Our last Greek post. Even though we have seen so little of it, Greece has been a wonderful country where we have enjoyed two and a half weeks of sun, food, history, and natural beauty. Crete was a great island to complete the experience.
We started out on Crete in Heraklion, its capital. We spent a couple of days there walking the city streets and testing out the Cretan sun on the beach. Mmm, the water was nice. We loved our hotel and enjoyed a few laid back days.
Then we ventured over to Chania, a wonderful little city on the western end of the island. We had around four days over there, so we were able to do and see a little more. The old town of Chania is something special. It has some terrific old buildings and a slightly northern Africa feel (not that we've been there, we just imagine). Crete is as close to Libya as it is the rest of Greece. We spent many hours strolling the streets and browsing in some of the cool little shops lining them.
We stayed in a cool little tourist section with great music, restaurants, pool bars, and beaches. So, as one might expect, we spent a good amount of time simply relaxing on sand and enjoying the atmosphere. We (as English speakers) were strongly outnumbered by Dutch and Scandinavian tourists in this area, which was actually kind of refreshing.
We did manage to take a day trip on one of our days in the Chania area. That's right, we actually dragged our bums off the beach. We woke up at 6:30 to take a bus to the Samaria Gorge in southern Crete. This gorge is the largest in Europe and stretches 16 km, taking about 5 hours to hike through. It was incredible to experience such a natural wonder. At times we felt extremely small. We really enjoyed this excursion, even though we finished the gorge by 1:30 and waited until 6:30 to catch our return bus. Getting back to our hotel at 9:00 made for a long day. But we got a lot of great pictures.
Now, we prepare for a 7 hour overnight ferry ride back to Athens and a flight over to Paris. A couple days of travel before we break into the home stretch!
1 comment:
Hey Ang. Lexi here. I was JUST in Europe too. We would of totally overlapped. I was there for 3 weeks. Your pics bring back to many memories. Sounds and looks like you have had a trip of a life time. We did England, Italy and Greece. Greece was definitely my favourite. We did Athens, Santorini and Chania, Crete. Hope you have a good last of the run!
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