Crete is magical. Relaxed, easy pace — though part of that is self-designed. You could definitely overdo it here. One of the things about travel planning on the fly is that at night when I’d normally be blogging about our day, I’m busy figuring out what we are going to do tomorrow or trying to make arrangements for the next hotel/apartment.
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| The black netting is strung out under the olive trees to catch the fallen fruit |
So there is this legendary pink sand beach that is one of the most famous beaches in the world. It’s tucked away on the southwest corner of Crete so we figured it would be a good day trip when we are staying on the southern coast. Except it turns out that the shortest way to the beach is over a rock and dirt road requiring 4 wheel drive, which we don’t have. Oh well, it’s still only about an hour the long way around.
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| Where are we going?! Through someone’s backyard? |
Following our map and GPS we start out on some of the narrowest and most winding roads I’ve ever travelled on. Beautiful views off the sides of the cliffs, but also plenty of shrines, reminding us of those who hadn’t been as lucky on these roads. Things were looking good until we hit dirt. Thanks a lot GPS lady! We had thwarted her first attempts to take us to the “shortcut,” but she was slick and persistent and brought us back around to another pass through the mountains (instead of around).
According to our dumb paper map it was an “improved” road, but I don’t know what it looked like previously to make this series of holes, ruts, and boulders the improved version. We tried to drive it for a stretch, especially since we were so close, but finally called it quits and Josh did a 42 point turn on the side of the mountain to get us turned around and headed back to find a paved road.
We backtracked and eventually found a place where we could meet up with the main road that would take us all the way to the beach.
The legends of pink sand are true, but not in the way that Carmel is a white sand beach. Elafonisi beach was similar to our beach day further north on the same coast, the edges of the surf tinged pink with sand made of red coral. Beautiful and indeed pink, but the majority of the sand is beautiful plain golden/tan beach sand.
Turquoise water as far as the eye can see and we planted our towels on an island sandbar for the afternoon. Warm water, little fish swimming among the rocks, and because it’s October, this very popular beach isn’t overrun with people like it would be at the height of summer. Worth every extra mile.
