A Travel Blog
We wanted to see the interior of Naxos beyond the main port town, and luckily the island has an excellent public bus service that operates under the KTEL umbrella, like the buses we took in Crete a few years ago. We had our choice of pretty mountain towns to visit — Chalki and Filoti almost made the cut — but we settled on Apeiranthos.
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We took a one-day cruise from Naxos specifically to visit the island of Delos, but the itinerary also took us to the nearby island of Mykonos for a few hours. We never planned to visit Mykonos, but this short stop was a chance to glimpse another side of Greece.
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The port area of Naxos Town is where nearly everyone arrives or departs the island by water. The very large ferries run regularly, and there’s a vibrant strip of restaurants, cafes and bars ready to serve them.
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Apanemiá is a small kafenio hidden in the backstreets of the Chora at the base of the Astypalea castle. They have very nice tables tucked around the surrounding laneways, but on the windy night we visited we chose to sit inside.
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We’ve returned to the streets around the castle a few times now, wandering at different times of day and in different lighting, and the urge to take a photos is impossible to resist.
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At the heart of Astypalea’s Chora is a small, cobbled square adjacent to a row of cheery red and white windmills. The mills are obviously no longer used to grind grain, but have been maintained for other purposes. Many roads on the island seem to lead to this square, eventually, and most of the shops and cafes frequented by locals and tourists alike are located around the perimeter.
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Our final destination in Crete was the capital city of Heraklion (also spelled Iraklio). We used the city as a base to visit the Palace of Knossos before flying back to Athens to begin our journey home. Heraklion is the busy capital of Crete and it doesn’t get a lot of love from locals or tourists, but we found it an easy place to spend a couple days.
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We were only in Rethymno for two days, but we found the city to have some of the best food of our trip. Cretans are very proud of their local meat and produce, and of their self-sufficiency in hard times, and this is reflected in the restaurant menus.
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The food we came across in Chania was a bit more varied than the tavernas we found elsewhere, such as Athens and Rethymno and Heraklion. The food was universally excellent, and the variety was a nice change of pace around the midway point of our trip.
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The compact but beautiful Archaelogical Museum of Chania is located just off Chalidon, the wide pedestrianized street that bisects the old town and connects the modern city center to the Venetian Harbour.
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The Chania Sailing Club, formed in 1990, promotes sailing by collaborating with various sailing schools, some of which we saw in action during our visit. Their facilities are housed in a huge Venetian warehouse at the end of the harbour, where the club also operates a very nice café and bar that is open from morning til very late.
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Depending on who you listen to Exarchia is either Athen’s cool counterculture student neighbourhood — or a dangerous hotbed of anarchists and illegal squats. When we visited on a weekday morning we found quiet streets filled with cafes, interesting shops, and just a bit more graffiti than other parts of the city (which to be honest is a lot of graffiti by normal standards).
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