Day 7: GetYourGuides 7 Villages of Apokoronas Tour… WITH LUNCH!

Mountain Villages, Roadside Herbs & an Educational Amount of Raki

Honestly, they had me at lunch.

Tim found our 7 Villages of Apokoronas tour through GetYourGuide, and I’m not entirely sure I would have agreed to an early-morning, multi-village excursion had the words “with lunch” not appeared in the description.

History? Wonderful. Medieval churches? Absolutely. Tiny Cretan villages? Sign me up.

But you’re feeding me too?

BOOK IT, TIM.

We’ve started using GetYourGuide when we travel because it gives us an easy way to see what tours and experiences are available around us without hunting through seventeen different websites trying to determine which company is legitimate, where we’re supposed to meet, and whether we’ve accidentally booked ourselves onto a six-hour goat-herding expedition.

Although, to be fair, I would probably do the goat thing.

[Check out the Seven Villages of Apokoronas tour on GetYourGuide →]

This is not a paid recommendation: If you book an experience on GetYourGuide, awesome for you!! Hopefully you enjoy the experience as much as we did! And, more importantly, shoot me an email about your experience to help me in my ongoing research into Greek lunches.

Food is also the only logical reason to get out of bed at a stupid hour, eat breakfast at The Red Bicycle at an even stupider hour, and then wander through Chania looking for a busload of strangers gathered outside a photo developer shop.

Wait. They still have those?

The app said it was an eight-hour tour. It wasn’t eight hours.

I was very okay with that.

The Bus of Potential Doom

The minute I stepped onto the bus, I was enveloped in the delightfully fluffy perfume cloud of the Australian lady sitting in front of me. She turned out to be absolutely lovely, which was unfortunate because her perfume was actively trying to kill me.

I’m allergic to fragrances. Perfume, scented lotions, hand sanitizer…if it smells nice, my body files a formal complaint and begins preparing paperwork for my immediate departure from this mortal realm.

So I clutched my EpiPen, quietly migrated to the back of the bus, and hoped her beautifully toxic scent remained toward the front.

Spoiler alert: it did.

Also, I didn’t die. Successful start to the tour.

Of course, as soon as we started winding our way up into the mountains above Chania, I remembered something important: I had forgotten to take my anti-nausea medication.

And where had I voluntarily relocated myself?

The very back of the bus. The exact place I normally avoid on mountain roads because I enjoy keeping my breakfast inside my body.

At this point, the day’s objectives were becoming increasingly simple: breathe normally, don’t vomit, and make it to lunch.

Fortunately, breakfast stayed put.

California, But Make It Ancient

Once I stopped contemplating my digestive future, I could actually look out the window.

The scenery was spectacular. As we climbed into the mountains, something about the colors of the landscape felt oddly familiar. The dry hillsides, trees, vegetation, orchards, and herbs growing everywhere reminded me so much of California.

Greece and California share that wonderful Mediterranean-style climate, which means the landscape produces an astonishing variety of things to eat. Olives, peaches, vegetables, fruits, and herbs seem to grow everywhere you look.

Apparently, I flew halfway around the world to discover California with older buildings.

Much, much older buildings.

Enter Nick, Knower of Things

Our guide, Nick, quickly became the real star of the day.

There are tour guides who memorize a script, point toward something old, and tell you what year it was built. Then there are guides who seem to know absolutely everything about the place they’re showing you.

Nick was the second kind.

He led us through Ottoman ruins, medieval churches, and tiny mountain villages, weaving history into stories about everyday life in Crete. As we walked, he pointed out what was growing wild around us: olives, blackberries, thyme, capers, sage, oregano, fennel, and more.

You could practically make dinner by walking along the side of the road.

It made me realize how disconnected I’ve become from knowing where food actually comes from. At home, herbs arrive neatly bundled in little plastic packages at the grocery store. Here, Nick would point toward something growing out of a stone wall and casually announce that it was dinner.

Crete is basically one enormous pantry with mountains.

And this was the part of the tour I hadn’t expected to enjoy quite so much. We could have rented a car and driven through these villages ourselves, but we would have missed most of what we were looking at. Having someone there who could explain the history, plants, buildings, and little details we’d otherwise drive straight past made the day completely different.

That’s one of the reasons I like booking experiences through GetYourGuide. Sometimes I want to wander around and get hopelessly lost on my own. We have already established that Tim and I are extremely capable of doing that without professional assistance. But sometimes it’s worth letting somebody who actually knows where they’re going take over.

And Then Came the Raki

Just when we thought we’d absorbed enough history, culture, and roadside botany, we discovered another important component of Cretan education.

Raki.

Every taverna stop seemed to involve it.

Raki is Crete’s traditional spirit, distilled from what remains of the grapes after winemaking. More importantly, it’s woven into the culture of hospitality. You don’t simply drink raki. Someone offers it to you as part of welcoming you, sharing food with you, or celebrating the fact that you are all sitting around a table together.

It’s friendship in a tiny glass.

Friendship that tastes like jet fuel.

Not regular jet fuel, either. This is the kind that puts hair on your chest, cures whatever’s wrong with you, and suddenly convinces you that climbing another hill in the Cretan heat sounds like a fabulous idea.

Tim and I had…an educational amount of raki.

Let’s leave it at that.

Churches, Ruins & Increasingly Cheerful Tourists

We continued through the villages, exploring ruined churches, old buildings, and an ancient theater while learning more about the layers of people who have called Crete home.

That’s one of the things I love about traveling here. History isn’t tucked neatly behind museum glass. It’s everywhere. You turn a corner and there’s a medieval church. Walk a little farther and you’re standing among Ottoman ruins. Sit down for lunch and the buildings around you have already seen generations of people come and go.

Crete doesn’t feel like a place that has history. It feels like a place still living inside it.

Admittedly, by this point the raki may also have been making everything seem particularly profound.

But More Importantly: Lunch

Eventually we arrived in the village of Fres and settled into the village square for the moment I had been promised from the beginning.

Lunch.

Finally.

And because apparently no meal in Greece is complete without a member of the local animal hospitality union checking on us, a taverna dog was making the rounds. He worked the tables expertly, accepting ear scratches, belly rubs, and whatever edible compensation tourists could be persuaded to provide.

The cats were also present, although they maintained the traditional Greek feline approach to customer service: You may admire us from a respectful distance, peasant.

I respect that. Greek cats understand boundaries. Greek dogs understand snacks. Together, they have the entire tourism industry covered.

Would I Book It Again?

Absolutely.

The tour gave us something we wouldn’t have gotten simply driving around Apokoronas ourselves. We didn’t just see seven villages. We learned why they looked the way they did, what was growing around us, how people had lived there, and how all those layers of Cretan history fit together.

Nick was fantastic, the scenery was gorgeous, the villages were fascinating, the raki was alarmingly plentiful, and yes, they fed me.

If you’re staying around Chania and want to get away from the busiest tourist areas for a day, this is exactly the kind of experience I’d look for.

[See the Seven Villages of Apokoronas tour on GetYourGuide →]

Worth Getting Out of Bed For

By the end of the day, we’d wandered through seven villages, explored churches and ruins, learned enough about wild herbs to become dangerously overconfident, survived winding mountain roads from the back of a bus, consumed an impressive amount of Cretan hospitality, and finally eaten the lunch that had lured me out of bed in the first place.

Somewhere along the way, what I had initially regarded as an alarmingly early commitment became another one of those days that reminds me why we travel.

You can read about a place. You can look at pictures. You can memorize dates, names, and historical events. But there’s something entirely different about walking through a village while someone who knows it points toward the plants growing beside the road, tells you who lived in the crumbling building ahead, pours you a tiny glass of something terrifying, and welcomes you into the story.

Another perfect day in Crete.

With lunch.

Which, let’s be honest, was the deciding factor from the very beginning.

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