Project Description
Exploring Crete
How it all started
First, briefly put things in context. Approaching the end of my university studies I thought I have “nothing to lose! ” and I applied for the Erasmus student exchange program to start a half a year semester at one of the Greek islands, Crete.
I can feel a lot of sympathy coming from you right now, and I have to admit, I thought the same as you do now, it is more of a vacation than study in that environment. Although my ideas collapsed shortly after starting on the university. Unfortunately, I saw just bits and pieces from the island, mostly around the city of Heraklion, which is probably the least interesting place of the whole region. Anyway, it left a very positive experience and an interesting stage in my life, but it left me unfulfilled which worked in me continuously, I knew once I’ll return…
Return for adventures
The “once” exactly happened in the autumn of 2016. I would like to share with you all the beauty of this island with a thousand faces. I can not promise anything more than numerous adventures, gorgeous places and amazing scenes with sunsets, sunrises during the journey on the significant part of the island. I wrote a small description next to each episode, but it is heavily recommended to watch the related episodes as well.
First day
The first one contains packing the standard equipment, travel and a few stealth drone shots from the city Heraklion. Don’t be discouraged though, the real adventures and scenes are coming after the first part.
The second day
This is absolutely recommended to view the videos from now on, first thing in the morning we headed out of town to catch a half-marathon race, which was a lot more demanding than earlier in Budapest. After defeating the heat and hills during the race, we took our way to the picturesque village of Matala. The truly unique coast is covered with caves, where a large number of hippies found their homes during the 1960s. Partially because of this they organize an annually held hippie themed music festival right on the coast. Unfortunately, I haven’t had the chance to participate, but it certainly looks like a charming event if you ever have the opportunity.
We just managed to catch the sunset, which led to a set of the most amazing footage I’ve ever seen from this area so far. Oh, and of course, I almost forgot to mention that we almost managed to loose the drone while I followed our car having a nice seasickness after a while. It was a pretty good day what we had out there.
The third day
Perhaps it was a bit bold, but we planned to climb the island’s highest peak, the Psiloritis (2456 m). After getting an advice from the lovely locals, we started to follow a different, but in theory shorter route to the mountain. This turned to an almost endless wandering on dirt roads with our car and jumping on the rocks in the mountain like goats do. There was a point where we needed to realize that no matter what we do, we can not get up the mountain today, so with it gave us a hard time, but we could let it go.
We had point of interest on our map, which we called “some lake” it served us great disappointment and a frightening bee attack, so we said goodbye rather quickly. We were about to arrive to the next highlight of the trip, the one and only Preveli beach. Why is it so special?
It is located in a valley, where a spring is running directly into the sea, bringing fresh water along, a very unique experience which one can have there. Almost instantly we decided to sleep on the beach so we were given the chance to take pictures of the stars, which turned out to be a pretty amazing experience.
The fourth day
It was hard to leave our temporary accommodation behind, but we needed to find our way to our next destination, Samaria Gorge. This is a valley as well, with very good infrastructure for hikers and really tall mountains. Finally we managed to choose the slowest and most expensive option from all, but it seemed to be the shortest. We made our way there with a ferry, which allowed us to make quite a few good photos and videos, while having a more relaxed day on the boat. Of course we were able to find a place to stay only in the middle of the night, but that’s how we roll.
The fifth day
While watching the sunrise we realized what a beautiful little town we arrived at night, I’ll try to show it quickly to you. Then we continued our trip to one of the most famous coasts, which has become my favorite, just based on other people’s stories.
This is Elafonisi, really nice shallow water and beautifully colored natural environment blessed the area. I don’t even bother to write about it, because the video itself is not really capable to reproduce the experience either.
Later that day we reached the similarly beautiful Balos beach, on a horrible dirt road. We instantly could see that an amazing sunset is about to happen at this magical place. Of course we had to run on the rocky terrain to still catch the most from the sun, but I think it was worth it. At night we didn’t go back to the city, but it was not allowed to sleep on the beach, therefore we slept in the car in the parking lot.
The sixth day
The next morning we took advantage of the capabilities of Balos beach and we don’t regret doing so, this place looks amazing. Once again with a heavy heart, but we left Balos beach and we tried to re-conquer the upper entrance of Samaria Gorge. We finally reached our destination, but it turned out that the gorge has a closing time which left us with only 2 hours of pure enjoyment. It was still worth it, like I wisely described in the video, it is very similar to the Grand Canyon, but entirely different, I can still stand behind this thought.
At night after getting lost several times we slipped into a small seaside cove next to the Chania airport, through a locked gate.
The seventh day
Seeing in the morning that we arrived to our designated beach is very charming on its own, however the ascent and descent to the shore is a life-threatening journey. Seitan Limania is a very well hidden, but beautiful beach next to Chania airport, which very well worth a visit.
Next we made a very quick visit to my favorite city on Crete, Chania. we were in a hurry because we could see a very slight chance of reaching the Psiloritis finally. Of course, we did not succeed, but we found accidentally the Ideon cave where Zeus supposedly spent his childhood, we had a good time discovering the place and I set my new drone altitude record of around 2000 meters which seems quite nice for me.
At the end of the day we returned to Heraklion, where it turned out that my holiday might not end in the near future.
The eighth day
It got officially confirmed that the strike will take place, which means that each flight is cancelled on the day when I would have started my journey home. I tried to contact the airline without any luck, so after seeing the hysterical situation at the airport I decided that I’d rather wait for the whole strike topic to clear out.
The ninth day
To give a nice frame to my whole journey, the last day I took part in another running competition, which was held in Festos. During the race, it turned out that the strike got cancelled, and my flight is due to start on the originally scheduled time.
I’ve never been so happy about actually travelling home, but as a great finishing of a very long day, I arrived home safe and sound.
So that’s what happened during my last visit to the island of Crete. We managed to visit most of the interesting destinations in the middle and western parts of the island, however there is still a lot of unexplored beauty left, which I will document during my next visit.