Lost in Greece: Irini or something, a tale of two tales

Got a tad more sleep last night, better than the previous 2, woke up basically on time to catch our taxi for the hike today. Went by the super market and found out that the buses actually came through this morning, which is great for everyone but us, because had we take the bus we’d have saved 20 bucks.

Oh well

So the nice young boy took us up to Aria Irini, a cute little village north of Sougia, high in the hills but not Omalos high, if you know what I mean. Because the Samaritan Gorge was closed, we had hike this one, which is about 1.2 the distance 7.5 km, and has a total elevation change of about 600 meters which is again 1\2 of the Samaritan gorge. All in all we though we were ok doing a different gorge because there are a lot of gorges on Crete and we’d like to do as many as we can.

So 9 am we’re dropped off at the top, we have the whole place to ourselves. The path runs next to a gentle stream, and for the first 1km is flat and beautiful. It was cool and there was a pleasant breeze. Eventually the path opted up and you could see the high mountains above us, and a series of switchbacks took us down. There were a number of ups and downs, landslides and trees and very high mountains. At 4 km ran into our first Germans coming the other way. Grumpy, sad, bullshit Germans who look like they havn’t shit since ww2.

We were chugging along and by 11 had gone 4 km. The temperature changed at one point and it got hot, though I think there was still a bit of a breeze. We ran into our second bullshit German couple coming up at km marker 5 and I know this because they wouldn’t get out of my shot. I didn’t see any people until we got to the road.

After 6 dkm, there was 1 km plus a bit more before the end of the actual gorge trail. The was a cute little cafe that had beer and ice cream and we went oh, we’re still a ways from Sougia. A tiny road lead away from the parking lot, and down it we went, following next to the river bed, and hugging the cliffs on the other side. This tiny road lead to the main road of Sougia where we say our 3rd grumpy as fuck German couple, we think who had been in fron of us on the trail, but we didn’t stop to check, and hurried down the road to Sougia were we quickly sat down at academy for some lunch.