28. Rethymno to Heraklion

The main road along the North coast of Crete…is big…and fast! So we opted to detour inland…and onto the ‘old’ road! 

Great decision…as we biked up and down all day on empty roads. Never exceeding 400m…but it turned into a big double-ton  climbing day!

Snow on Crete’s biggest mountain (Mount Ida at around 2,500 metres!)

….and then to the tiny village of Makrigiannis…

…where a table sat outside a house…suggesting it might be a cafe.

And opposite an old lady imploring us to stop to buy oranges. 

So we stopped! 

And her ladyship hobbled across the road…”cafe”? she asked.

She would be 90 at least! With a big toothy grin.

No Cappuccinos or Frappe’s here. Just plain old Greek coffee. A grainy thick sweet brew more akin to Turkish coffee. Not my favourite…but when the coffee alarm rings…almost anything works!

Plus water of course.

And then oranges! Which she proceeded to deftly peal for us. Delicious!

We were feeling a bit sorry for her. How many customers might she get in a day? What..one euro for a greek coffee….a couple of euros for a bag of oranges?

So we decided to buy a bag…to help her out. Iain went across…with the only cash we had…one five euro note…and one ten euro note. 

She grabbed the ten euro note….and then implied she had no change…so indicated to Iain to take a packet of walnuts instead.

Iain duly obliged.

Whereupon…our poor old lady…grabbed the five euro note too!!!

Iain had been done like a dog’s dinner…by a hustling centenarian!! It was a classic sleight of hand….for anywhere else on Crete, the cost should have been no more than five euros!

We just laughed………she smiled knowingly…..and then we did not worry about the fact that she might only get one costumer a day!! Classic!

Our Google ‘walking route’ then took us down a very good quality dirt road for some kms…before we came across a gate…and a security guard…who looked just delighted in a way….for this really was in the middle of nowhere! And we were the first cyclists he had seen in years. A true jobsworth of course! No…we could not go through his gate. Even though…just 100m further on there was another gate…beyond which our road carried on!!

No English of course…but he found someone who could explain to us that the second gate was for the exclusive use of staff!! This guy also could not understand why the plonker of a security guy could not let us through. But…they are the rules!! (It was the construction site of a large electricity sub-station).

So…14km away from Agia Pelagia…suddenly became 32km!!

It was a nice ride though……and we arrived down on the coast…for lunch here!!!

Haha…the very same place I had rented two years ago, and which Martin had remembered and had booked for a post-ride week with Marion!

The ride onwards to Heraklion on the main toad was largely uneventful…..except when we were pulled over by the police! “No bikes on this road…too dangerous”…they advised!! All a bit surprising…given there had been no signs suggesting bikes were not allowed…and we were cycling along a hugely wide shoulder which to my mind is always safer than almost any other road!! He could hardly tell us to go back. So he just said…”next time, you must not use this road”. Thank you, officer!

And so to Heraklion. (Funny how the English name puts an “H” at the beginning. The Greeks do too…but a Greek “H” is an “I”. So why not Iraklion…much more correct)

This is a place I have usually tried to avoid really. For no good reason…but it always seems a bit of a dump. We were cycling through urban sprawl for at least 10kms (& that is just from one side of the city)..so it was surprising to learn that the population is only 230,000 or so. I had guessed at least 600,000 which is in fact the population of the whole of Crete.

But we needed to stay here tonight…with our ferry departing at 8am tomorrow. Good apartment..very central…and after our double-tonner the beers and gyros tasted as good as ever!!