Messara Plain

Our favourite days on the bike are always in the mountains. There is simply no beating the crispness of the air, the vividness of the landscapes, or the sheer variety of scenery that slides by as you ride. The lowlands have their charm, but they are rarely as richly layered as life in the mountains. And this was exactly our initial reaction when we dropped out of the Psiloriti mountains and onto the Mesara plain to visit the famous wall of Gortys Law and the end point for Zeus's abduction of Europa at the ruins of Gortys. As in any of the more highly touristed areas of the world, the shabby quality of people clamouring half-heartedly for easy tourist bucks prevailed. Agriculture is also much larger scale here. Both cars and life in general seemed a little faster than it should be.

Whenever we hit an area devoted to commercial agriculture we always have a hard time finding a place to sleep. In such places it seems that, at the end of the day, there is no time or space for building the little churches we have grown to love over our months sleeping out of doors in Greece. For one last time we put our faith in the directions of our Anavasi GPS maps program which sent us through barren fields, vineyards, and olive groves to a very well hidden Agios Nikolaos. We shared our new home with a good number of snails and together we enjoyed what was our last night on this trip sleeping under a blanket of Greek inspired constellations.

Behind Rethymno

A few days spent hiding out from the rain in the old quarter of Rethymno allowed us to really savour the strange mix of real and tourist Crete that live together there. I thoroughly enjoyed watching little old kerchiefed ladies, burdened with the days shopping, waddle by disoriented groups of beefy German tourists. Glancing sideways through open dooways while walking the narrow streets of Rethymno one can still catch a glimpse of how the city may have been before mass tourism poured in.

As the clouds cleared out, so did we. Few cars disturbed us as we quietly picked our way through village after village in the mountains behind Rethymno. In spite of Basil's fluent Greek, the locals still insisted on trying out their german on us. One lady, overly concerned with our matrimonial state, proclaimed that we would soon be married. I guess she figured that any halfway normal looking woman following a man around a place like Greece on a bicycle should really be married to the guy. More concerned with where we might sleep, we smiled akwardly and pedalled on. "You'll see!" she hollered after us, "you heard it in Crete and everything you hear in Crete comes true!!"

Losing Mainstream Crete

As the surrounding olive filled hillsides prepared to be harvested, we meandered our way east from Hania and south into the mountains choosing increasingly steeper routes and praying the rain would hold off. As always, the quest for milk was on and Basil wandered in to a few small tavernas with the hopes of finding some. Unfortunately, the region was fresh out of fresh milk. All the sheep were either pregnant or nursing, therefore - no milk. We were surprised and pleased to learn that these guys were so serious about their milk that commercially farmed milk is not even available. One taste of their local cheese would fully and proudly allow you to understand why.

So, off we went with our milk starved kefir to find a place to set up camp and dream of a world just like the one we were already in. A world where the men favour camoflague clothing, drive black pick up trucks, eat salad, and homemade unprocessed sheep's milk yogurt, and where the lady in black who bakes your bread, has a beard, and remembers the days when women did the family's laundry at the water starved fountain you can still barely drink from in the middle of town.