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Welcome to my travel log! You will find here a lot more than in the travel reports, stripped from political correctness. Enjoy! 
Sep 30, 2003 02:00 PM Crete (GR) - Vai
Reportedly the best beach of Crete is the one in Vaï, and it is famous because of the palm forest in its vicinity. The palm trees are away from the beach itself, and therefore the misleading descriptions in numerous guidebooks make is a sort of tourist trap. Well, to be honest, technically, this Europe’s largest natural palm forest touches the beach, but since the beach is quite wide, it does not make a tropical scenery. The beach itself is rather spectacular. Unfortunately, there are no bars or a decent restaurant with tables directly on it, which makes it hard to enjoy if one is not into lying on the sand.
There are some facilities for water sports, like jet ski and some sort of joy for kids. Other than that it is just a stretch of sand adjacent to warm and clear turquoise waters of the Mediterranean.
There is also no accommodation and the crowds make it hard to enjoy. We must have spent there about an hour and then escaped.Neither did we go to see the nearby Minoan site of Itanos for reasons I cannot remember anymore.
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Sep 30, 2003 02:00 PM Crete (GR) - Xerokambos
The little village of Xerokambos with reputably good and quiet beaches was unlucky to miss us. We never made it. I mention it here however, because of the scenery surrounding it. To get there from Itanos, we took the off the beaten track amongst the hills. The landscape was great.
The hills struggled to remain green with brownish lichen being the dominating plant growing there.
Deep canyons or gorges divided the hills all over. I could not believe that scenery like that can be found on an island. Such landscape is usually found on large continents with vast open territories, like Africa and the Americas. Well, I thought the neighbourhood of Xerokambos was therefore special. I obviously tried to capture it with my camera - see above.
Driving there was great. It felt like we have just been teleported to another place. At this slow pace, we could contemplate. It was an aura of a holiday. The thing was that we did not need to be anywhere anytime soon, so we took it slow. The plan for the rest of the vacations was still in the making. We almost made it up as we went along. Obviously, certain places were pinpointed for a stop or overnight destination, but the island was small enough not to worry about the time.
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Sep 30, 2003 02:00 PM Crete (GR) - Zakros
Nearly nothing remains of the Ancient Zakros, an important Minoan site, where once a large palace stood. At its greatest times, Zakros was a major port of the Minoan civilisation. The trade routes were reaching the other coasts of the Mediterranean Sea, and beyond. Evidence suggests that through this harbour the Minoans dealt with Cyprus, Anatolia, Syria and Egypt.
The ruins of this great place are not kept in the ideal of states, sadly. However, the small town of new Zakros has a pleasant feel and there is a restaurant at the beach serving marvellous tomatoes! Their shrimp saganaki dish is delicious, however they make you wait for it!
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Sep 29, 2003 02:00 PM Crete (GR) - Mohlos
The little fishing town of Mohlos is a sleepy place sought after by many for its slow pace and peace. It is quite attractive, planted with colourful plants smelling nicely. It was apparently a significant site once, some five thousand years ago, at the Minoan times.
We came there for seafood. The shrimp saganaki we ate there was superb and made us want to learn how to cook it! Yum, yum.
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Sep 29, 2003 02:00 PM Crete (GR) - Spinalonga
The legendary island of Spinalonga, located just thirty minutes by boat from the town of Elounda, is an interesting place. Its entire territory almost is taken up by a vast Venetian fortress erected in 1579. During the Cretan-Turkish wars, it was the last spot to surrender, three decades after the rest of Crete.
When Greece and Crete created a union, the Spinalonga island became a leper colony. It was not a prison! It was a place where people rejected by society for certain moral or social reasons lived. Interestingly, after the last leper died in 1953, the island was left to its own. It has been uninhabited ever since.
The boat trip from a very touristy Elounda are very easy to organise. There are sea buses parked in the port. They operate with particular frequency and you just pick a time, you would like to travel, buy your ticket at one of the booths and wait. As we had some time, we went for a quick meal.
The fortress on the island is great and a little spooky. There is not much to it. It is more an unusual place rather than something spectacular. Unless one is really into the Greek/Cretan or Turkish history, there is nothing else fascinating about it.
I liked the fact that people are left on their own to explore the island by themselves. We circled the entire island inside an hour. Some would say that the place has an ambiance of macabre and sadness. Perhaps. I did not feel like that at all. I guess the open graves at the fort’s cemetery were, for a lack of better word, engrossing. However, the rest of it was just an abandoned stronghold.
Notwithstanding the aforementioned, the short escapade to Spinalonga is a great thing to do on Crete, as it is unusual. It is different from just lying and frying on the beach, eating souvlaki and drinking beer.
On the way back to the main island, I had a quick and harmless quarrel with my friend (as we like to tease each other like that), which ended with me slapping my palm on his forehead. This amused the boatsman enormously. For the open palm shown in one’s face is a grave insult in Greece, otherwise known as ‘malaka’. However slapping one’s forehead like that is almost a death wish!
The amount of joy and amusement we delivered to this rather sad looking lad was sensational. He could not stop laughing about it, which resulted in slight delay in the boat’s schedule and astounding discussion at the port after arrival.
The secret was that I expected a funny reaction of the man, and it made me feel good about me. Again!
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Sep 29, 2003 02:00 PM Crete (GR) - Ierapetra
Since Ierapetra was discovered as a miracle destination of ours, we keep talking about almost every time we meet.
When we arrived at this southern resort city, its waterfront looked like on this small picture above. Nothing was happening. The shops were either closing down or were already closed and the restaurants on the beach-front promenade were very quiet. The crescent moon was rising. It was of a deep, dark orange colour.
However, one of the restaurants made us change our plans quite dramatically. We actually decided to stay in Ierapetra an extra night. And this was solely because of the restaurant, which was serving the white Paulaner beer from tap! It is our favourite beer ever, and our astonishment can easily be imagined. We could not believe it... that we were in heaven!
The restaurant was also serving some classic Greek dishes as well, so we were certain that we made the right decision. We tried their mousaka, shrimp saganaki and lamb souvlaki accompanied by tomato salad with feta cheese. All went down beautifully washed with delicious Paulaner, the king of hefe weizen beers. What a place!
The town of Ierapetra was nice. It was small and some of its narrow streets were picturesque. It was hard to take photographs to show its atmosphere, because the alleys were really narrow. I think the most important sight of the town was this Greek church, very typical and the Turkish mosque.
Also, at the end of the beach-front promenade, at the side of the fishing port there is a fort built by the Venetians in the seventeenth century. It is quite large, but located in a neighbourhood that feels rather dodgy.
We did not spend enough time in the town. As we came in the evening, and discovered Paulaner, we remained at the promenade. Later we took a stroll in the night about the rest of the town, avoiding the labyrinthine old quarter. The next day, we went for a ride and came back at night again.
On the second night, we just made sure that we drank enough of Paulaner to last us a few days. We spent a lot of time eating and drinking. We waited for that evening the entire day.
Yet, there are a few spots in the old quarter that we could have seen properly. The churches, and the Turkish mosque with its Turkish fountain outside, we only saw in the dark. Well, perhaps next time.
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Sep 26, 2003 02:00 PM Santorini (GR) - the sunset cruise
I pressed on the absolute necessity to go on a sunset cruise around the submerged crater. I knew I wanted to do this even before we landed on the island. There were a few companies selling those trips. It was very easy to buy the tickets.
The boats were leaving from the old Fira harbour, from the water edge, a hundred meters down from the town itself.
The trip down to the water’s edge could be made in two ways. One was by a cable car. The other was by steps. Both were rather attractive, however the steps had this extra quality to it. It was the smell. For the way on the steps could be again completed in two methods. One was by using your own legs. The other was using four legs of the countless donkeys and mews. These animals contributed to the extra quality. Their shit covering almost every inch of the steps made the trip quite odoriferous and adventurous.

The animals were standing patiently for their next passenger. Poor things. Some of them were hurried up or down, depending on the actual business programme their managers had for them at that very moment.
Anyway, the cruise, operated on a small sail boat was fun. The trip involved a sluggish pace from Thira island onto the actual volcano. The volcano is active and dark island created by the solidified lava keeps getting bigger and bigger. Every year.
The stop at the volcano was short - about one hour. This allowed for a short trek on the new lava island and a swim in the hot waters along a small fragment of the coast. I wanted to see the exact spot from where the lava would come out, or the actual crater, but I could not find it.
The guide on the boat tried to be funny. He tried too much, and we could see through him quite easily. The number of lies, or whitelies, which he was able to spit per minute was astonishing. At some point, I decided to stop paying any attention, because it was really annoying me. How can someone really believe that everyone on the boat was a complete idiot, or at least so gullible to believe anything he was saying!
Besides this, it was a good ride, which helped kill time on this otherwise nothing-to-do-there island. And the sunset was pretty.
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Sep 26, 2003 02:00 PM Santorini (GR) - Imerovigli and Finikia
West of Firostefani there were small towns of Imerovigli and Finikia, which made an interesting morning escapade. The narrow route followed the caldera around among the cobbled streets.
The towns were kept in good order. They were clean. Houses were painted white, and only windows and doors were painted in bright and vivid colours. It was clear why so many photographers would come to this part of Santorini and claim that those pictures would make a good representation of all Greek islands. It was not far from truth. A few small churches around, small houses, disused wind mills, little curio shops...
Santorini was pretty. However, what we should have done was to go to the southern and eastern part of the island to see the beaches. Then, we would have seen it all. Yet, we decided to chill to the max, sipping cold beer and enjoying the sun with the view.
Going to the other part of Thira would require us to take some form of transport, and somehow we did not feel like it. We came from Rhodos where we travelled around, and our next destination, Crete, had a programme full of driving and visiting a considerable number of places. So, it was a good idea to take a break.
There was one thing we actually did not do on Santorini. We did not go party very heavily. We should have, I guess. There were a number of bars, clubs and discos around, and although we collected a few flyers, we actually never ended up going anywhere. It is somewhat strange, since all three of us are party animals. We came down to the capital on one night specifically to engage in a party somewhere, but could not decide which place to choose. I remember that we just had some tzatziki-based fast food and went to bed.
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Sep 25, 2003 02:00 PM Santorini (GR) - Firostefani
A fantastic and extremely picturesque town, the capital of the island, full with bars, restaurants as well as boutiques and tourists can become rather boring after a while. For me this while lasted about two hours. The problem was that the town is very small and apart from shopping there is not much to do there. Fortunately, I had my friends with me, and we did what we do best - eat and drink.
For the most part of the visit to Fira, we sat down in one of the restaurants with the most spectacular view from the side of the caldera and befriended a waiter, who kept fetching those beers for us. If I remember well, the restaurant was called ‘At Nick’s’, or something like it. And the waiter’s name was also Nick, which is among Greece’s most popular names for a boy. The restaurant served decent food too.
The terrace on the top of the restaurant was a perfect spot to enjoy a day. The sun was shining, the view to the entire almost island was spectacular and the beer was wonderfully cold. Nick, the waiter, taught us how to say “cheers” in Greek and from then on we kept raising the glasses and cried “cheers!’ like a small bunch of Greeks, who enjoyed their weekend.
For the purpose of decency, we kept making breaks from the drinking. During the breaks we would go for a walk in the town and buy small items belonging to the ‘stupid souvenir’ category. I bought myself two white shirts made of this super light and breathable material, perfect for hot weather. Actually, I used those shirts on my subsequent trips to Africa on several occasions. I loved them!
However, in no time we were back on the terrace bringing our beer glasses together crying ‘cheers’ again! One night we decided to eat there as well. We went for these full blown seafood platters, which made other people in the restaurant utterly jealous. I like doing things like this, from time to time. In a country where seafood is abundant, I like to treat myself to a wonderful, and perhaps excessive and a little extravagant, meal full of fruit of the oceans and seas. This one on Santorini was truly delicious! I normally do not include the pictures of me in those travel stories, but somehow I decided to make an exception this time. So, below is the picture from that seafood evening. You can see my new white light shirt there, too.
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Sep 24, 2003 02:00 PM Santorini (GR) - also known as Thira
Arguably the most picturesque of all islands on the Mediterranean, but most definitely the one with the most dramatic history.
The island’s current shape is a direct result of a gigantic volcanic eruption, actually the largest in the planet’s billions of years of history. It happened around 1650 BC, and it most probably killed a few civilisations in the region, like the Minoans and the Akrotiri.
Before the explosion, the island was round, and its name was Strongili. When the volcano blew, the centre of the island collapsed creating a very deep crater, called caldera, which the sea filled very quickly. This eruption released tonnes of ash, pumice, and magma and generated colossal tsunamis (even 250 metres high) destroying everything at the entire coastline of the sea.
Number of theories and hypotheses place the legendary Atlantis exactly where Santorini is. The gargantuan volcanic explosion ending the island’s Minoan civilisation that made the island disappear under the water makes an easy analogy. And despite it has not been yet proven to be true, the island happily advertises so and the Santorinians produce local wine called Atlantis, which is unfortunately completely undrinkable.

Today, the cities and villages are built on the top of the caldera’s ridge. The drop from the towns to the bottom of the island is very dramatic, steep and it is a few hundred meters all the way down to the sea. Although, the villages and towns have all their own names, they are simply one long city running from one end of the volcano’s ridge to another.
The volcano remains active and it is growing again. It is visible as a dark little island in the centre of the crater on this satellite picture on the left. Many boat excursions are organised to see and walk on this part of the volcano where people can touch and walk on the solid lava rock, and admire the views. There are also hot pools, which is rather expected in the middle of a volcano. I have been in hot springs before, but that was in fresh water and not in seawater.
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