– For a three days? Traveling without car and companion? You are crazy!

Do not listen it! All these people simply do not suspect that every day on Crete is a lifetime. So, if you have some money and a desire to change something, take a plane right now, immediately!

It is much better to go to a familiar place where you are known and welcomed — to the village of Istro, near Agios Nikolaos, for example. Nikos at the hotel reception, when seeing his regular guest, begins to laugh: “Again for a few days? I recently was wondering if you’d come once more…”

Why is he’s having so fun? Yes, this crazy woman tourist from Russia is an eternal troublemaker: she can’t find the refrigerator in the room, and then she will lose the key to your room; she tries to communicate all the time in poor English! But bartender Marina will open her arms: “My perfect person! I have something for you!” Of course, she stored up my favorite Knossos brandy, and this evening we will discuss the benefits of this drink… But now to the sea, to the sea! I don’t care with my suitcases and even with dinner. Voulisma beach (with its golden sand) is waiting! The sea will caress, calm and console. Let lose yourself in it. Only now is important: turquoise color, coolness, and the sun drawing lines in the sand visible through the water…

They say: «… you cannot step twice into the same stream». As always, the ancients are right: “everything flows, everything changes”. So our “stream”, where we return with companions and enviable constancy, can not be boring. This road to Sitia, for example: winds, misleads and leads. Last time we walked along it only three kilometers, so now we still have a way to go. Mohlos and Skopi are shining as beacons on this road, but until a next opportunity, if there will be more time for them. That monastery shining with its cross at night on the top of the mountain near Kalo Chorio, so many times we tried to scale the mountain, but always something distracted us along the way: either a small chapel on a rock, or a neighboring village, where we made a side stop at a junction, then new friends in this very village…

When your legs get tired after hiking in the mountains, you can think about bus routes. On the second day, you can go, for example…

So, the magic Agios… You know its embankments inside out but want to breathe again this smell of distant wanderings and short walks, to touch the colorful floats on a pile of ropes on the pier, and imagine how the sea was foamed beneath rowing Argonauts. The road ahead is not long: just to the other side of Mirabello Bay, to Elounda. The bus rises higher and higher. A breathtaking moment is when you look at the blue of the sea extended below. What a pity that you can’t stop the bus and get out right here. It seems you have already enough of this beauty. But you still do not know what persons you will meet: a gray-haired fisherman, for example, who will sort out nets in his boat, or a pair of French women who got lost their travel group. In your backpack of impressions from Elounda, in the most secret pocket, you will bring something else—a failed romance with the cook Mikali, who showed Elounda and gave a lot of compliments.

Spinalonga—here it is, at arm’s length. A cheerful grandfather at the pier offers to deliver there in half an hour and for 12 Euros. But you exchange Spinalonga for a walk with Mikali: where will you be flirting in such a manner?

A trip to the farmers market is a visit to a real feast. Oh, my god, how many colors, smells, faces! Gorgeous Georgia tells stories about her grass. Nearby is a company of funny Greeks with pomegranates (“fruits of Love!”). A mighty Zeus is throwing huge watermelons and a grandfather with radiant wrinkles on the face has on his counter bizarre cucumbers and occasionally partakes of a short of raki. You have forgotten that peaches are so real fragrant and sweet. The owner will choose a couple of them for you personally, will wash directly at the counter, and you will wander among the whole market luxury, biting slowly from peach’s velvety. Juice will flow on your fingers, the sun will fry your knees and hands, and you will be happy again, here and now…

You will eat the second peach on your balcony in the hotel, having opened a bottle of wine from Nikos: a gift to his constant troublemaker. The cicadas will sing their songs, the Poles below turn on the TV, and you will collapse on the bed in the room, forgetting about your hands in peach juice and the promise “to get up at seven tomorrow to go straight to the sea!” The Greeks wonder: “How can one plan his life?” I agree with them.

…So you still do not want to Crete for three days?
Svetlana Zaitseva.