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Crete White Mountains. October 14: Agia Irini Gorge and Omalos
Map of Agia Irini and environs
This morning was the beginning of our first Cretan trek, Trekking Hellas’s Hiking in the White Mountains of Crete. Today we began with a relatively short and easy hike: Agia Irini Gorge. This was both to give us a warmup and to account for the two full hours of car transfers that were involved in getting us to our hike and thence to our accommodation.
Topographic map of the trail.
Stats for our walk.
All downhill!
Our driver, Yannis, picked us up for the hour-long drive to the gorge. This started to give us an inkling of why Trekking Hellas’s Cretan holidays are so much more expensive than the ones in mainland Greece: transportation in Crete is difficult. Yannis works for a company called Sougia Taxi, based in the south coast town of Sougia. He had to drive about 90 minutes to meet us at our hotel, then drive back south to the gorge. After he dropped us off, he had to drive around to the end of the trail so he’d be in position to pick us up when we emerged 3 or 4 hours later. Then he had to drive us to Omalos, the town on the high plateau that’s the closest settlement to the top of the much more famous Samaria Gorge. Then he’d still be a good hour from getting back to Sougia–a long workday for him.
Anyway! Yannis got us to the trailhead. There were a couple of tavernas set up there exclusively to serve trekking customers; there’s no town there.
This café is named after the famous Kri-Kri, the indigenous Cretan wild goat.
We grabbed a coffee at a taverna so we could also use the restroom, and then we headed off into our first gorge.
The start of the trail through Agia Irini Gorge
There were lots of rocks, as one would expect. There were also lots of goats.
Goats! These are not, however, kri-kri.
Goats drinking water.
A little shrine in the rocks.
Chris flew the drone some; this looked like an ideal place to have it follow us. Alas, this drone apparently can’t see pine trees all that well.
A broken propellor blade after a run-in with a tree, easily repaired.
Eleni had told us that this trail would be fairly simple, though it would involve some “scrambling”. We never know what people mean by that; my assumption would be that it refers to terrain that requires the use of hands and that can’t just be walked over.
Is this “scrambling”?
This looks like a fossilized fungus.
We emerged at the far end of the gorge around noon. All in all, it was an extremely pleasant walk, all the gorge scenery with none of the desperate crowds that can fill Samaria Gorge. In fact, some hotels will recommend Agia Irini Gorge to visitors who can’t do Samaria.
A sign to the café at the end of the gorge.
Yannis had instructed us to call him when we were ready to get picked up. (He was waiting somewhere nearby, but not at the trail-end cafe.) As he warned us, our phones didn’t work there, but the café let us use their phone.
Tiny café puppy!
Our accommodations this evening were in the town of Omalos, which is barely a town; it’s just a farming settlement high on the Omalos plateau that happens to be located quite near the top of the Samaria Gorge. Tour buses regularly stop here to disgorge hikers, and there are about three hotels and restaurants to serve the overnight crowd.
Omalos plateau.
NB: Omalos is 35 km from Chania. That’s like 22 miles. But it takes a solid hour to drive there from Chania. That is totally normal in Greece, where the shortest distances can take forever to cover, either by car or on foot.
At over 1000 meters in elevation, Omalos has a completely different climate from the coasts. As had happened when we entered the mountains of Arkadia a month earlier, we discovered that we had passed from summer well into autumn. (We walked back into summer two days later, heading south through the Samaria Gorge.)
The staff at the Hotel Neos Omalos were fielding questions from a group of Germans who had traveled there intending to hike the Samaria Gorge the next day. But the gorge was going to be closed! The staff was recommending alternatives, to wit the Agia Irini Gorge (like I said…) or the ascent of Mt. Giglios. That was our agenda for tomorrow!
I ate goat for lunch. It was delicious!