Balos Beach
So we arrived on Crete a few days ago in a huge ugly city called Iraklio. Just the size and the site of the city made it unfathomable, and we looked for the nearest bus station out of there. All we wanted to do was find a room somewhere being eight in the morning with no sleep. We got on a bus to Knossos, which I remembered had a massive palace we wanted to check out. On the way over Dawson opened one our books to read about it and informed me that Knossos is not a town, its just the Palace. We’ll check out the palace later, we got on the next bus back to Iraklio.
We ended up staying in a city along the coast, Rithymno. I found a Mexican restaurant there! Ya I should be enjoying Greek cuisine to its fullest, but if you know me at all then you understand. Even Dawson agrees it was amazing… Not even the biggest grocery stores here have tortillas let alone beans of any kind.
We are in Hania now for our third day. It’s another city along the coast, but much more appealing. It is very Venetian in the way of the streets, and the water surrounding everything.
There are a couple beaches here that we had to visit, according to Lonely Planet. We cant get to either of them by bus, so we rented a car for two days.
Let me tell you about driving in Greece. First of all Dawson made me drive, which was probably a good idea on his part givin the circumstances. Imagine one road, a narrow or slightly big road, no lines, and a million cars. Nobody is obligated to be on a certain side, and there is no limit as to how many cars can be side by side. People are weaving all around traffic... no signals. Pedestrians are jumping out of nowhere and motorcycles are in every blind-spot. Lets just call it a cluster of maniacs.
We went to one beach yesterday called Elafonisi. It is in the most south western part of Crete, the closest point to Africa. Very pretty, my only complaint is that the wind made it cold and when we sat on one of the many lawn chairs a man came up and tried to charge five euros... for a lawn chair.
Today we went to Balos, which is at the tip of the northwest. Our car barley made it... The only road to Balos was a narrow, rough gravel road, to the left of it was mountains with mountain goats, and to the right was steep cliffs down to the ocean. People were ditching there cars and walking the rest of the way, for us, we shredded our rental all the way there. Once we parked at the end of the road there was a 45 minute hike down to the beach. Balos was worth it... The view is shocking when you finally turn a corner and see it. We stayed all day and on our way back to the car we got stopped by some travelers from Holland who had ditched there car and we gave them a ride. They kept telling us how brave we were to take our tiny little car on that nasty road, considering there was another rental parked next to us with two flat tires.
Both beaches had islands so close that you could walk through the water to get to them, and the deepest it got was waste high. It was so clear you could see the bottom and fish swimming along with you.
K well keep in touch... miss everyone!! Especially my niece Rylee!!
I want to write a little note to my dad, he was worried about us coming over here in the circumstances of our country. Everyone should know that the Greeks are so welcoming. Hospitality is everywhere. All they want is for us to feel at home.
This thing is hard to post pictures on sometimes!! So ill post more pics later.
HAPPY HALLOWEEN!!
