Crete
The Palace of Knossos
was a bust. It was mobbed with tourists, including some very pushy tour guides. The ruins were interesting but all the good stuff has been removed to the museum in Heraklion.
One bit of engineering was interesting, though. The Minoans, who first showed up in Crete about 6000 B.C., built the Palace around 1700 B.C. By the time they built the Palace they were already experts in water and sanitation engineering. You can still see the rain culverts that diverted water from the buildings to the edges of the palace grounds. You can also see the sealed terra cotta pipes that brought drinking water from a source 10 miles away. The Palace even had a system for flushing the commodes and carrying the waste far away. Western Europe "discovered" all these things 3000 years later.
Heraklion Archeological Museum
The city of Heraklion is about 5 miles from the Palace of Knossos. Most of the artifacts unearthed at Knossos around 1900-1930 were kept in Crete and are now displayed in this fantastic museum.
I'm not going to repeat the story of my awakening to the lives of the ancients (last blog posting) but I'm going to share a few photos of some of the amazing tools, jewelry, and art that were recovered at Knossos. Keep in mind that all of this stuff is over 3500 years old.
The solid gold death shroud of a child.
No, these aren't angels from some Renaissance Italian sculptor. These are terra cotta cupid figures from the 2nd century B.C., after the Romans occupied Crete.
The Olive Farm
TripAdvisor, which has been our constant companion, highly recommended the Koronekes Traditional Olive Mill 20 minutes from Haraklion. Having pressed our own olives last year for the first time, we were interested to see how the pros do it. Our lovely tour guide, Poppy, showed us around and explained the difference between traditional olive pressing and modern commercial olive processing.
The next day we managed to hike one of the gorges Crete is known for. The most spectacular gorge requires a 6 hour walk, followed by a 30-minute boat ride and a 45-minute bus trip to get back to the starting point. All together the trip is 9-10 hours. We decided to pass on that hike and, instead, walked for 3 hours or so in the beautiful mountains of Crete and still got back to the hotel in time (and in the mood for) our evening apertif.
Chania
The next day we headed east to the smaller town of Chania, in the northwest corner of Crete. Chania was occupied by the Venetians for 300 years, so there's a lot of Venetian-style architecture, including a fort which protected the harbor. There was no protection that day from the wind. The water from the harbor was being washed over the sea wall and into the tavernas that line the harborside.
Ralph really wanted to swim in the Mediterranean so we went shopping for a towel. We couldn't find anything so practical in the tourist center of town. He was desperate enough that he considered, for a minute, buying a souvenir dish towel and making do. We walked around, though, until we got out of the tourist zone and passed by a shop selling window coverings and bedding. We walked in and not only got a 6 Euro towel, we got a Greek history lesson from the proprietor.
I have not verified any of this but here's what he told us. "Greece is not a serious country," he said. "We've gone bankrupt 7 times and soon it will be 8. Nobody cares about anyone outside their family. Greece was created by the British carving up the Ottoman Empire 180 years ago and they pretty much ran things until after World War II. They were so weakened by WWII that they turned over the protection of Greece to the Americans. That lasted until 1992. Then the Americans left and turned things over to the Germans. That's who runs the country now."
This last statement seemed true enough. We were at dinner the other night in a taverna in a tiny village on the south coast. There were about 10 tables and all of the other groups were Germans. Ralph took this picture of the "Departures" screen at the Haraklion airport the morning we left.
We had such a luxurious hotel in Chania (recommended by Brian Farley, Sile's brother-in-law) that it was hard to leave.
The view from our room.
We finally dragged ourselves away and drove south, across the width of Crete, to a town called Plakias. Plakias beach, and the other beaches like it, are the reason that all those Germans come to Crete on one-week holidays. From our apartment, high on the hill, this was the view:
Ralph finally got his swim. The water, he reports, is very similar to Hanalei Bay in Kuaui -- clear, calm, and relatively warm.
(First attempt at a panoramic picture with my camera. The wooden walkway was actually straight. It was there so that the bartender didn't have to walk through the sand to get to your lounge chair.)
We spent 3 really pleasant hours at the beach, reading our books and just admiring the gorgeousness of everything.
This photo is entitled "Redhead at the Beach".
Alas, our time in Crete was coming to and end but this meant getting back to Heraklion, which meant
Driving in Crete
The Cretan attitude to driving can be summed up in two mottos: "Rules are made to be broken" and "If that asphalt is not being used, I can use it."
This is a good example. Note the wide shoulders on this two-lane road. Notice also that everyone, yours truly included, drives far to the right, straddling the shoulder demarkation. This leaves a wide unused area in the middle of the road, which is used as a defacto passing lane, blind curves, speed limits, and double white lines be damned. We were passed many, many times by cars straddling the double white line in the middle of the road, going 20 or 25 km per hour over the speed limit.
Google Maps, of course, made everything easier. Click on the arrow to hear typical directions.
Google Maps, of course, made everything easier. Click on the arrow to hear typical directions.
We made it safely back to Heraklion, spent the night, and flew the next day to Athens to pick up our rental car for the next-to-last leg of our trip -- The monasteries of Meteora and the Peloponnesian peninsula.
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