Day 9: The Samaria Gorge

Or: My Knees Have Filed a Formal Complaint

We arrived in Agia Roumeli by ferry with everything an experienced international traveler needs to locate her hotel: a name.

No address. No street. No map pin. Just Hotel Faragi and the vague confidence that surely this would work itself out.

Nothing says “seasoned world traveler” quite like two Americans wandering around a remote Cretan village dragging luggage behind them and looking hopefully at buildings.

Fortunately, Agia Roumeli is tiny. Very tiny. The sort of tiny where apparently addresses are considered excessive bureaucracy. Why number buildings when everyone knows where Kostas lives?

After skirting several cats, one exceptionally round pug, and a few buildings that looked promising but were definitely not hotels, we found a teeny tiny sign attached to a goat fence: HOTEL FARAGI →

Well. There you have it. Google Maps can go home. The goat fence has spoken.

Hotel Faragi was one street up from the bay, and our innkeepers were an older couple who spoke very little English. We spoke approximately four useful words of Greek, three of which involved food. Somehow, none of this mattered. They were absolutely lovely, we had a room, and nobody had been murdered.

Successful travel day.

The timing of our arrival was actually strangely perfect. Wildfires between Rethymno and Sfakia had forced Samaria Gorge National Park to close the day before, and by the time our ferry reached Agia Roumeli, the park would have already closed for the evening anyhow.

Which meant there were almost no people.

Glorious.

If you have been following along, you may have noticed a recurring theme in Harrison Family Travel: we enjoy seeing the world. We are considerably less enthusiastic about seeing the rest of the world seeing it at exactly the same time.

So we went to bed early because tomorrow we were tackling the Samaria Gorge.

Sort of.

The Harrison Method of Hiking

The Samaria Gorge is one of the great hikes of Crete, running roughly 16 kilometers from high in the White Mountains down toward Agia Roumeli and the Libyan Sea. The traditional route takes somewhere around five to seven hours, depending on your speed, your knees, your relationship with rocks, and how often you stop to stare dramatically at enormous canyon walls.

It is generally described as a moderate-to-challenging hike.

We are Gen X. We were raised on garden hoses, lawn darts, questionable playground equipment, no bicycle helmets, and the general parental philosophy of “come home when the streetlights turn on and if the street lights are on, you’re in the front yard.”

We are determined. We are resourceful. We are feral. We can do anything.

Unfortunately, my knees did not receive this memo. They have apparently unionized.

Instead of beginning at the top and hiking the entire gorge like sensible outdoorsy people with expensive hiking poles and suspiciously muscular calves, we devised what I shall henceforth call The Lazy Person’s Samaria Gorge Experience™.

We would start at the bottom in Agia Roumeli, hike into the gorge, continue until my knees began sending threatening correspondence, then turn around and hike back in time for the ferry.

Would we conquer the Samaria Gorge? No.

Would we poke it with a stick and see what happened? Absolutely.

Operation: Avoid Humans and Heat

The park opened at 7:00 a.m. We were there at 7:45 a.m ish. There WAS breakfast to be had after all.

We were there early because of the heat and partly because PEOPLE. Avoiding both had become the day’s strategic objective.

From Agia Roumeli, we walked about two kilometers toward the gorge, passing through the remains of the old abandoned settlement of Samaria (a village that was left beghind in 1962 to make way to the Samaria National Park service. and eventually reaching the entrance to the national park.

TRAVEL EVIDENCE № 008
Proof I Actually Went There

Along the way were goats. Lots of goats.

Crete’s municipal lawn-mowing department.

They wandered around munching vegetation with the confidence of animals who know perfectly well that humans are merely temporary visitors to their island.

We also came across a memorial to Cretan resistance fighters from World War II. During the German occupation of Crete, the island became a center of fierce resistance. Cretans hid in the mountains, helped Allied soldiers escape, carried messages and supplies, and organized attacks against the occupying forces. The reprisals were brutal. Entire villages suffered for their resistance, and people were executed for helping fight the occupation.

Standing there, surrounded by those mountains, it suddenly made sense in a way that reading it in a history book never quite could. These weren’t just beautiful mountains. They were hiding places. Escape routes. Lookouts. Protection.

Crete remembers and Cretans are fiercely proud that their people fought back.

Then we continued into the gorge. It was spectacular.

The canyon walls rose around us, steep and enormous, with caves carved into the rock. A stream rambled along the gorge floor, appearing and disappearing between stones. The morning was quiet enough that we could hear the water moving through the canyon.

There were rocks.

So.

Many.

Rocks.

This is where I should explain something important about myself.

I am not graceful. There are gazelles. There are ballerinas. There are elegant people who seem to glide effortlessly through airports wearing white linen without spilling anything on themselves.

And then there is Kim.

If an object protrudes from the ground by one-quarter of an inch, I will find it. With my foot. While moving forward.

I tripped over rocks. I tripped while climbing rocks. I tripped while walking around rocks. I tripped on portions of the path where there did not appear to be a rock, which suggests that either I am extraordinarily gifted or the rocks had begun actively hunting me.

Straight lines mean nothing in Kim Physics. My natural walking pattern is somewhere between “drunken pirate ” and “newborn giraffe”.

Sometimes I simply cannot be left unattended.

But we kept going.

We wandered deeper into the gorge, listening to the water burbling beside us. We climbed over rocks, crossed the stream, stared up at cliffs that made us feel very small, and stopped whenever we wanted simply because something was beautiful.

There was no finish line. No medal. No requirement that we prove anything.

Eventually, the clock reminded us that the 11:45 ferry had absolutely no interest in our personal journey of self-discovery, so we turned around and headed back toward Agia Roumeli.

Somewhere along that walk back, I realized something. I think I’ve spent a lot of my life believing that doing something properly means doing all of it.

Finish the trail. See every room. Climb to the top. Check every box. Get your money’s worth. Don’t quit. But maybe travel isn’t supposed to be a list of things you’ve conquered.

We didn’t conquer the Samaria Gorge. We wandered into it. We listened to the river. We stood beneath cliffs that had watched generations of people hide, fight, flee, survive, and return home. We laughed at goats. I attempted to lose a fistfight with gravity approximately fourteen times. We went as far as we wanted to go.

And then we turned around.

That didn’t make it half an adventure. It just made it our adventure.

Besides, I don’t think Samaria Gorge particularly cares whether I conquered it.

It has mountains.

I have knees that make a noise when I stand up.

I know which one of us is winning.

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