Out of Greece (with frantic sightseeing)

Hello everyone. It’s been a while between posts so this will be a monster. He we go…

(Left Santorini and spent 3 days in Ios… locally known as a party island. Since the most cultural thing I did there was eat a pottle of yogurt I’m parenthesising it and moving on. You didn’t miss
much.)

We returned to Athens and visited the Acropolis. It was more impressive from the bottom of the hill than the top, maybe because of all the scaffolding, but was still good times. It was strange actually to be there since we’ve been seeing pictuers and hearing about it our whole lives. Awesome. He is another of the buildings at the top, not the Parthenon.

And here we are:
Next day headed up to Delphi. Like the Acropolis, I really can’t do justice to it with words and pictures. Being there, it was easy to see how the ancient Greeks believed it to be the centre of the world. Delphi:

Then we spent the next two days at Meteora. This was the most amazing place in all Greece for me, which means it was seriously amazing. It is a series of high cliffs rising straight out of nowhere. This is incredible to see in itself, but on top there are monastaries! Some have been there for about 1000 years. Monks must’ve been hard men back in the day since the first ones had to free climb up there with the materials on their backs. A good way to get away from the rest of us sinners.
So that’s it. We are out of Greece after 7 amazing weeks. Hiking Crete was the big thing obviously, walking nearly 400km, climbing mountains, getting lost, meeting lots of incredibly friendly and helpful locals, much bromantacism, etc, etc. I could write all day and still say nothing so I’m giving up. I’ll leave it at this: go to Greece.

Santorini

Since we walked our ~400km faster than expected, we have some days to spare in Greece before Cam flies out. And what better place to pass them than here, in Santorini? This is a much smaller Greek island a bit north of Crete and is dripping with quintessentialism. Quintessential whitewashed houses with quintessential donkeys to take you up the top of the quintessential cliffs to see them. Quintessential day trips to see the quintessential volcano which formed the island. Quintessential hot pools to swim in. Quintessential perfect sunsets. A real quintessential tourist trap. We’ve loved it. It is beautiful and like nowhere else in the world. I’ll have to let the pictures do the talking, quite inadequately.

I like watching other tourists (but have no illusions that I’m any different to them). We’ve started to call this meta-tourism. Here you can see a quintessential group of tourists taking quintessential photos of the quintessential sunset.

Crete Hike 4: Sougia -> Finish!

A sunset over the sea. It was a big moment for us to see this; sun setting over the sea meant that we couldn’t walk any further westwards: we’d finished the trek! Our last couple of days were along the coast where the White Mountains drop into the sea. It was beautiful, like the rest of the island. I won’t try and summarise the whole trip now, but suffice to say it was awesome… I’ll try and write more later.

Here are the others in one of the gorges near the end. We didn’t get to walk the Samaria gorge, which is the most famous in Crete but saw a bunch of others and are happy to leave that as an excuse to return one day.

Crete Hike 3: Spili -> Sougia

We’re almost at the end now! Only 2 days’ walking to go. From Rethymno we bussed back to Spili then walked a penitential 45km that day to atone for our 4 day bender. That is a long way to walk up and down mountains, in case you didn’t realise. But it was fun. We stumbled into a random village where the old ladies wouldn’t let us leave without eating their apples and cookies and drinking their raki. Life isn’t all bad Continued on into the foothills of the White Mountains but couldn’t get through them because of bad weather so have had to take the coastal route instead.

We went to a museum of The Battle of Crete en route which had an amazing collection of war relics and a director who loved us being New Zealanders. So much so that we had trouble escaping after 4 shots of his cinnamon raki each… I think he would’ve kept pouring all afternoon. Despite eventually losing it seems that the old NZ soldiers acquitted themselves well here.
White mountains:
Crete’s south coast. That’s the Libyan Sea.

Rethymno and around

Hi everyone,

From Spili we bussed into the nearest city, Rethymno, for another break. We had a brilliant time there partying in the hostel and getting a lot of kudos from the other tourists that we’d walked there from the other end of the island – almost 200km by then I guestimate. Rethymno was a cool city with old Venitian and Ottoman stuff and we also investigated the local yoof scene by checking out a basketball game (and perhaps one or two of the bars). All in the name of cultural tourism, of course.

May 20 was the anniversary of (the start of) The Battle of Crete. This was a short but intense battle in WWII when Crete was won by the Germans from it’s NZ, Oz, Greek and British defenders. We’ve all read a bit about it by now so hired a FIAT Panda – basically a ride-on lawnmower with more doors – and drove around some of the historical sites. We saw the Preveli Monastary where a lot of escapees / evadees were sheltered and evacuated from. There’s a monument there now and it’s a surreal and sad place to visit. We also checked out Maleme airfield where much of the important action took place, and visited the German cemetery which is there now.

Here’s us, the Panda, and a tri-five. Amazing what stupid things you think are funny when you spend all your time with the same people eh?

Memorial at Preveli:
And part of Venitian fort in Rethymno: