New Year's Eve at The Point

Like all of the festive season, New Year's Eve in Greece was a new experience for us, and we weren't quite sure what to expect.

We decided to go down into town, grab a bite to eat, and see what happened.

At first, to be honest, this seemed like it had been a terrible idea. At 8pm it was absolutely chucking it down without mercy, there was nobody around, and all the good restaurants were either closed, or booked out for group parties starting later in the evening. We had not planned ahead well.

We ended up having dinner that was nice enough, but that was in an absolutely freezing eaterie right on the harbour we wouldn't normally have given time-of-day to for a beer, let alone purchase a full meal.

After that we steeled ourselves again against the weather, and decided to go to the Avalon rock bar - but it seemed packed with U.S. Navy personnel from Souda, and so our bottle failed us. Instead we headed to old faithful Remezzo. As we walked in they dutifully informed us that they would be closing in half-hour. Which would see our night out ending at about 10pm.

We left there, wandered aimlessly for a bit, and then Claire took the initiative, and bravely strode up the steps to The Point. We'd previously identified it as a hideous tourist meat-market dance club, but we'd decided that if we were ever going to visit it, then tonight was the night.

How wrong we had been about it.

I'm sure it does get ghastly in summer, but we arrived to find it playing New Order, The Killers and Depeche Mode, with lovely English-speaking bar staff who were all recent arrivals in Crete from Denmark, and we had a great, great time. There were free shots, we purchased an over-priced mini-champagne bottle for midnight, and we had a real laugh.

From such a doomy start where we thought we might be in a cab home by 10:15pm we had a fantastic time.

Still, we're nothing if not British and inexperienced at this clubbing abroad lark. We left town at 2am, exhausted and ready for bed. As we walked down Halidon, it was heaving with people dressed up to the nines - it seemed that Chania was getting ready to party hard for 2008 without us!