Sunday, September 5, 2011 — Plateau of Lost Souls

The peb­bles and thorns made “sleep” into a con­stant cycle of drift­ing off, then wak­ing to remove a sharp rock pok­ing into my ribs, or to remove a thorn that had worked its way through my sleep­ing bag and into my flesh. I got my revenge on Fil­ip by snor­ing loud­ly when I did man­age to sleep, ruin­ing his sleep.

It was a tough but scenic climb up to Thryp­ti. Once above the cliffs, which were resplen­dent with great cav­erns, crags, and even a spec­tac­u­lar stone arch over emp­ty air, were came into pine for­est, and a long snaking moun­tain road that could have been in the Cana­di­an Rock­ies. This took the bet­ter part of the morning.

Around Thryp­ti there are farmed ter­races, just like in the low­lands, and also ample graz­ing for sheep and goats. There are even vine­yards. It’s obvi­ous that the Eti­oc­re­tans could have found suf­fi­cient resources to sus­tain them in their long, sad cen­turies of exile. There’s even a tav­er­na in the vil­lage, and we had some omelettes for lunch. But the oth­er “roads” marked on the map appeared to be more fic­tion that fact, and we need­ed to get to our reserved room on the oth­er side of Crete by evening. So we decid­ed to hitch­hike back the way we came and from thence to the south coast at Etiapetra.

Once in Eti­a­pe­tra, we deter­mined that the only way to get across to our des­ti­na­tion at Agia Pav­los was to return to Irak­lion and find a bus going south­west. Even then, we could find noth­ing that would get us clos­er than forty kilo­me­ters from our tar­get. We hitch­hiked the rest, get­ting lucky with a sin­gle ride, espe­cial­ly since Agios Pav­los is twelve wind­ing kilo­me­ters off the main road across a range of hills.

We arrived at a small cove on the the south­ern coast. A lit­tle hotel serv­ing the more adven­tur­ous, soli­tude-seek­ing trav­el­ers. A civ­i­lized, cloth­ing option­al beach. We unwound for awhile on the cool, windy patio, look­ing at the moon­light sparkle on the dark Mediterranean.

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