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The people you meet while hiking I had spent the month prior to my trip scooping out what I had wanted to do on Crete. For this island, more than any other island, it is essential to do background work. Unlike other islands, where it was easy to get around on a moped, Crete is a huge island, in which you need a car to take bite size chunks out of the island. Therefore, I did a lot of background work. I read parts of four different books to get adequate information to prepare me for this trip. I am very glad I did this research. Originally I was going to focus my time around Iraklion and the Minoan ruins, since I had to leave from Iraklion to get to Santorini. There were a couple of caves near by as some nice beaches to the south. I was also going to skip Chania, the Samarian gorge and the west coast all together. I was originally planning to skip Chania because there was "nothing to do there and no major ruins to see". I was going to skip the Samarian gorge because I thought the temperature would be unbearable to hike it. However, the more I read, the more I soured on Iraklion and the more I warmed up to Chania and the west. I read one author who was in love with Chania. I read another source, which describe Chania as a very pleasant town to stay in with a pleasant old quarter and not as many tourists as the east. The more research I did on the Samarian gorge, the more I found that it was the one, DO NOT MISS site on Crete. I also learned that temperatures on Crete would not be too unbearable in June. By the time of my trip I had steeled on two days in Chania (I had wanted spend three and to do a day trip to Rethymnon but it would be easer to spend the night there instead of wasting an hour and a half for a return trip and then move on to the east. A plan that I was happy I decided on) and hike Samarian Gorge. Samarian Gorge is the longest river Gorge in Europe. Its length is estimated at eighteen kilometers (close to twelve miles). Crete gets a surprising amount of rain on its mountains. In fact, it even had some snow on its higher mountaintops when I was there. This rain doesn't spend much time on the Crete though. It quickly forms channels and streams down to the coast and into the Mediterranean. The highest and most impressive mountains on Crete (According to this author anyway) are the White Mountains, which dominate western Crete. The southern side of the range has a quick decent into the sea. The southern side is also made up primarily of limestone. Over the millennium, the runoff from the White Mountains formed distinctive channels, which cut into the soft, soluble limestone (Calcium Carbonate) leaving very large, impressive river gorges. Samarian happens to be one of the longest, and deepest with some of the clearest water. It is absolutely breathtaking. (The other gorges aren't bad either and one day I will return to visit them. The name of the gorge is a corruption, like so many of the names on Crete. The Venetians, wanting to keep their villages away from pirates and Turks (often the same people) tucked a village about half way up the gorge (with six castles protecting the entrance.) They dedicated the village to Saint Mary, or in Italian Santa Maria. Over time the village, and the gorge, became known as San Maria and eventually Samara. By the time I was getting ready to leave for Greece, my plan was settled. On my second day on Crete I was going to hike the gorge. The eighteen kilometers of the gorge. In the sun. In June. Or at least that was my plan a week and a half before I left. About a week before I left I caught a nasty cold, which was accompanied by a wicked cough and congestion. When I flew to Greece, I was still getting over this cold and I was still a little under the weather. (I'm sure I caught something on the plane too). I went directly from Athens to Crete. As a result, on my first day wandering around Chania I was not feeling 100 percent. The last thing I wanted was to get stuck in the middle of the gorge. I could imagine being stuck alone, with nobody around (I grew up hiking the sierra Nevada mountains). That night (or early morning) as I was kept awake by various acoustic sources until 4 A.M. I had plenty of time to think about if I wanted to really hike 18 km. All of my guidebooks said it was a "HARD HIKE". I've done ten-mile hikes in a day and they take a lot of energy out of you. I was not sure I had the energy. Especially since I was still sick and not getting any sleep. During my artificial insomnia I discovered that I could hike up the gorge as well from. That is, instead of catching a bus to the top, hiking the entire 18 km to the bottom, then catching a boat and bus back to Chania, I could start at the other end, hike up as far as I felt like, and then return to the port and catch the boat and bus back. I went to bed, thinking that was an option, but I would see how I felt in the morning. I was feeling tired in the morning. I did feel better, my cough was better and I wasn't as congested. I was still a bit weary of how hard this hike was. When I got to the bus stop, I became even more worried when I saw people decked out if they were hiking through the Sierra Nevada Mountains. People with walking sticks, day bags beaming with water and good trail food. These people that I saw were obviously die-hard hikers. That settled it; I was doing the easy route. I would get to see the gorge and not kill my self. I would actually recognize many of these people at the bottom. My bus ride was 45 minutes longer, and then I would have another hour-long boat ride to get to the gorge. So they would have about a 2-hour head start on me. One person in particular caught my eye. A cute blond girl who had a bag of sour cream potatoes chips strapped onto her bag. The reason, no not because she was cute, but because chips make you thirsty, a very questionable kind of food for hiking. (Good energy I guess.) As I said, my bus ride was a good 45 minutes longer. That was because not only were we going the entire distance to the southern coast, but also we were going over the White Mountains, riding on hairpin turns both ways. The bus ride was very scenic. On the assent, we had alternated views of the White Mountains with that of the coast. The northern side of the White Mountains does not go up as sharply so the climb was not very abrupt and there were not life threatening drop offs on either side of the road. There were a lot of hairpin turns though. By the time we reached the pass, I was beginning to wish I had chosen the other route. As I mentioned above, there is a really sharp drop-off on the southern side of the island. This meant that the hairpin turns on the road were accompanied with death defying drop-offs on either side of the road. With drop-offs like these, the ride was very very scenic. As long as you didn't think about the reason for the view being scenic. It even went along a nice gorge (which some people got off to hike down.) The ride was also very scary, since I have heard stories about buses going off roads like this, in India. To further add to my anxiety, someone started up a conversation with the driver. When I am elected emperor, I am going to make a law in which you CAN NOT TALK TO BUS DRIVERS DRIVING DOWN HAIRPIN TURNS! But the driver was very competent, handling the turns with a great deal of grace. I decided that one job I would not want would be a bus driver on Crete. During all of this, the girl in front of me managed to sleep! The bus dropped its passengers in the little town of Hora Sfakion, a good hour's slow boat ride from the mouth of the Gorge. Greece has been mocked about its transportation system. That was because 20 years ago, it may have been chaotic. (Two years ago for its train system!) However, this is no longer the case. Waiting for the bus was the boat. This boat is the life connection between the little towns. Aside from dirt roads that go through the mountain (which walking is preferable to 4x4 transport) the only connection to these towns are the hourly ferryboats. On the boat I started to talk with the Girl who managed to sleep on the bus ride. A feet I am sure few people would be able to accomplish. It turns out the reason why she was so sleepy is because she had been traveling for 14 hours straight. She was going to (she thought) New Roumeli to visit her mother who just had an art show there. New Roumeli is the town at the base of the Gorge so we were headed to the same location. We chatted as we watched the impressive southern coast of Crete slowly move by. There were a few other river gorges and the attractive little town of Loutro. If you want to stay at the Southern end of the gorge after hiking it, stay in Loutro, it is the most attractive of the three towns. We got off at New Roumeli with other people who seemed to have a similar mind to myself. Explore the end of Samaria Gorge and then go swimming. I tied to help the girl to find the hotel her mother was at. I asked several people Pu ene Ikerus in my best Greek. I assumed that no one understood me because no one seemed to have heard of it. Not wanting to waste time, I left her at a phone where she was going to call her mother. Samara Gorge was worth the wait. It had the clearest blue water running down it. The walls of the gorge and the sky looked like a painted back. It was breathtaking. Words cannot describe the beauty of the gorge, which is why I took 500 pictures of it! It was very rugged but had a well worn trail down the center of it. A nice thing about hiking up it was I was going against traffic. That is people were coming down the trail but not blocking my progress going up it. I made good time, getting to the 1/3 checkpoint within an hour, while taking pictures and stopping to admire the beauty of the gorge. I ate lunch up the gorge, at a rest stop that had benches and tables. It was here that I met up with the hoards of people coming down. There was a Greek lifeguard convention going down the gorge apparently and several tour groups. I sat for a while admiring the beauty of the gorge (I did this after I found an isolated spot to sit and think for a while). On my return to New Roumeli I discovered the problem with going with the traffic of the gorge. Many of these people have not hiked before. They were unsure of their steps and took it slow. Too slow for my comfort. They blocked the passage, not allowing others to pass. I also noticed that they did not understand the basics of trail courtesy either. Most of the people were here for the same reasion as I. Their guide books said that this was one of the most beautiful sights on Crete. As a result there must have been hundreds of people in the gorge that afternoon. I got the impression that when you hike the entire length, it is always one large mass of humanity. That waiting doesn't help because there is always another tour buss dropping off its masses. I guess it was fortunate that I hiked up it instead, I got the trail to my self in places and I could go at my own rate. As I hiked back down the gorge, I noticed that a few of the tour guides would take "high routs" around these hoards of people. The Chip girl from Chania (the blond girl with the chips) also passed me this way. The chips made it all the way down the trail. (a sure sign that I was still sick I was more interested in the chips than the attractive girl carrying them.) I guess she didn't want them. I noticed that these high routes were indeed trails (cut by numerous guides doing this) so I decided to so as well. I was able to proceed with a more leisurely rate. Back at the bottom I went for a leisurely swim. I discovered something very important during my swim. My water proof watch….wasn't. This would present a slight problem for the rest of my trip The swim itself was very nice because I could relax after a semi strenuous hike. However, once my watch went out I kept worrying about missing the boat. I knew it was time to go when I saw a few hundred of my fellow swimmers start to head for the boat. On the boat ride back I ran into the same girl I had talked to on my ride to New Roumeli. It turns out her mother's show was in Loutro. So she had spent the afternoon in the New Roumeli swimming. I am guessing Loutro was a nicer place to stay in anyway. While waiting for the bus back to Chania, I had a chance to talk to the chip girl. It turns out that when she was shopping for food, the chips looked really good. However, as she was hiking the practically( or lack there of), of eating chips occurred to her. So she just carried them the entire way. She was a nice girl from Australia who enjoyed the outdoors alot. For some reason, I never got her name though. (I must have still been sick!) Epilog: At one point along the trail I was taking a picture of a bridge with the crystal blue water under it. As it turns out the "chip girl" was walking across it. Despite what my friends think, I really was taking a photo of the bridge and river (it's a good photo) and I had no intention of taking a picture of anyone crossing it. Now whenever I show my photos to people, they ask me "who is the chip girl?" Therefore I have explain it and defend my photo to who ever sees it. |
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