Day 10: Chanai, Crete

We got into the harbor at Crete early in the morning, and Jesse walked around the deck taking some pictures of the island at sunrise.

Originally we had planned on another tour at this port, but Maria had found a local, famous chef who has a restaurant on the island preparing local, self-sustaining food. He usually only opens for dinner, but had offered to open for us if all 6 of us at our dining table would attend a luncheon. Since we were a little 'toured-out' anyway (Lisa's ear actually hurts from having had an earbud in her ear hooked to the tour guides microphone system for the past 4 tours) we canceled our tour in Crete. Unfortunately, upon arrival to the port in Crete we realized the chef must have thought our ship was coming into a closer port as his restaurant was over 1 1/2 hours away by taxi - not enough time for our short stop in this city. This actually turned out to be a good thing, because we had our first itinerary-free day in port. We hopped on a city bus with our traveling companions (Luis, Maria, Tony and Tania) and went to the old harbor district. This turned out to be the nicest day we've had on our cruise so far - the old harbor is beautiful, as you can see in the pictures. There was an old mosque that had been converted to an art gallery, glass-bottom boats, snorkeling expeditions, and crystal clear water. There is also an old fort that we did not have a chance to explore.

After going up and down the harbor to see the shops, we found steps leading up to an overlook where we had a great view of the entire harbor, with the mouth of the harbor flanked by the fort on one side and the lighthouse on the other.

Of course, with Crete being part of Greece, we needed to have some gyros, and these ones were maybe even better than the ones we had in Athens. The weather was perfectly sunny and breezy but still cool. The only bad thing about the day was that this was our shortest day in port - we needed to be back at the boat by 1:30. As we were heading back to the city bus stop, we noticed what we think were some protest marches - we saw very young (high school maybe?) people carrying banners and talking on a bullhorn, but as they say, it's all Greek to us!

Once back onboard we took our usual siesta (we think they are putting some kind of sleeping powder in our water - how could we possibly be this relaxed and tired on vacation?) we were able to wake in time to take gorgeous pictures of the sunset. Funny enough - we asked a fellow cruiser to take a picture of us with the camera (with the big, heavy lens)… he couldn't find the button to take the picture and could barely hold the camera with the weight… and YET when we took a look at the picture later, we felt it was the best picture of the two of us yet and the best picture of the day. Good going mystery amateur photographer man.