More days at Myrtos. Thursday 30 Oct - Saturday 1st November.
We hadn't realised that the Cretan House was just below the village school until we were woken by the wonderful sound of children playing excitedly and running around, then suddenly silence. It was almost like turning the radio off, but the school master had called them into lessons.
They would sell anything here!
Breakfast was a leisurely affair once we had worked out how to light the camping gas stove to make our coffee. Alec had done the early morning run (about 25 yards) to the local shop to stock up on yogurt, chocolate croissants, (rather tastier that the plain ones) and oranges to squeeze. This became the pattern of our next couple of days. Our only concern was that there was no electric point to charge our toothbrush. Would we have to start doing our teeth the old fashioned way! Fortunately, a bit of brute force by Alec with the adaptor into the power point solved the problem and amazingly didn't fuse the entire block!
We swam a lot, read a lot and walked along the coast towards Tertsa, a very small village, which was mostly closed up.
Extraordinary rocks along the coast.
Mirtos is very small and surprisingly pretty, having been rebuilt after being flattened in WW2. It really only consists of a long beach, great for swimming, and a string of tavernas and bars along the beach front. The few back streets have little local shops and rooms for rent. We were very surprised that at this time of year, we had to join an orderly queue of other Northern Europeans to find a bed. We all traipsed around the village, one after the other asking where there was space.
We got to know several of the local tavernas over the 3 days but our favourite was The Beach Bar where you could use the sun loungers for free as long as you spent something on food/drinks. It seems to be a good arrangement.
Immediately behind our apartment was a very pretty old chapel, closed of course, and the village museum. We had read that it is a gem, being full of ancient treasures picked up by the local school master back in the 90s. Currently The curator is an Englishman called John Atkinson who acts as curator and will open the museum for you if you contact him. As luck would have it, one evening, whilst we were sheltering from the wind and smoke in the back of a taverna, another British couple came in - Fluent in Greek and definitely very part of the huge community, they turned out to be none other than John and his wife. Along with a couple from Holland and Switzerland who lived in the area and played in a group, we had a very entertaining evening, us 2 slightly from the outside looking in as they all bantered away in a mixture of Brummy/Midlands and Greek.The taverna owner and his wife were very hospitable. Anyway the long and short of it was that John would meet us in the museum the next day and show us around.
We had a wonderful morning in this tiny 2 roomed museum. The best thing apart from John telling us so much of interest, was his model entirely built to scale down to the smallest fragment of pot found,of the Minoan village discovered just up the hill, which as a potter he had recreated beautifully. He said that it took him 3 years, 16 hours every single day to complete it in time for some VIPs to visit the site.
There was also a most useful time scale painted around the walls as to the years, BC and AD, which were relevant to Crete's history.
It rained cats and dogs one morning so we went inland to find the reservoir to see if there were any interesting birds. Here there were only 2 ducks and not much water which meant that we could see the house that was in the middle of where reservoir is now! So we returned to the beach in time for lunch! We looked at Lerapetra very quickly and decided against stopping; it was populated with migrant fruit pickers and didn't look too attractive. This area really is one big plastic poly tunnel. However, the local baby bananas and other fruit grown in them are delicious.
We didn't want to drag ourselves away from Mirtos at all, but know that we have a great deal more to see here.
We have to head to the North Coast here, and are in fear and trepidation as to what the weather will hold, as it has been consistently 5-6 degrees colder and wetter.
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