We had a late start Wednesday morning, exploring Chania’s old town harbor. It is extremely venetian and a bit claustrophobic, with old buildings leaning out into cobblestone streets. It looks like we are in Italy (she presumed, never having been to Italy). Shops line the harbor, there are plentiful gelato places, and we can buy kitschy souvenirs like there’s no tomorrow. Cars are not really allowed in old town on the cobblestone streets (unless you are driving deliveries for the business, in which case, the world’s your oyster). It’s a great place to walk around aimlessly and shop.
The driving streets in Chania are also incredibly narrow. We have rented two Jeep Renegades, which I will lovingly call the Joops. The Joops seem comedically large in the tiny labyrinthine streets. This is easily one of the largest cars I have ever driven and lord help me I do not have even a backup cam for mysterious reasons. Parking promises to be a real good time. We will be lucky if the cars have all their mirrors at the end of this trip.
Regrettably we had to move the cars, giving up our sweet parking spots in the old town municipal parking. We were going horseback riding! On horses bigger than Icelandics! I hoped my horse would be slightly less of a food fiend.
First, we needed to survive getting out of the city. We wound through some impossibly tight streets, with cars parked every which way on the narrow lanes and sometimes people on scooters doing crazy scooty things that defied the laws of traffic. By some miracle, I didn’t remove a mirror from any cars parked on the sides of the street, nor my own Joop. My favorite is when the scooters all bunch up in herds and wind around the cars like the people driving them are immortals. They aren’t, and we hoped that we didn’t see anyone squished to death in traffic. I saw one dude carrying his helmet instead of wearing one. Points for the carry, I guess.
In Greece, you make sure to drive all the way to the right-hand side of the road, to leave way for people to pass in the middle one or two “lanes”. Thus, your humble two-lane road really truly becomes a four-lane death causeway in the right circumstances. We hugged the right-hand side when possible (sometimes it was not road, but was bushes, so you had to dodge the bushes) and passed cautiously. We lived with as little screaming as possible. I still maintain that Costa Rica is worse since people tend to drive everywhere and usually right in your face.
Our horseback riding lessons (why is it always horseback riding and not just horse riding? Where else on the horse are you gonna ride it?) were about 45 minutes outside the city. We had private lessons for beginners. Our guide was a dutch exchange student who was there on a scholarship, and the ranch had about 21 horses of varying sizes. She asked us if any of us were afraid of horses. Um…should I be now? Is there something I don’t know about these majestic creatures that I should?
She saddled us up on three horses: One horse which I will just call “faroura” for lack of better understand of what the heck its Greek name was, Hoofy (spelling also a mystery), and Rocky (he was mine, and we did not listen to eye of the tiger).
Since these were beginner lessons, our guide took us on an extended walk. I want to know what the f we did in Iceland because we did like 10 different gaits and we all nearly died in their “beginner” lessons. Maybe it was an attempt to weed out foreigners who ride ponies by killing them with tolting. We meandered along in a line, through olive groves, up hills, past a lake, and many dogs. We heard a lot of sheep and saw a few in a pasture. The sun was setting, the olive trees smelled amazing, and there were a lot of birds chirping everywhere.
Rocky loved snacks. I was the only person whose horse wasn’t on a lead so I had to exert some amount of skill (I do not have any) to control my beast. Rocky knew I also lacked skill. He knew I was weak. Rocky got a lot of snacks. His favorite snack was a tree that had kind of a wilty yellow leaf. I didn’t go inside any bushes this time, but did have to dodge olive tree branches and muddy patches. Our guide later said that the horses love beginners since they can get away with getting a lot of snacks. I took an underripe olive off a tree as a reciprocal snack.
Hoofy at one point saw a bag that scared the heck out of her and she bolted away from it. Rocky saw that suspicious bag and gave it a wide berth while eyeing it warily. I was glad he didn’t bolt. My legs were tired at this point and I didn’t want to fall off a horse. About 5 feet from the end, Faroura decided she had to pee a lot and all the other horses ignored the stop and went on ahead. They were eager to get home and remove their saddles.
We dismounted somehow and with our rubbery legs waddled back to our trusty Joop to drive home for a Greek dinner. This has unexpectedly become the tastiest food trip I have done. Peru was also unexpectedly amazing. If you want to go somewhere and eat top-notch food, screw New York, just fly to Lima or Crete.
Thursday was our excursion to the Palace of Knossos, left by the Minoan civilization between 2,000 and 1,000 BC. It’s roughly a 2 hour drive east of us, near Heraklion. The road followed the coast and wound up and down mountains. I was extremely glad we chose to not drive in Heraklion because it was somehow worse than Chania.
The palace complex was pretty large. Its re-discoverer, Arthur Evans, unearthed a lot of it in the early 1900s. While he did find some cool stuff, he unfortunately took a lot of creative liberties with the restoration, many of which were irreversible. The ruins nonetheless are expansive and impressive. It took us a long time to wander the site, visiting the various rooms of the palace.
Nobody knows for certain what happened to the Minoans on Crete. There is some evidence to suggest that the combo of the volcanic explosion near Santorini + invading forces finished them off. Their frescoes are scattered all about the islands and they were a wealthy civilization, with plumbing and even Europe’s first running water toilet. The languages they spoke are not deciphered yet. Mysteries abound.
We drove the Joops back through dramatic hills and sunset as we approached Chania again. We had only one instance of a foolish driver nearly killing us (he was even so dumb as to be honked at by the local he was passing), which surprised me (only one scary person!). We saw lots of goats. Goats for days!
Tomorrow is our last full day in Greece. Boo. 🙁
