Drive from Malia to Agios Nikolaos

Today we left Heraklion and drove west, on a 3 hr drive with Mr Rutaki VoiceMap to Agios Nikolaos. Typically, these drives take you on a winding roads around olive tree groves, through mountain villages, which are very sleepy with all commercial activity shut down for the season now. On the way, Mr Rutaki shares a lot of general info about Crete, which is somewhat quite repetitive on each of the drives. For example, we heard multiple times about the funeral and burial Cretan traditions, or types of olives and olive oil that exist, or the significance of small roadside candle shrines. Well, at least we hopefully will not forget it! Each drive though has a few of its distinct highlights. Today, we stopped at the cave where 3500 rebels and civilians were hiding during the ottoman times, and were all massacred. There is a small chapel inside the cave. In the high season you can probably explore the cave, but now no one was there and it was pitch dark, so we didn’t venture deep into the cave corridors with our flimsy phone flashlights. The next highlight was the gorgeous Mirabella bay and the Spinalonga island that we could see from the shore. It’s a 16 century Venetian fort, later turned into a leper colony. In high season boats take you on a tour of the small fortress but now we just admired it from the distance. We then arrived to Agios Nikolaos, a small town with the beach and lake and we stopped there for the night.Les mer