Sougia Julia

A wonderful morning, in beautiful Sougia, it’s such a wonderful village and the people are so kind.  We may try a new place for dinner tonight, I am craving sardines.

So we went over to the coffee shop and got some giant pastries for breakfast and then waited for the boat to Agia Roumeli at 9:20.  We walked down to the pier and bought our round trip tickets and waited with quite a collection of very old humans who looked like they needed a walker and not a gorge hike.

We jumped on the Samaria 1, which is a boat we’ve seen in Paleochastro sitting in the harbor, but have never ridden.  It’s a good sized boat and there were maybe 30 of us making the journey, though it seemed like someone them would continue to Loutro or Chora Sfakia, because they had suitcases.

40 minutes later we were docking at Agia Roumeli, and headed down the long 2 k path to the Samaria Gorge.  This 2k is a very contentious path, because a lot of people finish the gorge and then are fairly pissed they have another 2k to walk to the boats.  It’s fine really, add it to your total distance, for us today it was 14k, which is pretty fucking sweet considering I couldn't even walk 2 months ago and today I felt pretty darn good.  I’m just gonna post a bunch of pictures, because to describe the walk to you would not do it justice, much like these pictures barely scratch the surface.  It’s a religious experience that we have now done twice two different ways.  It was marvelous both time.  since we were hiking from the bottom, we had a lot of time by ourselves, until people who started at the top started coming through.  we made a point of saying hello to them as they passed us, it was funny to me.

We’ll go have dinner tonight and pack up as we have to leave Crete tomorrow at 9 am from the Chania airport, which is a 1:45 drive from Sougia.  No Bueno.  I’ll be back online from Ioannina tomorrow.

there was an ominous red moon this evening.  no bueno.