Wow, I feel like Rip Van Winkle coming down from the Cretan mountain to find the countryside I left completely altered. England seems to have fast-forward the entire spring season. My garden, which I left in winter mode, is now florrid; my camellia’s come and gone, and the horsechestnut whose blossom candles I watch from my study window slowly unfurling is in full leaf already. What’s going on? My body’s back in Frome, but my head’s still circling Gatwick. And there's a whole week I didn’t have time to put on my blog…
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Hora Sfakion to Loutro is the section I’d remembered as easy but it’s trickier with a rucksack – even dangerous on the high-crag narrow paths with a freak wind whipping the sea-spray into white spirals which hurtle ferociously across the water towards the shore. Maybe, Peter says, this bizarre phenomena was the origin of the legend of the Drossilites, ‘dew-shades’ supposedly the ghosts of nineteenth century murdered warriors, who haunt this shore-line...
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Loutro is a place I know already from leading writing courses here, a picture-postcard village where exclusivity is cherished, music frowned on and topless bathing banned. It’s charming but a tad boring so we spend our day off here clambering across the headland to the tamarisk beach at Fenix.
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From Loutro to Agia Roumeli the path is intermittently perilous until beyond the marble beach of Marmaris. Around 4 hours into this 7-hour trudge, the scrubby garrigue gives way to an exquisite pine forest above a turquoise sea. This stretch of coast with champagne-pale sand and turquoise sea is where Apollo made love to the nymph Akakalline, so besotted he forgot about his fiery chariot and made the whole world darken for a day. Here's where we meet our first walkers: a German couple kitted out in lycra shorts, headbands and trekking poles. We exchange chat, feeling like smiling hillbillies in our casual gear.
Agia Roumeli is still blinking blearily in pre-season sleepiness; the Samaria Gorge – its raison d'etre – isn’t open until May so the unexpected heatwave finds these pragmatic farmer-hoteliers hurrying to finish re-whitening walls and re-blueing paintwork. This is the site of old Tarra, and
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the tiny Byzantine chapel of Saint Paul near here is built on top an old temple – not to Apollo, though. To Poseidon, the god of elemental energy, Georgios tells us. He talks of his decision to exchange his previous work-hard-play-hard ethic for 17 years of monkish life on this beach: 'Do not think, "I'm sacrificing something." The money you can get back. You can never get back time'