A lemon tree of our own

The shell of Ipocampus

One of the nicest things about our little local Golden Beach was the small canteen that plied its trade there. You could have a couple of hours on the beach then get a cold beer or a quick gyros or something like that. It was really cheap, had yucky but functional toilets, and a comedy waitress who was always tripping over the walkboards set on the beach. One of my favourite moments last year was using it as my base to hold a conference call - everybody else in an office in London and me literally sitting on the beach...

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Road Trip Day #8: Taverna Seli and the undrinkable coffee

We had a very long drive to do on the eight day of our road trip, and so after breakfast in the village of Mirtos, we rejoined the main road and continued heading westware towards Matala. We suddenly made an unscheduled but spectacular stop at Taverna Seli. Perched on a cliffside seemingly in the middle of nowhere, it just appeared as we rounded a corner. Impulsively Claire stopped the car, and we got out and enjoyed some spectacular views of Crete's southern coast. We didn't so much enjoy the taverna itself however. The three staff seemed aggravated that someone would...

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Road Trip Day #8: Mirtos for breakfast, accompanied by Bernard Borger's art

Day 8 involved a lengthy drive from Ierapetra in the south east of the island to the old hippie enclave of Matala. We set off very early, and headed for the village Mirtos for breakfast. This was a really quiet sleepy place, and we found a lovely cafe to stop at. Cafe Mirtos had their tables and chairs out on a covered area in the street. They also had a lot of artworks on display from Bernard Borger. He paints impressionist pictures of people, buildings and landscapes in Crete, using distressed and found pieces of wood as his canvas. The...

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Road Trip Day #7: The dancing girls of Ierapetra

For dinner in Ierapetra we had in mind a trip to a well regarded restaurant called Portego, which specialises in cooking in a wood-fired oven. However, once we'd struggled to find it, we found that they were shut for the night. So no slow-cooked lamb in a clay pot with yogurt for us. We then looked along the water-front to narrow down our options, and ended up being dragged into one taverna to inspect the fish in the fridge. Although it looked nice we did feel a little hectored, so walked further down to explore more. We ended up at...

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Road Trip Day #7: Claire goes missing

We'd been at the Cactus Bar in Ierapetra, after the West Ham - Manchester United game, for a little while, when this tremendous noise started up. It was men singing, but punctuated by loud bangs that could have been fireworks being let off, or, just as likely in Crete, gunshots. Everyone in the bar crowded out the front to see what was going on, and being nosey, we were no exception. Because we had all of our stuff with us we took it in turns to take a peek. I went first and got this blurry photo of the racket....

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Road Trip Day #7: Jacky at the Cactus Bar

After we watched the West Ham - Manchester United game in Ierapetra, we headed down the road to a cocktail bar we'd spotted earlier that looked promising - the Cactus Bar. Again, like our lunchtime taverna, it was mostly filled with locals rather than tourists. However, it wasn't the cocktails that we ended up craving - as soon as we opened the menu we wanted a Jacky: "Vanilla and chocolate ice cream served in a cow toy for kids"

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Road Trip Day #7: Watching West Ham with a load of sweaty drunken Brits

As it was a Sunday, the main event of the afternoon focussed on trying to find somewhere to watch English football. It has taken me a long time to write up this whole trip, so cast your mind back, if you will, to the climax of the Premiership season. West Ham needed to get a result against Manchester United at Old Trafford to stay up, whilst Sheffield United were tussling with Wigan. Depending on the permutations of the results, any of West Ham, Sheffield United or Plucky Little Wigan could end up relegated. We soon found a place with the...

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Crete Road Trip #7: Onwards to Ierapetra

Well, back to the journal of our road trip, although it does rather seem like I started writing this in 1866.... On the seventh day, we got up early after the Eurovision excess of the night before, and visited Sitia's old fortress. Perched on the hill above the city, it is now mostly used for live theatre and open-air concerts. After that we checked out, and got into the car for what turned out to be one of the most pleasant drives of the whole trip. We were heading south to Ierapetra on the south coast. The road was unusually...

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Lawrence of Arabia visits Chania

We thought that Lawrence of Arabia was in Chania harbour the other day - one of an intermittent series of fashion disasters spotted on our travels.

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Under 21s and over 42s

You can learn a lot from taking part as a youngster in something like the UEFA Under 21s championship. For example, last night the England lads learnt that international football is all about playing your heart out for your country in a gutsy backs-to-the-wall do or die performance with less than 11 men on the field, and then losing on penalties. Had England reached the final - and let's be honest here, for any other country, scoring 12 times in a penalty shoot out would usually be enough - they would have struggled with suspensions (four) and injuries (at least...

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A real-life Tardy in the harbour

When our friends were staying with us the other week we watched a lot of "Greg The Bunny", and Tardy The Turtle developed into one of our favourite characters - even if I still can't do an impression of him despite a lot of trying. (You can watch some of the best of Tardy in this YouTube compilation of clips) Once our friends left, we were a bit at a loss as to what to do, and so on Friday we found ourselves wandering rather aimlessly around town. We ended up sitting on one of the benches by the harbourside...

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Petrol station dispute in Crete

Sometimes you get stories in the news which are little vignettes that speak a world of volume about the differences between living in Greece and in the UK. One such story at the moment is the petrol station dispute. The government in Athens has decided that petrol stations in several of the islands, including Crete, should open longer hours during July, August and September to help the influx of tourists. I didn't really expect the opening hours of businesses on the island to be something that would require micro-regulation from the capital. In Crete, the petrol station owners are furious...

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Stacks of "Bum Juice" in Chania

I wrote before about how whilst we were in Austria my beer drinking standards stooped to picking up the cheapest possible beer from Lidl - "Grafen Walder" - presumably, at a mere €0.55 a throw, the Austrian tramp's drink of choice. We eventually took to jokingly calling it "Bum Juice" after an unfortunate mix-up when instead of calling it "Tramp Juice" we referred to the American way of depicting the homeless as bums. Thankfully, I can now get right back on the bum juice over here - as I've discovered that the Lidl just down the road stocks it. And...

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Cuban cocktail fiasco

We've spotted that there are a whole series of hotel resorts near Agios Apostoli that offer Happy Hours in the afternoon on cocktails - and that the times are all slightly offset. With that in mind, the other week when our friends were over we took them on a cocktail crawl through the area. This turned out to have its limitations. It was nice enough, but since they were chucking them out at half price the cocktails weren't exactly up to scratch. A particular culprit in this respect was the Cuban fiasco at the very first place we stopped at,...

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A trying day

I didn't have the best of days on Thursday - it sort of seemed like everything I touched or tried to do fell apart. First up I went down into town to the TripleW internet cafe to get some work done. This was somewhat hampered by spending twenty minutes fiddling with my laptop and the connection, and failing to get them to play nice. In the end I had to use a different computer. Whilst I was there I downloaded updated versions of Firefox and iTunes to put on the main computer at home. Firefox updates like a dream, but...

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Road Trip Day #6: Eurovision Night!

Now, I've talked before about how seriously Eurovision is taken here. The build up to the show resembled the way the BBC and ITV used to build up to their simultaneous coverage of the F.A. Cup Final. NET had a two hour preview show, only interrupted by a news bulletin, on which the lead item was the Eurovision Song Contest. Mega was even worse. When Claire got back from the trip she found that the hours of American TV she records each Saturday had been replaced by six hours of Eurovision preview. All on a channel that wasn't even showing...

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Road Trip Day #6: Toplou Monastery

On the way back from Vai we made a stop at the Toplou Monastery. Situated near the coast it was built in a time when it was prone to raids by pirates and Turks. As a result it looks more like a fortress than your traditional Cretan monastery. It was also armed to the teeth and played a role in the resistance to several of the invasions of the island. Indeed, in the Second World War, the Abbot was executed by the occupying Germans for sheltering resistance fighters, and allowing them to operate an underground radio transmitter from inside the...

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Road Trip Day #6: Kato Zakros and Vai Beach

We used our base at Sitia to explore a couple of Crete's best beaches on the sixth day of our road trip. First we headed to Kato Zakros. Claire has always wanted to visit it and have a coffee by the beach, to recreate one of the most picturesque scenes in our Cretan guide book. Boy, she paid for that coffee with her driving. The road down to Zakros was the most winding of the journey so far - at one point we virtually had to do a hand-brake turn just to execute going right at a junction. There was...

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Road Trip Day #5: Dinner at Balcony in Sitia

I can honestly say that dinner on our first night in Sitia was a unique event. The closest thing I can compare it too was our astonishing night at Il Forno in Gozo. We went to a restaurant called "Balcony", which was just a little way back from the main harbour. It was absolutely beautifully decorated and set out, with lots of stained green glass on the walls - but there was definitely something odd about it from the get-go. We were the only customers, and we got a strong whiff of some spicy smoking substances as we went up...

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Road Trip Day #5: The girl with the flippers

Just about the funniest sight we saw on our travels was this poor little girl in Mohlos. She was trying to ride her trike whilst still wearing her swimming flippers. Her grandma was bellowing at her, but still she kept on with it, flip-flopping her way slowly along the road, much to our amusement.

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Road Trip Day #5: Mohlos and Sitia

After the church we made a pit-stop in Kritsa itself, then set off on our way to Sitia via Mohlos. Mohlos was on our potential list of places to move to when we reached Crete. Well, it was absolutely beautiful, but what were we thinking? With a population of just 79, and 5km down a steep winding track from the new national road, it would have been impossible for us to get settled here. As a visit though, it was a real treat. A few tavernas lined the shore, and just about 200 metres away was Mohlos Island (or Mollusc...

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Road Trip Day #5: Church of Panagia Kera in Kritsa

We left the Hotel Pergola in Agios Nikolaos early on Friday. Our host invited us to take a complimentary coffee before we departed, and then gave us each a free hotel t-shirt - they really were too sweet. Our first stop was at Kritsa, just 11km or so outside Agios Nikolaos. We wanted to see the Church of Panagia Kera, which has the most extensive surviving set of Byzantine frescoes on the island. The guide on site told us they were from the 12th century, whilst our books speculates that they are from the 13th or 14th century. But what...

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Road Trip Day #4: Second night in Ag. Nik

After Spinalonga we had some lunch at a taverna in Plaka, then went back to our hotel in Agios Nikolaos. Claire had discovered there was a sun-deck on the roof of the hotel, and so we dozed and sunbathed until it was cocktail o'clock. We went to a cute little cafe that was a mix of a book shop, internet cafe, and CD shop. It had a tiny balcony which overlooked the lake, and so enjoyed a drink there. Then we moved on to the Migomis cafe. This has a commanding view over the lake, and also an excrutiatingly bad...

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HP printers are not for criminals

We bought a new printer the other week, and on the packaging it contained the single most ridiculous warning I have ever seen. We immediately conjured up all kinds of ways we could use it for crime - you know, like throwing it through shop windows in order to steal more HP products, that we could then use illegally etc.

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Back to Agia Marina for footie Saturday

Following the previous night's adventures watching England versus Brazil, we went back to Agia Marina on Saturday for some Euro2008 qualifying action. We had a stroll along the beach and then made our way to the Kiss Bar to watch Walse versus the Czech Republic. It wasn't the most gripping of games to be honest, but at least Claire got to use the laptop for a bit whilst I moaned about Ryan Giggs useless record of actually turning up for his country. There was a comedy misunderstanding with the owner as well. "How long are you staying for?" he asked...

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Watching England in English in Agia Marina

I was delighted to see that the pulling power of Late Wembley stretched to Greece, where England's opening match there was on terrestrial TV. Nothing to do with the fact that Greek TV always shows every Brazil match of course. I still went out though, to get a bit of atmosphere and so as not to disturb Claire - since the game wouldn't finish until midnight our time. I went to our new haunt in Agia Marina - The Kiss Bar. It is almost exactly what we were looking for and failing to find all last year - somewhere with...

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Road Trip Day #4: Flying boat crash in Elounda bay

As I mentioned, Spinalonga had a great collection of old photographs and some informative panels in Greek and English. I was greatly intrigued by this photograph. This is a picture of a plane crash that happened in Elounda Bay on the 22nd of August 1936. The bay was apparently used as a staging post by British sea-planes flying a route from the UK to India. This one obviously never made it.

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Road Trip Day #4: Elounda, Plaka and Spinalonga Island

We started the day with a drive to Elounda, about 11km down the road from where we were staying in Ag. Nikolaos. We stopped for coffee in Elounda at a place called Babel. We joked that if we had been staying in Elounda for a week we would have hardly left the place, since it had internet access, a pool table, a table football game, boasted of showing football on their big screen with English commentary, and served cocktails. I mean, what else could we ask? From Elounda we headed further north to the small village of Plaka. The drive...

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Road Trip Day #3: A night out in Ag. Nikolaos

We went out for our first night in Ag. Nikolaos around 7pm. We stopped at a bar we had spotted earlier - Cafe Du Lac - for cocktails. No fresh mint was the refrain we are used to hearing when ordering a Mohito, so instead Claire had a Caparinia. This came made with lemon instead of lime, and was pretty unpalatable. Our next stop was Taverna Zygos, right in the corner of the lake. Here we had a lot of entertainment from a little 4 year old boy called Nikos, who was enjoying acting like a strong man by hauling...

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Darling buds of may

As I've now become a lady of leisure, I'm very fortunate to have plenty of time on my hands to explore this beautiful island I'm living on. This time last year we were focusing our minds on finding a flat and a job, so I didn't take much notice of our surroundings. However the explosion of colour, courtesy of the multitude of Cretan wild flowers, has not passed me by this spring. When you start taking a closer look at the wild flowers, blanketing the hillsides and unexpectedly peeking out from pavements and rocky beaches, you realise just how many...

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Road Trip Day #3: The road from Lasithi to Agios Nikolaos

As we descended from the road to the Dikteon cave, we could see an extraordinary sight across the Lasithi Plateau. Clouds were coming over the top of the mountains in the distance, and rolling down into the plateau itself. You can just about make it out behind the two old ducks in this photograph that Claire snapped from the car as we were leaving. Having been up there a while, you forget you are 900 metres above sea level, so it just looks like the magic porridge pot has spilled over into the plateau. Well, pretty as it was, we...

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