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