We ended up on Crete somewhat by accident, it doesn’t have the cachet that Santorini or Mykonos enjoys, but once we got off the airplane, we were amazed by what we found.  Crete is a substantially larger island than most and having no idea what would differentiate one part of the island from another, we simply picked the highest rated hostel, the Youth Hostel Plakias and set out figuring out how to get there.

While we arrived safe and sound to Crete at about 9:30pm, the same could not be said for our bags which took an unexplained detour to parts unknown. We had plans to rent a car and drive straight to Plakias on the other side of the island, but ended up taking our little Suzuki to find a hotel close to the airport as our bags since the next flight wasn’t until the next day.  Crete was our first stop in Greece after having just left beautiful, and relatively easy to get around, Split, in Croatia and all of a sudden we had no clothes, toiletries, or any sort of idea what Greece was all about – it certainly felt like an adventure.  After a night of “camping” in the nearest hotel to the airport, we were delighted to be reunited with our bags and continue on.

Kyle happy to see his bag again

We packed up our Suzuki and set out learning how to drive in a country with some decidedly unique traffic laws, or rather a decidedly unique lack of them.  We were playing around on Google Maps and I spotted what looked like a go-kart track, we figured we would go check it out.  To our surprise, we arrived to a track with nothing around it, and no gate on it.  I figured our Suzuki was roughly as fast as a go-kart so why not try a lap or two?

Rental Suzuki on Crete

As we started out on our trek across the island, we discovered another fact about Greek roads: despite the best of intentions, many of them are simply not paved.  The main artery that snaked across the island was in fact 10km of loosely graded gravel with intermittent basketball-sized rocks for added adventure.  After an exciting and bouncy ride across the island, we settled down in the hostel and set about exploring Plakias.  This was one of our favourite beaches, about a 10 minute drive from the town, beautifully isolated except for the small barbecue shack on the beach serving 2€ beers and some traditional greek delicacies.

“Hidden Beach” outside Plakias

Another interesting place we stumbled across was the town of Theriso, about 5 kilometres up the coast and slightly removed from the waterfront.  While Perissa is built for tourism, Theriso is the epitome of all the images I had of “real” Greece – incredible labyrinths of the narrowest streets you have ever seen (i.e. we had to fold the mirrors of the car in several times to get through), small nondescript residences packed together, and none of the glamour, glitz, or Americans found in the tourist destinations.

Theriso’s incredibly narrow roads

Here are some of the other photos I took while in Crete: