I don’t keep very much when I’m travelling but I did just find this ticket that I’d saved from the day we were in Samaria Gorge. I liked the stamp and drawing of the Kri-kri (the Cretan Ibex that is endangered and lives in the gorge).
But even more I loved this little map of the track on the back that gives distances between resting stops and lists their attributes.
A few photos taken after the walk down Samaria Gorge.
Michael on the beach at Agios Roumeli, the sea village at the end of the gorge walk. I had intended having a swim, but there wasn’t really time. A paddle followed by banking up the hot stones around my legs felt like very good therapy for tired muscles!
The Neptune, the little boat that took us to Sougia, the next little place along the coast to the west, where the bus was waiting.
Can you believe the colour of the sea?! Beautiful! Cyclops’s cave was said to be around here, perhaps it was one of those?
Or one of these? To get an idea of the scale of the landscape, if you look closely, there are two specks in the middle of the photo that are people.
The mountain countryside on the way back to Xania was green and often farmed. We passed through areas that grow nuts of various sorts as well as olives and citrus.
We had a fabulous day walking the Samaria Gorge, a downhill decent of 16km from 1250 metres to the sea. I’d had my eye on this walk from early on in planning where we might go on our trip. Unbeknown to me the gorge usually only opens at the beginning of May, but we were lucky – this year it was a few days earlier, and in going on the very first day of the season it was really quiet.
You need to sign up to a bus tour to get there and back, but our guide was pleasantly laid-back, striking a nice balance between being approachable but non-intrusive. In large part his role was for our general safety, as the walk is rugged and long, and he backed up the party in case anyone got into trouble. I did see a helipad marked on the map at the now-deserted village of Samaria half way down, but in general the donkeys that are stationed at various points down the track are the ambulances if you need one.
The part of the gorge that gets most press,The Gates, is where it narrows to just a few metres between cliffs towering to 300 metres. It’s great, but strangely anti-climactic after the towering mountain sides and churning geological rock patterns in the kilometres before. If you came to The Gates from the seaward side you would impressed, but would have no idea of how much more stunning the gorge is beyond them.
