Chania (Quickly)

Very exciting picture of the glass bottomed boat.

I haven't had a chance to update in the last couple of days, so I'll try to keep this one quick so I can keep on top of it.

The small part of Samaria Gorge I saw.

After Heraklion I headed west to the town of Chania. This place used to be the island's capital. I also discovered that I should have researched it a little better before I came. It's another nice town fortified by the Venetians - all round a lot like Heraklion, and I did a nice half hour tour on a glass-bottomed boat - but as it turns out nearby there is a spectacular gorge to visit, called Samaria Gorge. The problem was it takes an hour to get there by bus and at least three hours to walk, and the buses don't drive very regularly. I only had one night in Chania and I had to catch a plane from Heraklion to Rhodes the next day. So basically I did the "poor man's" Samaria gorge, similar to my Poor Man's Gap of Dunloe. I took the bus as quarter past six and returned with the nine thirty bus, giving me about an hour to stumble as far down the gorge as I could and slog like an idiot back up. It was still very nice, but I didn't even see the best part of the gorge - where the rocky sides go straight up for three hundred metres. Vertically. Well, next time I suppose.

PS: I wanted to put this in somewhere, but due to my abridged post I'll add it as a post script. At the bus station in Chania, waiting for the bus to take me to Samaria there was a deranged beggar woman (I've always wondered if they're deranged bcause they're beggars, or beggars because they're deranged), yelling at nothing. I almost expected her to start shouting "buggrit buggrit, I told 'em, millenium hand and shrimp".