Australia to Crete

Here we go again! 

Welcome back. Our plan this trip is to go Greece, Bulgaria then 'The Stans' - Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan.

First stop however, was Perth to see my brother and his amazing family. Much to our surprise, the entire family turned up at the airport to meet us!

We were there for three days and had such a fun time! We had big family dinners each night with a lot of drinking and dancing to accompany the incredible barbeques. My brother is a bit of a master of the Weber. My gorgeous little great-niece nearly crawled while we were there.

One night, we ate outside around a fire. They have quendas in WA. They're a type of native bandicoot. A couple of quendas turned up and one was really tame. It was eating off plates near us!

 At one stage, it ran over Bessie's feet and Lucas briefly patted it. It was amazing!

For those of you who know me through my crafting, ArtStacks is now being distributed by The Dusty Attic, which is based out of Perth. I took most of my stock over with me and got to meet Jen Hedger, the owner, for the first time in real life. Our time together flew!

We went for a few walks from my brother's place. The first one didn't start well when John and I just walked to a nearby coffee shop in the rain. Like something from a movie, a car drove past and sprayed water all over us!

On a later walk I saw gorgeous red-tailed cockatoos up close and found these very cool grass trees.

We said goodbye to the Perth gang and started the long slog to Greece. The next couple of days became a blur of planes, movies and airports. On the two long flights we had seats beside the emergency exit door, which meant we had no windows. With no visual clues of movement it felt like we were in some strange limbo of boarding planes, then getting off many hours later in another airport, just like the last one, without the understanding of movement in between. We turned into dazed zombies from lack of sleep. It was a bit weird.

We flew to Singapore and stayed at a hotel inside the airport. It was the first hotel we've ever stayed in where we collected our bags from the plane on a trolley, then wheeled the trolley into our room!

The next morning we had a few hours before we had to check in to our next flight so we got some miles under our feet as we explored all three terminals, catching the unmanned trains between them. The water garden was new to me. Thick glass covered part of a large fish pond and we could walk over it, watching the fish underneath. Over our heads, a scene was projected onto the ceiling that made it look like we were on the bottom of a pond looking up. Otters swam above us, along with ducks, fish and, strangely, stingrays! They must have a new species of freshwater stingray in Singapore, haha!

At one stage a boat glided by. It was beautiful!

I was also entranced by a fish tank holding all sorts of unusual underwater creatures. The shrimps were gorgeous.

I don't know what this is. It was shaped like a stingray but it was only about 4cm across. It busied itself burrowing through the sand at the bottom of the tank looking for food.

We then flew 11.5 hours to Istanbul where we had a five hour wait for our connection to Crete. Again, we walked a lot though to keep the circulation flowing (and to stop us falling asleep, lol).

One of our legs was with Turkish Airlines and, much to my amazement, they offered no Turkish food! They served a meal soon after we took off then the staff all went awol for nearly eight hours. There was nothing served during that time, not even water. The staff member in charge of our area just sat down the back and if we wanted water we had to go and find her. She then had the gall to complain to us how tired she was from all this work!

It's funny the things you see at airports. The tall young man waiting for his plane to board, fast asleep across four seats with a pillow between his knees, not under his head. The lovely baby next to us on one flight and the one who screamed for most of the flight just one row back. The same hostie above that told off a three year old for walking around the cabin without her mum and scared the kid half to death, although she was a determined little thing and she backed off from the woman's outstretched arms, a defiant 'no' on her face.

By the time we got to our lovely room in Heraklion, Crete, we had been awake for 24 hours. I fell asleep immediately but woke three hours later. Sigh......

We picked up our rental car and it was a beauty! John had secretly organised to get a convertible. Ok, so it was a VW but it was such fun!

With the wind whipping our hair we crossed the island. (I took this photo when we were stopped.)

I don't know if it's just because it's still very early summer, but the island was quite green. This isn't something we can say about many Greek islands. It was also very mountainous.

We drove past acres and acres of olive groves. Thyme bloomed pink, blanketing some hills.

Our destination was Mirtos, a small village on the south coast. We had to negotiate narrow roads through the village to reach our accommodation. Our room was simple but it was fine, although the hard mattress (which is so Greek!) made our sleeps quite uncomfortable.

We will have a week here and we concentrated on adjusting to the time zone and settling in to the Greek way of life. The village was more touristy than we expected. Beach umbrellas were lined up in rows on the dark, gravelly sand and tourists, mostly Germans, seemed to outnumber the locals. The locals we met were wonderful though. 

We found a great restaurant on our first night. The staff were friendly, the food was good and the cook had worked in Melbourne for a few years!

Strangely, John had just read about a Cretan wine in an Australian newspaper that day and there it was on the menu!

Cats hung around of course, and this mum and her four kittens slept there overnight as well.

We began our walking regime. We were going to bed so early that it was easy to get up early and walk before it got too hot. Oleanders lined some of the roads.

Someone told us about a walking book written by a local and we found a walk that went through a gorge nearby in it. It sounded perfect! We drove to the start then struggled to even find the path as the painted signs had worn off long ago. The book said things like, "You will have to climb/scramble over uneven surfaces" and "You might have to climb a little bit." What an understatement!

We entered the gorge and it was stunning. The walls ran up steeply from the gorge floor and the shallow river trickled beautifully through it. Only in Greece would irrigation pipes be allowed to sit idly inside the gorge!

Soon we had to start climbing over boulders. Sometimes there were ropes to use. Other times there were rough steps hacked into rocks. The problem was that, despite the fact that the rocks were dry, they were weirdly slippery. What began as an exciting challenge soon turned into something that we had to be very careful about, especially for John who is still easing back into exercise after his operation.

This boulder was wedged firmly off the ground.

Sometimes we had to squeeze through gaps.

Oleander plants added an unexpected splash of colour.

No doubt about it, it's a gorgeous gorge!

The ropes were very much appreciated.

We reached the top of the gorge and it was as pretty as a garden.

We climbed up a dirt road (ugghh, we didn't need more uphill!) and had fabulous views over the mountains and one of the villages.

Needless to say, we arrived home and jumped straight into the sea. The water is surprisingly cold though. We haven't been in Greece this early in the year before and it's amazing how much difference it makes to the water temperature. It's rivalling Apollo Bay!

The afternoon didn't go so well though. We both got tummy bugs. This is so unusual in Greece. Mine was fairly mild and didn't last long but John got quite knocked around by it. He spent the next day or two just chilling in the room. It's not the best room to be sick in with its hard bed and tiny, hit-your-head-on-the-ceiling dunny but it'll have to do!

'Til next time,

Heather and John

Indonesia - Raja Ampat 2 and Home!

We were so sad to leave our wonderful accommodation at Friwen Island, although we wouldn't miss things like the sheets not fitting the bed and riding up under us all night, or the toilet tank banging underneath the bungalow at every high tide!

We organised that we did our last snorkelling trip with that accommodation on the day we had to move to the next island and they dropped us off on the new island, called Kri, at the end of the day. Perfect!

Kri was our last significant stay for this trip and was the one that caused me the greatest amount of stress in the planning stages. I simply could not find a place that fit our criteria for that week. Friwen was booked out so we couldn't remain there. In the end, we bit the bullet and booked a diving resort place, at great expense. It was three times the price of our previous place and, as expected, was only a little better. But sometimes you've just got to accept that things don't always work the way you want and just enjoy the time there.

The accommodation was similar to that on Friwen - palm frond bungalows with no air-con, set over the water. They had a similar bio-tank system for the toilet but this time it was set at ground level, not underneath the bungalow, and we had no trouble with it.

We walked along a sandy track through the jungle to our bungalow. We saw a snake a couple of times! 

Trees with amazing buttress roots lined the path.

When we first arrived, we were given a run down of things by the effervescent Dolly. One thing she mentioned was to make sure we had no food in our rooms as there were plenty of jungle rats. I've never heard of a jungle rat and I figure that it's an elaborate name for a normal rat, lol. There was nowhere to put our bags in our room but there we had a family room so we had our bags on the spare beds. One day I went to get something out of my pack and a gazillion ants ran out of my gear. Some Strepsils had strangely fallen out of a sealed pack and were lying on the sheet with ants swarming all over them. It wasn't until a few days later, when we were packing to leave that I noticed a hole in my daypack. Then I looked closer and realised that rats had chewed through our good daypack and completely ruined it! Arrgghh!

Even though John dives, he's preferring to snorkel more lately, so we both went to the resort as snorkellers. We wondered if we would get looked down upon from the other divers but it wasn't like that at all. We were very fortunate to have a lovely German couple there for the whole week that we were there who were 'only' snorkelling too and we did all our trips together. They were great fun and we got on really well.

All meals were eaten together and we soon established groups. The four snorkellers and the two single people - one from Holland and one from Algeria - all usually sat together. We also spent time with a fabulous Spanish couple and a lovely Indian couple.

There were some beautiful sunsets.

A cuss cuss hung around near the restaurant in the evenings waiting to be fed.

People were feeding it bananas straight from their hands. John tried and here's what happened....

John was annoyed with one of the managers (seriously, she was useless!) and this was around the time we were thinking about our trip home and, for the first time on the trip, I just wanted to go home. Then it got sorted out and I didn't want to rush home any more, lol.

Kri is famous for having the most fish species counted in one dive in the world. The resort promotes this heavily of course. We took boat trips to many sites around the area and saw so much. We spent hours each day in the water!

To get taken out on a boat, we usually had to have a guide with us. This isn't the way we usually do things but we were happy to go with the flow. Our first guide did nothing but swim along with us. We got a different guide next time and he was much better, although none of them came anywhere near Rashid, the owner from our previous lodge.

The water was so warm! One of the divers told us that the lowest temperature their gauge ever read on a dive was 30 degrees - and that was a long way down!

We saw so many turtles!

There were also plenty of reef sharks.

Sometimes the sea was a seething mass of colourful fish.

Clown fish on an unusual striped anemone.

There were plenty of coral fans under our jetty and in other locations. I'm a bit in love with them!

A few lionfish lived under the jetty too.

Look closely - that's a crocodile fish. It's a member of the scorpion fish family and is a champion of camouflage. 

John under the water.

We visited a site called Five Islands. It was originally one small island but during WW2, someone thought it was a ship and bombed it! The result is that the island split into five sections, and it was great snorkelling between the broken walls. Sometimes, good things come from bad ones.

Fan coral grew between the split rocks and it was great fun to snorkel through the gaps.

This sea cucumber was like none I had seen before. It was a bit under a metre long and looked more like a land slug than a sea cucumber!

There were heaps of fairly tame batfish here.

At another spot nearby, sun rays shone down through the water. There was a mass of large fish at the bottom but they're not picked up in the photo.

One day we visited a nearby island. We jumped into the water and found ourselves surrounded not by fish, but by plastic bags. It was awful. This happened in a couple of places. Tides and currents would concentrate all the rubbish into particular places for a while. It was also sad that the resort staff tried to fob this off as being rubbish coming from other countries, but it was clearly mostly coming from locals.

On South Kri reef we saw a mixed school of fish that swam past us for ages. There must have been 500 fish in it!

There were the usual colourful reef fish which are always a delight to see.

The upmarket sister resort to ours was a hot and sweaty 25 minute hike through the jungle away. We went there one day to see a leopard shark breeding programme they were running there. To my surprise, it was really fascinating!

I bet you don't know what these are. They're shark eggs! They look and feel like large seed pods, so I can't imagine how a shark lays these!

Various tanks held young sharks at different ages. Considering these were being bred to be released into the wild, it was a very unnatural environment to be raising them in. The last stage though was where they lived in a fenced off enclosure in the sea.

On one of our trips, we somehow ended back on cat island again, where we had visited the previous week. The water was beautiful.

An unusual fish. I have no idea what it is!

A scorpion fish well camouflaged.

We saw schools of flute fish.

The divers were doing some night dives so we asked about night snorkelling. Yes, it was possible so just John and I plus the guide headed out. I thought it would be scary but it wasn't at all. And, of course, even though it was dark, the water was still warm!

It was so fascinating! Life under the water at night is so different. The fish are mostly sleeping but other creatures came out. We saw weird crabs and creatures in shells. A huge lobster scuttled across the coral trying to find a hole to hide in.

A cool lumpy, bumpy crab.

Hermit crab

I loved seeing shrimps out and about!

Different hermit crabs:

One thing in particular that we were searching for was a walking shark. These walk on their fins as they cross the floor. We saw three under ledges on the first night but we went out again with the Germans the next night and saw a great one. I had trouble with my camera though and only caught the last bit.

It's funny how you can visit the same site on different occasions and everything is different. We saw far less crabs the second night but saw the great walking shark and a huge moray eel that was totally out of its hole! Again, I had trouble getting a good photo though. This underwater night photography is all new to me!

A smaller moray that we found later.

We saw a few reef sharks but this one came straight at me! I think it was attracted by the torches. Once I realised that, I shone the torch away from me and it headed away. It was so close I could almost have touched it!

We got talking to an Aussie woman at our resort one night who looked like she was working. It turned out that they were holding a climate change conference at the sister resort with a spillover into our resort. The conference was run by an Aussie charity owned by Andrew Forrest and his ex-wife. They had a huge boat anchored nearby and even the tenders for the boat were flasher than any other boat we saw for the whole trip. Scientists were flown in from around the world for the conference. For some of them, it was a 40-hour trip each way for a three day conference. The irony of all those travel miles and usage of boats for a climate change conference was not lost on us.

Nonetheless, one night they had a dinner at our resort and the staff played some great music for them.

Considering that Kerry Stokes apparently turned up later, I'm not sure that those security guys joining in the music were doing much of a security job!

They used one of the decks on the jetty and it looked lovely at night.

We had kept in touch with Rashid from our previous accommodation and the English/Dutch girls that we did a trip with and, on our last full day, we organised another trip with Rashid. We figured it probably wasn't the done thing to do a boat tour with someone else when we're staying at a place that does boat tours so we told them we were going out for the day with friends, which was true.

It was great to catch up with everyone again and we had another amazing day

Three Germans joined the trip and, as we were boating along, one of the guys said he saw a manta, something we had been looking for a few times but not seen! His 'manta' turned out to be a floating log.....  So when he said he saw a whale spouting, there was some hesitation to believe him - until someone saw another one! I missed both of the spouts but saw a whale tail rise up majestically out of the ocean as the whale dived down. I was blown away. Most of the whales I've seen have been in really cold water. The sight of whales in this warm water just didn't make sense to me. Gosh, they must be tough creatures.

We visited Yenbuba again, a village with a great reef nearby. This time we thought we'd visit the village, not just the reef. The jetty was really long and it was only once we were part way along it that we realised how hot the boards were. We ended up running between small patches of shade but I found the next day that I had burnt feet!

The church there was very colourful.

Back underwater, the reef was amazing. A huge bump-headed wrasse hung out under the jetty where people fed the fish.

The water teemed with fish!

John checking out the jetty from the sea bed.

A unicorn fish. Fish come in such a variety of shapes and colours!

Barracuda always look a bit sinister I feel.

Again, we saw so may turtles here! John counted five in one place, all sleeping on the bottom near each other. 

Coming up from a turtle visit.

This site was a popular location for boats to visit and, for the first time, I felt that the sea life, particularly the turtles, were being over-impacted by divers and snorkellers. I thought it was just ok that Rashid got quite close to them to film them as it was never for long, however I watched as Rashid finished filming and came to the surface. As soon as he did, some divers arrived and got close to the same turtles. Then another snorkel group arrived. Then another diving group. Whoa! That's too much!

We visited an island that was different to most of the others. It was a sand island and looked like something you'd picture when someone mentions "deserted island". Palm trees lined the shore and lush forest stood behind. Apparently, there's a resort on the other side of the island and the whole place is for sale. For $2 million you can buy the resort but you can only lease the island. 

There was lots of lovely coral here and millions of tiny, colourful fish!

I found him, lucky fin and all!

Our boat on the perfect beach.

An abandoned, and leaning, lighthouse lurched precariously nearby.

Amazing soft coral feeding

On our last morning I snuck in a quick snorkel around the jetty but many jellyfish were there so I didn't last long!

Finally it was time to start the journey home and I think we were ready to go home. The trip home took a day longer than originally planned as Garuda cancelled a flight on us which left us with no option but to spend an extra night on the way to make flight connections work.

Our trip home began with a hot and sweaty speedboat ride to Sorong with two guests from our resort's exclusive sister resort. They were two young Aussie pilots, and we talked a lot about how hard it was for them to afford a house. The irony wasn't lost on us that they had just spent a week or two at a very expensive resort....

Sorong was a town of rusty rooves and rough roads and it seemed to be slowly melting into oblivion.

Rashid had told us that we must eat at his friend's pizzeria in Sorong. Everyone that we spoke to loved the place so we had to go, despite me just wanting Indonesian food. I loved the blurb on the bottom of the menus!

We were advised to have the cheesy burgers. They were huge and came with a bowl of melted cheese sauce! It was all so decadent and surprisingly good.

We then flew to Bali and stayed at Jimbaran, not far from the airport. We walked along the beach to stretch our legs. It wasn't much of a beach really and there were soooo many people there! We had a last drink and ate dinner at a restaurant on the sand watching a cloudy sunset. 

We watched in amazement as singers went around to each table. They would sing a song and the people would pay. There were a surprising number of tourists from the Gulf countries there. The singers would first ask where the people were from then, amazingly, they sung songs in their language! We heard Arabic, Mandarin, English, Bahasa and Spanish, and that was just at six different tables at our beach restaurant. I'd love to know how many languages they can sing in!

On our way back we passed a funeral parade. It seemed strangely traditional in among the tourists and hotels.

In a way, our last night in Bali finished the trip on a sad note. We saw so much rubbish on the beach here. The worst part was where a large group must have gathered and they drunk water from plastic cups. The cups were strewn all over the beach. The next morning we were in a more local area and this time it was blue plastic that seemed to be dumped on the sand. This, together with the horrific dumping of rubbish in the sea that we saw at Sorong the week earlier, really drove home the problem we face with plastics, both on the land and in the sea.

Reflecting back on our five months, it was another truly wonderful trip. Tunisia was interesting. I don't need to go back but I'm really glad we went. We saw many amazing sights here, both historical (amazing ancient ruins) and not quite as old (Star Wars locations). Like Indonesia, they had a plastic problem in places though.

Greece was awesome as usual. Unfortunately, we copped the heatwave that affected most of Europe. We went to the mountains to escape the heat but the heat just followed us. John's big bike crash caused some ongoing issues and he now has to get his hand checked out at home asap. We will definitely be back - in fact we have a week at Halki booked already! 

Moldova was interesting but we allowed too long in such a small country. It's the first time we've found ourselves killing time on one of these trips.

Indonesia was beautiful, both above and underneath the water. But the plastic problem is huge here.

Thanks for joining us on this journey. We've loved reading your comments and knowing you're enjoying the trip with us in a way.

We look forward to seeing you soon!

Heather and John :)