Western Crete--from north to south

Paleohora, Pithari,
and Kallivia (Iraklion Prefecture)

We roused ourselves at 6 a.m. on Monday, about the time a
nearby herd of goats makes its early descent from the stony ledges above our
house, with their symphony of tinkling bells, the growing racket of hooves
against rocks, the approaching snorts and bleats, as the sun rises from ocean,
making its way above the scrub-land to the east. By prior agreement, the
children stumbled with us speechless to the rental car, their day packs set up
from the previous evening—towels, swimsuits, computers, reading materials all
at the ready.

We drove through Hania, picked up the so-called “National
Road” heading west: a terrifying two-lane improvement over the old road, with
only a few sections of center divider and a narrow breakdown lane that is used
to force slower vehicles to the margins while faster vehicles (including
over-packed agricultural vehicles) overtake them. We strove to maintain 140
kph, despite a cacophony of backseat objections, exiting the highway 30 km east
of the city. We then headed due south, crossing the mountainous spine of
western Crete, negotiating hairpin turns, passing flocks of goats and sheep,
giving way to occasional careening sports car and kamikaze
motorcyclist—arriving at our destination, Paleohora, on the Libyan Sea, within
an hour and half.

The last major town before Paleohora is Kandanos, which the
Germans exterminated and leveled during
World War II, in retribution for the “murder” (i.e., self-defense) of 24 German
soldiers. The town square includes several reminders of this act of barbarity,
including an exact copy of the Third Reich’s original plaque marking the event:
“At this site, once stood the town of Kandanos, which exists no more and will
never be rebuilt.” A few feet away a wall lists the names of the village who
were massacred there in 1943—men, women, and children ranging in ages from 16
to 87. Of course, the town was indeed rebuilt and thrives today.

Paleohora itself does not lend itself to much poetic
description, but the beaches that stretch east, several kilometers from town on
a gravely track, are brilliantly clean—most with a plethora of brightly
colored, polished stone, and the last section with fine grayish sand. But like
several other places of such austere beauty, a sort of “second occupation” has
occurred in recent years, a god-forsaken proliferation of beach chairs, umbrellas, and the usual
bric-a-brac that accompanies development of any kind. Thankfully, all of this is
right-sized construction of two or three story buildings. And none of it
detracts from the ocean’s magnificence.

Almost anywhere along southern Crete, the ocean color and
quality is without compare anywhere in the world—crystal clean, aquamarine,
with visibility at tremendous depths. Whenever we swim out from shore, we
engage in one of our favorite fantasies: we are swimming, without any
obstruction, directly to Egypt. Or, with some deviation, directly to Libya.

The following morning, back in Suda/Hania, we drove from our
house to the nearby village of Pithari, where in 1892 Jonathan’s grandmother
was born (as were all of her 15 siblings) and where the family house, several
hundred years old, still exists. We found the graves of her parents, Manoli and
Anna, who were both born before 1850 and are still remembered by the local
people generations later. The Comatsoulakis family is well known throughout
Hania, a city of 60,000, and those 16 children resulted in a widespread and
diverse family tree. We are being fed by many of those branches!

On Wednesday morning, now having defied anything approaching
normal sleep cycles, the five of us set off on the “National Highway”—which, by
necessity, remains permanently in quotations—for Rethymon, Crete’s third
largest city on the north coast—and like Hania to the west and Iraklion to the
east, a city steeped in many thousands of years of history. As we approached
from the west, in the first light of morning, we spied the well-preserved
Venetian castle on the heights. Skirting most of central Rethymon, we cut south
toward the Libyan Sea, our destination the small village of Kallivia in the
Kofinas region. Getting there required negotiating an endless series of hairpin
turns, ascents and descents, and some breathtaking vistas.

This is a remarkably abundant olive-growing region and a
place seemingly unmolested by rampant tourism, steeped in traditional Cretan
values of family, religion, and vibrant agriculture. We thought that the
Kalamata region (Messenia in the southern Peloponnese, where we lived in 2009) was
a “forest” of olive groves, but this area’s olive cultivation is on an even
larger scale. Our drive took us through the rather grimey trading towns of
Timbaki, Mires, and Agi Deka and then into an impossibly large valley with
literally millions and millions of olive trees and vineyards, surrounded by
desolate mountain ranges with dizzying heights (8,000--foot elevation). It felt
like we were driving through California’s Central Valley, for the agricultural
richness, but with a desolate backdrop of the Hindu Kush and a smattering of
the Gobi Desert.

Our old Athens friends Akis and Mania, and their lovely
four-year-old daughter Lydia, rescued us from a nearby village as we became
hopelessly lost in a maze of roads. (The old Downeast saw—“you can’t get there
from here”—might also apply in this region, but in the opposite sense. There
are multiple tracks that lead to practically every village, so asking for
directions or using a map, which we attempted dutifully, seems an act of
futility.) We followed our friends to Mania’s parents’ house, enjoyed
refreshments and a tour of the gardens, and then set off in a convey to their
swimming beach, called Tsousouras, down a switchback mountain road that leads
to the Libyan Sea. It proved well worth the effort: connecting with our friends
and swimming for several hours on this gorgeous, sandy beach. At 5 p.m. we set
off on a track further east to the village of Dermatos, for a late lunch, and
then retraced our track back toward Tsousouras—seduced by another swim at 7 p.m.,
then a coffee on the waterfront, we were late in leaving. Our late departure
put us on some dangerous roads at night, which we had hoped to avoid in our
tired state. By the time we returned to the Suda Bay exit, just east of Hania,
our nerves were utterly frayed by the journey. We had a meal at midnight, overlooking
Suda, and found our way back to the village of Marathi and bed by 1 a.m. This
was our earliest night in a week. As we clasped our veranda shutters, the beach
party was just warming up below.