Blogs from Sougia, Chania, Crete, Greece, Europe

We're up at 5am for our long awaited day of hiking through the Agia Irini Gorge. I think that maybe it’s only me that the “long awaited” bit applies to; I suspect “long dreaded” may be more Issy’s take on the subject. We are picked up just before 6am, and we join a busload full of fellow hikers for the long drive up into the White Mountains where our hike will start. We originally considered hiking the 16 km long Samaria Gorge, which is apparently the longest gorge in Europe, before deciding that the Agia Irini, at a paltry 7.5 km, was a bit more our style. We assume that everyone else on the bus is also a fellow Agia Irini hiker, but we soon discover that it is only us and one other couple who ... read more

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Worth the Wander After the last entry, you may be wondering what possessed us to go creeping along the winding, collapsing mountain roads of Crete. Brother Mark and I were looking for a small beach town on the Southwest coast called Sougia because it was the closest thing we could identify near Lissos. Lissos is an ancient site that's played host to a number of civilizations. The odd thing about Lissos is that, while it's marked on lots of maps (usually with a cartoon symbol that's supposed to suggest ancient ruins), there's almost no information about it anywhere and there's no road to it. That's going to peak my interest; but how to get there? We had a plan for trekking across Crete. Before you point out that Ernest Shackleton had a plan for trekking across ... read more