Cretanous Chronicles

To avoid the heat we spent a day crossing Crete by car, loving the wild mountains, remote villages and teeming flowers of the deserted south. We offroaded to an empty beach near Paleochora where, at 5pm, it was safe to slather on the sunscreen and take refuge in the sea.

On one of our last days we were antiquity deprived so headed for Knossos, home of the Minotaur and a truly ancient palace complex, near the Iraklion. One of the great things about Crete is its size: you can get round the island on great roads (ah, another big tick for the EU!) pretty quickly. 10 minutes out of Chania is countryside. Just a couple of hours take you from Chania to Knossos, though they don’t exactly advertise its whereabouts, considering how important it is. Though Knossos is incredible, it did find us cursing the Brits almost as much as Athens. Elgin nicked all the marble from the Parthenon and shoved it in the British Museum, a travesty, but it pales into insignificance compared with what Evans did at Knossos. He basically decided not just to conserve it but to recreate it, and used one heck of a lot of plaster and worse, artistic licence without much regard for accuracy. So, you see intact red columns and frescos of the minotaur and blokes holding grapes, but much of it is 19th century and the product of his imagination. Archaeology at its worst, surely, and not as stunning as I remembered it. It does have the oldest road in Europe though and is mindboggling big.

In our last attempt to recapture the past we drove all round the Souda peninsula west of Chania to find the tiny village we had stayed in 30 years ago. Fears of rampant development were quickly quelled, thank goodness. We found the beach at Horafakia, Stavros beach where they filmed Zorba the Greek, the site of our villa and amazing scrub-meets-mountain-meets-sea scenery. Our last stop before the ferry back to Greece was a tiny monastery high in the hills where you can find true tranquillity amongst the olive groves. All this just a few kilometres from the bustle and tourism of pretty Chania – Crete remains wonderful.

The ferry back marked more than just a goodbye to Crete; it was our last night with Mum. The sunset and the islands were spectacular against a calm sea, and these ferries are brilliant. You do all your sailing from sunset to dawn on a great boat, and the staff are casual to the point of carelessness! No queue system or passports here. You turn up and drive on, unless you’re “hmm … very high” as we were deemed with roofbox. Poor Joe had to sit at each port both to and from Crete and Italy, waiting for someone to slot him in (usually reversing precariously!) between the lorries in whatever hole was left. Still, the system works, somewhat haphazardly, and the boats themselves are some of the best we have been on. And that’s a few – 46 different vessels and journeys (no, we aint counting both legs of ferries) this year.

It was good to have a rest from camping and Mum was free from her minute tent for a good long while, as the next day we drove back to Patra for our different ferries to Italy. The goodbyes were long and difficult, made more so as we had to do them twice! Poor Mum went onto the ramp to board her ferry to Bari, only to be told she wasn’t allowed in yet … only cars. She had to come back and spend another hour with us, and this time we didn’t repeat the long and emotional goodbyes, she just slipped off. But it wasn’t our last sight of the departing Queen of Sheba. At six o’clock both our boats were due to leave, both in the same direction though ours was to dock south, at Brindisi. Mum’s left on time, and we scanned and scanned her huge ship for a waving figure. Finally, we saw her, and we all waved ourselves silly until she was way out to sea. It had been a fantastic holiday – and it really felt like a holiday rather than travelling, something that was both good and also weird. We were ready to continue travelling in earnest, with less beach and more discovery, but it was strange to be just five again. We now needed some cooler weather and some of the best cuisine in the world.