On the road

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We have been busy the last few days. On Wednesday we went to the Palace of Knossos. This is an ancient minoan palace. It has been reconstructed in parts by Sir Arthur Evans, an archeologist. It was very difficult to visualize what the palace looked like all those years ago. Many original items that were found at Knossos have been placed in the National Archeological Museum. Many columns and walls were reconstructed according to what Arthur Evans thought the original purpose was. It is hard to be a tourist in Greece as they do not have as many maps/signs/markers as we do in North America at tourist sites. You have to depend on your guide books or spend extra money to have a guide show you around. It was nice to see but not as impressive as I had pictured.

After the palace we drove into Heraklion to see the National Archeological Museum. They are renovating the real museum so they have moved all the 'important' pieces into another building. We paid 6 euros to go into a small room containing only about 50 artifacts. My guide book said the museum should take at least half a day to look through so this was rather disappointing. Although we did get to see many things that were found at Knossos. I especially wanted to see this statue of the Snake Goddess. For an Art History assignment a few years ago, mom and I sculptured this statue. I really wanted to see it in person, so when I saw it I asked mom to take a picture of me with the statue. A man came running over yelling at us. They have a lot of rules in the museums and they have these plain clothed guards ready to catch you doing something wrong. Usually this is taking flash photos, touching the glass or talking loudly. We found out this also includes posing with museum items. Not allowed but we got our picture before he stopped us.

We then took off for Chania. This is a port city in western Crete. The drive was 150km but it was along a beautiful stretch of highway full of flowering pink and white bushes. The coast is right beside the road as well. We passed many greek villages on the side of mountains. It reminded us of Canadian national parks. Mom drove mostly on the shoulder as her speed was only 80kms instead of the average 140km. We immediately liked the city of Chania. It is an old Venetian fortress. We stayed right beside the harbour in a quaint little room. We had a balcony on the third floor. The hotel was right on one of the main shopping streets of the old town.

Yesterday we hiked through Samaria Gorge. This is the longest gorge in Europe. The hike is 16kms and took us 5 and 1/2 hours. This may seem like a long time but the first 4kms were down steep rocky terrain. A sprinter can do the walk in 4 hours so we think we did pretty good. It is a beautiful area set up really nicely with many rest stops/washrooms and natural springs throughout. The one thing lacking the markers letting you know how much longer you have. There were some markers along the path but we found out at the end that these were not accurate. We are still not sure what they were there for. We were dying when we saw the marker for KM 12 when we had been hiking for 5 hours. We started speed walking (as the walk is suppose to take 6 hours for the strollers) and a few minutes later we were at the end. And not a moment too soon. That was the only confusing part of the trail. Everyone from 10 year olds to senior citizens were doing the walk. We were really impressed with some of the elderly people. One elderly gentleman was wearing keds and dress pants and was walking faster than 3/4 of the walkers. It was very quite walk despite the amount of people on the trail. It was a lovely day.

The gorge is in a remote area. We caught a bus from Chania at 7:30 to Omalos. We arrived at 8:45 after a terrifying ride up a corkscrew mountain road in a greyhound-like bus. We did the walk and then caught a 1 hour ferry to another town where we had to take a 2 hour bus ride back to Chania. We walked back to our hotel, had beer and ice cream for supper and went to bed. The hotel owner took one look at us and said "Samaria Gorge?" We must have looked exhausted. Getting out of bed this morning was not fun. Everytime we try to stand up after sitting for a while it is painful. Hopefully we are better tomorrow.

We still managed to do a lot of walking around Chania today. There are many beautiful stores built in ancient buildings. Sometimes the store is more impressive than the stuff inside. We drove back to Heraklion and gave back our car. In the morning we will catch the ferry to the island of Santorini. An island I have been wanting to see for many years and one of the main reasons I wanted to come to Greece.

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Photos

Outside Taverna
We went for a wonderful dinner on Wednesday night. It was our best meal yet!

Comments

[vic]

message
on sat 2 guys broke into my truck got the remote and entered the garage stole my tools give me a call vic

[Roberta]

Rough ride
I talked to Vic today after I heard about the breakin. He told me that the hydrofoil ride was pretty rough and that Jess was sick. Hope the ferry ride was smoother. Have really enjoyed reading your blogs. Glad you're having a great time. Stay healthy!