2nd June 1984 - Swiftly through Samaria Gorge, Crete

Saturday 2^nd June I got up just after six, had my yoghurt, packed , said goodbye to the sleepy Kiwis, walked off to the bus stop and waited there with some Cretan ladies for about twenty minutes. At the bus station in Hania I bought a round trip ticket and got on the bus at 8.30.

   The bus took just under 1½ hours to reach Omalos/Xilascala, climbing up into the mountains – the White ones – of spectacular views, pretty villages and bendy roads. There were still patches of snow on some of the mountain tops – though not as much as in Austria, of course. Orange trees, the white houses of the village of Lakki with their red roff tyles (topesettink fiddiculties), the prominent church with its blue dome [though it now seems to have a red tiled dome], olive trees in lines.

Church in he Village of Lakki

   The village of Omalos lies in a plateau surrounded by mountains, and the reason that it’s not a lake is that there is massive underground pit, the cave of Tzanis.

   A short way from Omalos is the tourist pavilion of Xilascala (Xyloscallo – spelling changes a lot in Greek translation). Here is the start of the “wooden staircase”, a long winding path of over two kilometres down the side of the mountain, to the Church of St Nicholas. The gorge entrance is still about another two kilometres. The whole length of the track is eighteen kilometres from Xyloscalo to the ferry jetty in Agia Roumeli.

   Now, I had to be back in Chania by 7.00pm because that’s when the baggage store at the bus station closes and it’s not open on Sundays, so I therefore had to catch the ferry in A. Roumeli at 2.00 to link up with the bus to Hania that got back in time. The walk usually takes 5-8 hours, depending on which source you read. [Or time of year - longer in mid-summer, I suspect.] I did it in 3 hours 40 minutes, arriving in A.R. at 1.40pm. The boat didn’t leave until 2.30.

    There are a number of springs along the path and at the bottom when you finish climbing down Xylascala is a fast-flowing stream through the grey rocks (they’re yellow in the water and blue in any pools – very inviting). There are mostly cypress trees, but a few deciduous trees like what I think are plane trees which alleviate the dark green with their lightness. There are also many wildflowers, purple and yellow. The plane trees might actually be holm oak trees. There are also pines. I’m not very good at floral or arboreal nomenclature.

   Somewhere before the gorge entrance the water disappears to somewhere – it goes underground or down a plastic pipe, and then there are only the grey rocks in the riverbed. But still the side of the mountains are steep and afford spectacular views.

  The village of Samaria is just inside the entrance of the gorge and used to be where the woodcutters lived. But it was abandoned in 1962 when the area was created a national park; so now the buildings are ruins except for the warden’s place and a couple of churches further down. (To get to it you have to cross a wooden bridge over the gully.)

  It’s certainly a great walk, even if done rapidly. The gorge can be as little as four metres wide at some places; and there are tremendous rock slides (rocks fallen from 300m), half cones of rock piled against the walls; and incredible formations in the strata of the sedimentary rock which has been twisted and verticalized. Down near the bottom and out the exit grows a lot of that pink flower I can’t remember the name of, but it was growing near Killarney in Ireland on the Kerry Ring. [See the Ireland Diary, which I didn’t write.] Oh, it’s OLEANDER!

  The actual village of Agra Roumeli is mostly ruins but there are still a few houses amongst the olive trees still inhabited. Walking along the shady footpath through the village feels like a Western [movie] set in a deserted ruined Pueblo in Mexico (don’t ask me which one).

   There’s still a little way to go before arriving at the modern Agra Roumeli, which is mostly establishments thrown over to the victualing of tourists trade. The valley broadens, there are caves in the mountain sides and the ruins of Tarra, an old fortress in a lofty position overlooking the sea, and the grey beach backed by evidence of massive rock slides. I bought a ticket for the boat and had souvlaki for lunch.

    The boat trip, on the Sofia, took about an hour to Chora Sfakion (Sfakia) over the most incredible two blues of sea I have seen and past sheer mountain slopes plunging into the water. Incredible.

  [I was one of 25,745 people to visit Samaria Gorge in June, 1984, according to the statistics (though they don't mention me by name, for some reason). More than twice that number in August.]

   The bus was waiting for us at Sfakia and then climbed hairpin bends up into the mountains – more spectacular views and pretty villages, and another ravine I wouldn’t like to walk down.

   Along the road – an old man sleeping on a wall in the shade of an olive tree; women sitting in their gardens; two women digging for something with knives in a wild field while a man watched leaning against a car (in the shade); goats and sheep and a few donkeys.

   Bus drivers bleat their horns a lot, especially before going around corners. A delighting village is Vrisses, about 30km from Hania, with its shady streets and stream a-flowing through (though there were a lot of buses there for some reason).

  We arrived back in Hania at about 5.00 and I picked up my baggage and looked for a pension – one for 400Dr near the harbor. I had a shower, washed some clothes, wrote a little and went back to yesterday’s café for dinner. More moussaka. Halfway through, the four Kiwis turned up to have their dinner at the same place. Meanwhile, at the nearest corner of the quay, members of KKE (communists) were preparing a rally, which included a video, some of which were excerpts from ‘Modern Times’ (Chaplin). (In Greek towns – Athens, Hania, Iraklion – they have loudspeaker systems on some street corners where they play mostly music but some speeches as well).

   Swift swallows swooped back and forth over the quay buildings as the sun set – there were a lot of them. I finished my dinner, went promenading, bought some postcards and went back to the pension to bed.