Rome to Athens to Crete

Hotel Porto del Colombo, Hania

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Early, early on Tuesday morning (the alarm was set for 5.15am....where's that sleep-in?!) we were up and heading back to the train station for the trip out to the airport. Goodbye Italy, hello Greece…..and our first destination, Crete.

This ended up being another basically full day of travel, with a flight from Roma to Athens, a 3 hour wait at Athens airport, and then a one hour flight to Chania, on the western side of Crete. As you would expect, Toni passed the time in Athens airport with a little shopping and is now the proud owner of a pair of sunglasses, the size of which she never thought she’d own (and the price of which Dwayne is still recovering from...). It seems that in the Mediterranean you must wear sunglasses that cover your entire face – well she couldn’t go that far, but these things are pretty big, and very bling…!

We got to our hotel at around 5.00pm – first challenge, though, was to find it… The taxi driver took us to the end of a narrow pedestrian mall and said “it’s at the end of the road, this is as far as I can take you”. Well it wasn’t actually at the end of the road - it was at the end of the road, around the corner, around another corner, down several steps, and around another corner. Phew!

We were assigned Room 8 (of 10 rooms), and informed this was on the 3^rd floor. On the 3^rd floor, however, means hauling suitcases up three flights of a circular staircase. This hotel, like many others in this area, is an old restored Venetian building, characterized by circular staircases and no lifts. Important point to remember if you’re ever coming this way…

Anyway, we settled in and immediately forgot the climb when we saw the view from our room. As I type these notes in our room I can look out our window to the harbour – absolutely glorious. The whole area is geared towards tourists, with hotels everywhere and the pedestrian walkway around the harbour bordered by restaurants and souvenir shops. Tacky and over-commercialised in a way, but really buzzy all the same and most things are close by and walking distance which is great. For instance it was only a 5 minute stroll to the bus station where we would be catching the bus early the next morning for our trip to the start of the Samaria Gorge – which will be covered in a separate entry.