After breakfast we got the car and drove south to Sfakia, a region of Crete on its southern coast. The road hugged the north coast then veered south. We drove through a small village and the roads became narrow. There were a few pick up trucks and it became difficult to get through the village. Once we were past the village the road became windy. To the east was a cliff that plunged into the Vikos Gorge and to the west was the White Mountains Range. There were gorgeous views the whole way to Sfakia.
We would often have to stop for goats crossing the road. Lizy got some good photos of them out the window. I had heard there was a special type of endangered goat that inhabited the Samaria Gorge just west of the road. I wondered if these were the same goats and they had just wandered out of the gorge.
As we got closer to Sfakia, we started to see bullet holes in the traffic signs. Also, everyone seemed to be driving a souped-up pickup truck. Lizy commented this seemed to be kind of like the Republican part of Crete, with the guns and the pickup trucks. The final descent to the town of Sfakia Hora consisted of a series of hairpin turns, with views of the ocean.
We drove to Illingas beach, just outside of Sfakia Ora. It was the beach farthest to the east that could be driven too from Sfakia Ora. Everything father to the east you had to hike or boat to. We ate lunch at small taverna on a hill just above the beach. It looked like a big home and they had rooms to rent on the upper level. The extended family, including the grandparents, was milling about in front of the taverna. Some of them normally lived in Chania, but they had come back to the village to vote in the election that day. In Greece everyone goes back to where they were born to vote. I’m not sure if it’s impossible to reregister where you move, if it’s prohibitively difficult, or if Greek people just prefer to have an opportunity to go back to their village.
In the back of the restaurant there was group of young Greek people hanging out and talking. Probably also visiting to vote. We sat at a table outside overlooking the beach.
A man with a beard and messy hair came to get our order. He was the middle brother of 4 and did not usually work there as he lived in Chania, but was also there for the day to vote and his family and put him to work. He recommended the Sfakian Cheese Pie. A thin pastry with cheese, drizzled with honey. His mother cooked, but it was his grandmother’s recipe.
I asked him about the goats we had seen on the road and the goats that were also wild in the hills around the taverna. Were they wild? He said they were wild, his family left some water for the one’s near their property though. So in some sense they were semi domesticated. Were they the same goats as in the Samarian Gorge I asked. He replied in the negative. Apparently the Samarian Goats could be told apart because of their really cool horns. They were endangered and only lived in the Samarian Gorge. The goats in Sfakia were just regular goats. I thought, I shouldn’t have asked then I could have lived in blissful ignorance and assumed I had seen the Samarian Goats.
After lunch, we went down to the beach to swim. I had read in the book Crete Swim that if you swam east along the coast from the beach you could enter a series of cool caves, but when we got down to the beach it looked as if it might be too choppy to swim. Another one of the brothers from the taverna was overseeing the beach chairs and running a small drink stand. Lizy asked him what he thought about swimming in the water. He mimed choking his own neck. He said, “How do you say, you die,” to which Lizy replied, “Ya that’s how you say it.” I still wanted to go out swimming, but Lizy was really freaked out, so we decided not to swim, instead we walked around the beach and checked out a small cave that was right on the beach. Looking at the water as it crashed into the cave, I couldn’t help but admit that maybe Lizy was right.
We drove back into the town of Sfaki Ora to see about the ferry to Loutro, a small village that could not be driven too and had to be accessed by boat or by hiking. A jovial, bearded, Greek man named Nikos told us he could take us there in a water taxi, since there were no more ferries in that direction, then we could take his ferry back. We handed him some Euros, and he had us on a boat, leaving the harbor in shocking little amount of time. Right before we left a German couple came up to the Nikos to inquire about water taxis, he told them we were taking the water taxi, but he said you could try to pay them 20 euros to let you go with them. As our boat was heading out of the harbor he started to try to haggle us down to 5. The whole thing put a bad taste in my mouth. I told him, he could just get on, our treat.
The water taxi drove along the coast back past Illingas. We looked at the caves and beaches that dotted the coast. One of the bigger beaches had a mini forest and a small taverna. Later we found out some people had hike out there and were camping in the trees that night. The water was still choppy and the boat rocked back and forth. Both Lizy and I got a little seasick.
Loutro was quite small. Most of the houses were in a semicircle around a small harbour. The bottom of the houses had tavernas and few beach chairs on the water they’d rent to patrons. A lot of the tavernas had big pieces of meat on a spit roasting over an open flame. The water in the town was light blue.
We walked along the harbour checking out the village and seeing if there was a good place to swim. We met a middle aged woman from New York who was on a guided swim trip with a company called Swim Treks. The organizers would have a boat beside you while you swam in case something happened while you were in the water. They also took you to all the best spots and took the decision making out of trip planning. The woman really seemed to like the company. Lizy told me she wanted to do one of their trips.
We rented some chairs from a taverna and I swam a bit in the harbour in the light blue water in between the few boats docked here and there. Afterwards Lizy and I had a little time to walk around the town and then it was already time to take the ferry back to Sfaki Ora.
The ferry back was small like the water taxi, but somehow supported a second floor even as it rocked back and forth in the waves.
Getting onto the ferry was super frantic. The captain and his crewmate got off the boat and started yelling for everyone to get on the boat. The crowd, there was about 12 of us, all started running on the dock into the boat. It seemed that if we didn’t run fast enough the boat might leave without us. Lizy and I went to the top to brave the second floor, with a group of three young Germans. They had hiked to Loutro from Sfakia Ora and were taking the ferry back.
Once we got back to Sfakia Ora we got a restaurant recommendation from Nikos, the ferry organizer. We ate dinner on the harbour overlooking the sea. At the end of dinner they gave us a free desert and an aperitif and as was custom on Crete. After dinner, we drove back to Chania and fell asleep right away.
