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Towards The End Of Crete
We do like to mix it up a bit when it comes to accommodation on our travels, and aim for a bit of variety. Large hotels with small spaces and big prices aren’t really our thing, but pretty much anything else is fair game. So after apartments in Hania, Thessaloniki and Korinthos, a small family hotel in Delphi, and an “aparthotel” in Agios Nikolaos, we both find ourselves beaming from ear to ear as we drive up the steep unmade road to our next base in the village of Palaiokastro, just a short drive from the eastern coastline of Crete. For the next few days we are based in a…
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Agios Nikolaos: Lepers & Lotus Eaters
About 50 years ago in the early 1970s, I used to watch, with my parents, a TV series called The Lotus Eaters which I recall as being very watchable. That series was set here in our next base, Agios Nikolaos, towards the eastern end of Crete. I figured I was one of only a handful of people to remember the programme, yet on our very first walk around the town upon arrival, we find the very bar where it was filmed, still with a commemorative board at its entrance. The title of that series is actually taken from Greek mythology, whereby those who ate the fruit of the lotus lost…
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Crete: More Of The Western End
Dawn is greeted at our apartment in the same way as it is throughout Hania, with the cacophonous rasping of a billion cicadas, in all our travels we haven’t ever heard a day-long chorus at a decibel level such as this. But dawn also heralds consistency: August in Crete is a delight of clear blue skies throughout the day, we are yet to see our first real cloud in seven days here. Mercifully though the heat is less intense than during the heatwave on the mainland: days here have varied between 32 and 38 but the cooling Meltemi wind blows in each afternoon to make every day just simply lovely.…
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Crete: The Western End
We’re sure lots of travellers do this, but we have a tendency to give nicknames to bars and cafes rather than call them by their real name. This nickname may be governed by the location (bus bar or corner bar) or by what we ate or drank (fish bar or aperol bar) or something we saw or heard there (dog bar, tree bar, reggae bar). So we begin our last evening on Serifos at Ugly Woman Bar, gazing out over the evening waters and wishing we were staying longer. But events outside of our control have brought about a rethink and we are off to a new destination. Our journey…
