After breakfast on the pebble beach in Sougia I set out up the gorge that lies right outside the village. It’s not very big compared to yesterday’s Irini, but it takes you up on to a plateau which I intend to traverse to get to the next bay, where the ruins of the Ancient Greek port town of Lissos lie.
The gorge is full of oleander, which is poisonous, so I keep my trousers on, in spite of the heat. Once up on the plateau it’s a different story – the large shrubs are replaced by low brush of thyme and wild rosemary and other ethereal herbs, and the polished rocks of the gorge (more of a dry gulch, really) give way to volcanic rock, serrated and cruel. The trail is nothing more than a goat track, so my ankles get what’s coming to ’em as I stumble along, but it’s pretty as can be, the red earth, the undergrowth in every hue of blue matching the Libyan sea to the south and the White mountains in the north providing a grandiose backdrop to it all.
Part of the reason why I keep stumbling is that there’s a new type of plant here, too. A kind of enormous lily that is quite frankly astonishing, and can only be described as deeply erotic. The phrase “to bee or not to bee” takes on a whole new meaning. Consider the lilies, indeed!
Bee that as it may. When I reach the ruins of the city there is not a living soul in sight, so me and the kri-kris have it all to ourselves. I spend a happy hour climbing up and down two-thousand-year-old walls and foundations, in and out of bath houses and watchtowers (or what’s left of them), marveling at the excavated Temple to Zeus with its mosaics laid bare – it was destroyed in an earthquake, so the archeologists were able to retrieve a number of exquisite votive statues when they dug it out. Goodness knows what else lays buried here…!
That excursion only lasts me the better part of the morning though, so after a last lunch on the beach I hop back in my car and drive off to Imbros Gorge.
Imbros is the second most famous gorge on the island, and it’s with some hesitation I decide to hike it, because guides often bring their groups here when Samaria is closed, and I don’t want to share my experience with hoards of Brits, Aussies and Kiwis. Why those nationalities? Because apparently forces sent to strengthen Crete’s defenses during WWII were evacuated through the gorge after the German invasion, and hiking it has become an act of pilgrimage for their descendants.
As it turns out I arrive so late in the afternoon that there is virtually no other people here. With a few exceptions I have it all to myself, and what a hike it is! Here, Mediterranean pine dominates, and the goats are out in force in the lush forest undergrowth and – more often – perched improbably on the cliff-sides.
A couple of times Imbros narrows to the point where you can just about touch both sides at the same time, the walls swaying crazily upwards where the waters have dug down over millennia, and in one place visitors have gone collectively mad, producing cairns in untold quantities.
It is quite impossible to resist the urge to add your own rock, the sheer magnitude of the combined effort drawing you into its own logic. There’s a Nobel prize in economics waiting for the person who explains the practical applications of that particular aspect of the human psyche…
You can see why Imbros is popular: it’s easy walking, the path gentle and forgiving, it’s not too long at just shy of two hours, and very pretty throughout. A giant arch marks the finishing stretch, and at the end there’s a scattering of houses where everyone is offering taxi services back to the top for 20€. That’s theft tho, so I walk another kilometre or so and hitch a ride with a young local fisherman instead. His driving is as erratic and engaging as his English, but it makes for an interesting ride, as I learn about his family history while hanging on for dear life through every deadly curve and every massacred sentence.
Once back at the car it’s already past seven in the evening, and dusk is settling on the land. Along with the daze from the Saharan dust cloud that has engulfed the island all day it makes for a dreamlike decent into the nearby fishing village of Chora Sfakion. I find lodgings for the night by asking in the taverna where I have my dinner, and am soon sound asleep.
Kalispera!