Five unsung gems of Europe Part 5: Crete

Crete is a beautiful Greek Island in the Mediterranean Sea not far from Athens. It is often overlooked by the hordes of sun-seeking tourists who descend on more popular islands such as Mykonos. Crete exceeded all my expectations, both in beauty and friendliness! It is a short overnight ferry ride from the port of Piraeus.

A wonderful mountain view from a Cretan village.

Heraklion

We left Athens on a huge inter-island ferry full of cars, trucks and passengers. The ferry was packed with backpackers determined to stay up all night and party around the pool area! We had a cabin below that I had booked from Australia. It was fairly small but clean and reasonably comfortable, much better than the reclining chairs upstairs that others chose! The view leaving harbour was beautiful, but not as beautiful as when we arrived in Heraklion. The sun was just rising and the dawn revealed a beautiful harbour and fortress.

Venetian Fortress at the Old Port entrance.

Overlooking the sea and harbour, Heraklion has the prettiest aspect of any Greek island. Our hotel was the shortest walk from the centre of town, which is full of outdoor cafes and small shops - all bustling with young and old. There are many lovely embroidery and craft shops in between the lovely local coffee shops.

There are many restaurants also to choose from, but I particularly liked the ones outside where you sit watching the passing parade. One had beautifully placed bicycles with flowers placed on them. Another was set up inside a boat decor with the waiters and waitresses having to dodge the traffic with trays as they crossed the main road to deliver our food! The food on offer is superb and has that Mediterranean style that is so famous!

Our favourite outdoor bicycle themed café!

 

Close to the town and within easy walking distance on the edge of the city harbour at the old port, is a Venetian fortress, the Castello a Mare. It was built in the 1500's by Venice and armed with 18 cannons on the ground floor and 25 on the pathway leading to the roof. It has been restored and has many rooms complete with cannonballs and some cannon remain there also.

View over the harbour to the fortress and ferry berth.

View from the Fortress of the boat marina.

Palace of Minos at Knossos

The next day was the highlight of the trip for me, a visit to the famous Minoan Palace of King Minos! If you know your Greek history, you might know this location as the place where Theseus fought the Minotaur in the labyrinth!

I had told my family about how wonderful this palace would be, and I think they were greatly surprised to find my prediction right! The Minoan culture goes back to 1500BC and the palace has frescoes well known world-wide for their great beauty and these paintings show great details of everyday life in ancient times.

The Minoans were also known for their first use of paved roads and their use of a sewage system before Roman times and the palace was designed around this wonderfully inventive water system.

Restored fresco in the palace.

Colourful pillars used throughout the Palace ruins.

 

The famous beautiful dolphin fresco on the inside walls of the palace. 

The paved road predating the Roman roads used throughout the ancient world.
 

 

Top tip: Hundreds of tourists descend on the palace throughout the day, so I made sure we were there early to escape some of the crowds from the many buses that come from the big centres for the day.

North to South Crete

After this, we travelled from the Northern part of the island to the coastal South by hire car. We ascended steep winding mountain roads that seemed to climb into the heavens. They gave equally heavenly views, but I was a bit worried looking down steep cliff faces at times!

Here is an island population that survived terrible hardship during the invasion of Germany during WW2. The liberation of the island by British, Australian and Canadian troops is remembered as if it's yesterday. During our trip by hire car around the mountain villages, we were very much welcomed by the local villagers.  From the steep mountain sides, during WW2, the Cretans were able to strike and terrorise the Nazi invaders and quickly withdraw to their defensive positions high up in the mountains.

Unique Memorial to the fallen from 1943 is placed high up in the mountains in a secluded spot.

Coastal views in the south of the island.

 

On reaching the coastline, we celebrated with a beverage or two and then made our way slowly back to our accommodation in Heraklion, stopping off in a few small villages for exploration and more food highlights!

Have you ever visited the Greek Islands and if so, which one did you like the best? 


 

Daylight robbery!

Why did we fall victim to a robbery on a train from Patras to Athens in broad daylight?  There was only one person, admittedly a large male, on the train when we stood up to get off. We always cover each others backpacks and keep them in sight when travelling. He was very practised and very quick!

Luxury accommodation on board the ferry.

We had come overnight from Brindisi in Italy on the ferry and caught the train on landing in Greece, to go cross country. When buying the tickets, hubby got out his wallet and forgot to return it to his front pocket, easily done when tired! (Our money belts were securely on and I never carry a purse or wallet at all on overseas trips.) As soon as the train departed, and checking everything, we realised the wallet was missing. That horrible feeling comes over you, that feeling of disbelief, then the reality! Hubby had just received cash from the hole in the wall, to pay for the tickets as well! Worse still was the cards we lost, though we always had another with me.

The railway police were terrific, offering us the phone and helping us get through to numbers to cancel cards straight away. First question was, " From Australia! Do you know my cousin in Melbourne?" Surely do! However, we thought it a bit strange when they took us over the busy street to the police station and pointing it out, left us on our own! As our hotel, very budget friendly, was in this slightly run down area, we took our weekenders on wheels with us to get a statement for insurance purposes. Simple you would think? Wrong! It couldn't have been worse. We were holed up on the third floor of that awful cement building in the Athens intolerable heat, for hours of our afternoon. We had no food left, but luckily had water with us. Police officials kept squeezing past us with prisoners in line, in handcuffs... and no detective in that dingy, dark room wanted to bother with our little complaint!

 Finally, some ladies of the night, who were waiting with us on the stairs, took pity on us and through sign language , we managed to see the door open and hubby whipped his head in to get the scrap of paper required! My advice, do not commit a crime in Athens! The incarceration would be awful if our experience was anything to go by.....so saying, we had a wonderful time in this foot friendly city walking around the Parthenon and other ruins so close by!

The Parthenon, a spectacular monument to the might of ancient Athens!

Why no one takes the shortcut through Albania by bus to get to Croatia!

My first post is about a disaster, yes, unbelievable I know after I had thoroughly researched online comments on ways to get from Greece to Montenegro! They were very limited, but I have always believed in the power of  one's own instinctive urge to go where no one else has been and ploughed ahead regardless. This was 2010 and we had enjoyed a fantastic few days in Meteora, visiting the Greek Orthodox Monasteries and overcoming my vertigo to crawl across a narrow bridge to one monastery, but that's another story! The food there was to die for, as in all Greek towns, Kalampaka being no exception and this comes into play later on in our trip to Tirana, the capital of Albania. With the help of the local lass at the bus counter, who interpreted our request for a bus that night, we got our tickets, a Friday night as I recall. This was very significant as this is the night Albanian workers, all men, return to Albania for the weekend.




Our first view of a  Meteora monastery.

 We holed up in our hotel for several hours of rest before waiting at the bus station. It was this trip north or having to fly back to Athens and fly up to Croatia, a very complicated and seemingly long and silly retracing of our steps. The trains were very unreliable , as I had researched that also: they were very complicated with slow and frequent changeovers.
 Well, we set off on this bus with a driver who had complete disregard for safety, roaring around what must have been thousands of corners at top speed mostly with one hand on the wheel, smoking AND texting, in the teeming rain that started when we got on! It seemed everyone on board either had a death wish or just had to get home!

 Of the entire passenger list, only 2 were female. There is nothing more threatening than 40 or so Albanian men and us - with no knowledge at all of their language. It was quite terrifying enough by then as my hubby and I were separated also and he was forced to sit up the back in a puddle of water that ran in from the roof onto the seating there. To make matters worse, hubby then became violently ill, perhaps from food poisoning although we couldn't be certain of that, except that he had had a fabulous seafood dish at lunch that he normally enjoyed in Greece and I had not! As he advanced to the driver, he managed to yell at him to implore him to stop at once or the bus would be the receptacle of his lunch! Somehow by sign language, he managed to achieve this, only to get back on and continue to feel worse again.

 By midnight, we had reached the border and what ensued was nothing short of nightmarish! The other poor woman was a girl, and her clothing and articles from her luggage were strewn outside on the ground as the Albanian Border Police searched it thoroughly. They had taken our passports and I actually thought that we would never see them again, as I did at other places like the river police on the Cambodian border when we lost our tour guide who was refused entry,  but that's another story! It seemed like hours later, but in reality only an hour, when we were able to continue, with some stops for poor hubby, eventually reaching Tirana at daylight.




View from bus of Albanian capital Tirana.

 We jumped off the bus as fast as possible, and hubby ran for the nearest toilet, fortunately there was a nice coffee shop man opening up. I bet he didn't anticipate a demonic looking man bolting past him for the loo at that hour of the morning! By various hand signals, we gathered there were no buses to Montenegro and the best we could do was to get on a small mini van for commuters to the next major town of Shkodra on our way to Ulcinj and thus to Kotor. We noticed there was a terrible evidence of poverty everywhere with run down communications and the use of horse and cart, also field work carried out by hand.



Local transport from taxi cab, the old and the new!

On arrival at Shkodra, we found a hotel to have a cup of tea and coffee and a friendly doorman who tried out his English on us. He told us of the years of post - Communism that things such as living standards were improving but very slowly. No doubt, as in other countries, the internet and mobile phones were beginning to be accepted by the authorities but there was not much infrastructure to support them. We hired a cab, amazingly a BMW but extremely old, to drive us over another policed border to Montenegro and that went without incident! He was so happy to receive what would have been a minimal amount of Euro to transport us such a long way to Ulcinq, the cost in Australia would have been astronomical!

 Needless to say, we reached Kotor, my mini Dubrovnik, by late afternoon, and as I fell off the bus, I literally plucked one old lady out of the usual crowd of people scrabbling to nab these helpless tourists and cart them off to their places for accommodation for the night! I rounded on the nearest one to ask, how far? She indicated in broken English, two minutes....Done! I chased her down the street nearby and we found a pretty and clean, if bare room with an old bathroom for the night in an old stone cottage with magnificent views of the harbour and countryside.





Prettiest medieval fortress in Kotor, a mini Dubrovnik.

Outside our cottage door in Kotor. 

 I set up my notebook computer and happily downloaded our photos and off we went to explore the prettiest mini medieval town in the Adriatic Sea!