Gorge – ous!
We tend to book our travel destinations a long time in advance – working in education, we both know when our holidays are going to be for two or three years ahead, we have a list of places we’d like to go to and have learned that the cheapest way to book flights is the day they open. So it would have been last May that we booked our flights to Crete. One of the things that attracted us to Crete was the Samaria Gorge, at 16 km, the longest in Europe and a popular, all day hike. We both very much wanted to walk its length before emerging onto the beach and sea. However, we book early with a vague idea of what we want to do, then research at a more leisurely pace as the holiday approaches. This time, this strategy failed us! The Samaria gorge is only open between 1st May and 31st October (for safety reasons – in the other months, too much water flows through it, making it unsafe to traverse.)
However, a bit of googling before we left home revealed a short gorge walk not far from where we were staying in Rethymno, Mili (or Mily) gorge, so named as it is full of abandoned water mills. Finding out how to get there was a little difficult – one option we found was to use the red hop-on-hop-off tourist bus, but this would be 20 euros each, and there wasn’t much else on the route to see that we hadn’t already visited. So we asked at the bus station, and they suggested getting the bus to Chromonastiri, which we decided to do (2 euros each) These buses don’t run often – every three hours or so, and don’t trust google! The times given to us on the sheet at the bus station where correct, google was out by over an hour! Anyway, we found the bus, waited in the glorious sunshine for its arrival, before boarding what was little more than a minibus for the 20 minute journey. We got off before Chromonastiri at bus stop that the hop on hop off bus used – it was pretty obvious this was an entrance to the gorge, and headed down some steps into a beautiful, lush green world.
The walk was lovely, pictures nor words will do it justice. There was a well marked and maintained stoney trail to follow, although we did occasionally divert of the track and scramble down to the waters edge, to marvel at gushing waterfalls and gaze into deep, clear pools.
It was a lovely walk, trending down hill, but there was the odd bit of uphill as you crisscrossed the river. We did spot the odd Croc wearer, but I would recommend trainers as the footwear of choice and a reasonable level of fitness and agility would be needed, but certainly do-able by most, children included. Towards the end of the trail, we came to the Banana Tavern were we had a drink and light lunch in what seemed like a tropical oasis.
We did then make a mistake in navigating our way out of the gorge and ended up taking a very pretty, but unnecessary detour through a field of olive trees and yellow daisies.
Doubling back on ourselves, after an extra 30 mins and a few kilometres, we got back on track to walk back to Rethmyno. The first half of this walk was a pleasant stroll on a very minor road, but as we neared the town, the roads got busier, and much less scenic, until we hit the beach. And that was still not the end of it as the beach is long, and it felt like miles as we walked back to the old town. Beautiful and serene, looking out into the infinity of the ocean, but with aching limbs, by this point we just wanted a sit down, an ice-cream and to get back to our apartment.
Forgive the pun, but it was a gorge-ous walk, a lovely way to spend a Spring day in Rethmyno.
