beaches

Today was a vacotiony-vacation day. We drove through a winding gorge to reach the quiet beaches at Damnoni and Amoudi. In the morning we walked along Damnoni, up a dirt road to a cave full of goats, and settled in to the beach front cafe for a long, slow lunch and afternoon frappe.

After giving up on finding an empty cove (they were overrun with nudists), we sprawled on a nearly-empty pebble beach at Amoudi for the next several hours to read, wade, headstand, and sift through the colorful pebbles.

mount ida, almost

Today we set out to hike Mount Ida. Starting from Fourfouras, we were happy to find the first trail marker, but it would be the only one we would see for the designated route. After a promising start, we wandered through some grazing area and eventually found ourselves plodding along goat tracks and scrambling up a funnel of fallen rock. We had read that trails were not well marked so it took a long time to concede that this actually was not a trail (maybe the skulls and partial goat carcasses should have been a warning). Eventually we decided to turn back, skidding back down the rocks and through the prickly low brush.

After that 3 hour detour, we discovered a well marked trail (although still not the E4 we were looking for), and with already tired feet, began another ascent. With the late start, we couldn't make Mount Ida and save enough daylight for the return trip so by 5 pm we started back down while enormous griffin vultures started circling overhead.

Mount Ida above us...would have been a few more hours up.