time, since we could not conceive having a better time anywhere else in the world.
The only things to interrupt this pleasant monotony were three longer day trips we went on while we stayed there. The first was to Elafonisi, a sand islet off the south western corner of the island, separated from the main land by only knee deep water. A waiter in a Herakleion restaurant told us about it -- he believed it to be the most beautiful place in Crete! While it is hiking distance from where we were staying, there is no paved road going there directly, so we had to take a detour. We ended up going all the way to Chania again to pick up my passport, which I had foolishly left at the campground admin office days before. Elafonisi is indeed a beach paradise with few tourists and an amazing pinkish sand of seashell debris. I wish we could have stayed longer.
The second day trip was to Souglia: This time we went east, up across the mountains. Before reaching Souglia we stopped by some abandoned archeological sites where we again found a bunch of pottery fragments, though nowhere near as nice as in Athens. We had lunch in Souglia, and then decided to try a hiking trip recommended by our guide book as "entry level". It was to Lissos, location of several archeological sites at the far side of a mountain plateau. It took us three hours all in all, if I remember correctly, but we got very exhausted on the way back. The mountain was steep and the weather unforgivingly hot. At the end we were a bit panicky that we would not get back by sunset, but in the end we just about made it. It was quite a downer to then reealize that we still had a very long drive across the now dark mountains ahead of us to get back to Paleochora!
Our last trip was to a cave. Its only claim to fame was that two hermits who took up residence there died in it for unknown reasons; their bones supposedly still remain there. It was up in the mountains and even driving up the dirt roads as far as the car could go was quite a challenge. From there we walked. Finally, at the mouth of the cave, we saw iron ladders descending almost vertically into darkness, as if into a well. Doves infested the walls with their nesting places. We went down one flight of ladders before realizing that our single small flashlight did not provide us with enough courage to venture deeper. The thought that there was likely no intelligent life apart from the two of us for miles did not add any comfort. So we turned back. It is interesting to note that I only found one other blogger on the web mention visiting the cave, and he also turned back at the mouth of it: http://delboy85.tripod.com/crete/id21.html
With the cave trip our time in Crete also came to an end: On the final weekend we returned the car to the Herakleion rental, and flew back directly to Zurich the next day.
Hover your mouse over the photos to see the descriptions!
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