Wandering Europe - Again: 15. Greece: Crete

Getting to Greece takes a while. Getting to the islands takes even longer when you take your car.

Leaving Brindisi in Italy at 9pm, we finally tied up at Patras in Greece at 1pm the next day having collected an extra hour by moving east - so a 16 hour trip.
All ferry traffic to the Greek islands must leave from Piraeus, the port of Athens. From Patras on Greece's west coast it is therefore necessary to drive about 230km to Piraeus. We dreaded this drive that we had initially done in 2013 as it was a one and a half lane road, full of potholes and crazy Greek drivers.
A one and a half lane road is a Greek phenomenon. The Greeks straddle the white line and you need them to move over so you can pass. Whether they move over depends on whether or not they are watching their mirrors and know you are behind them; whether or not they respond to your headlight flashing' or whether you have to resort to the horn.
However, we found that things have improved greatly and were thrilled to find a new, two lane 130kph road. It lasted for 200km and abruptly ended, pretty much in chaos, 30km from Athens.

So we made the trip in about two and a half hours with time to spare before boarding the connecting ferry to Crete. Paul posted the above photo of me on Facebook and said "Give her a chair and a beer and she'll follow you anywhere". It's pretty true.
The ferry for Chania, Crete left Piraeus at 9pm and arrived 9 hours later at 6am. Within half an hour we were in the old town of Chania, trying to work out how to get the car as close as possible to our accommodation to unload.

It was all too hard; we were very tired and it was very early, so we just sat at the only cafe that was open and watched Chania wake up.

The beautiful old Venetian harbour is pedestrian only, except for a delivery and servicing period of two hours every morning between 7am and 9am. The police drop chains at both ends of the port to allow the trucks in and one must be out before 9am so as not to be caught.

We finally located our apartment (that's it with the umbrella), moved the car in and unloaded, knowing check-in was not until 1pm. Luckily the restaurant on the ground floor let us leave all our bags under a table (a bit nerve-wracking really because our computers were included) and we moved the car into a public car park about 1km away, just before the chain went up at 9am.

We used the Hop-on Hop-off bus to get a sense of our surroundings. Chania is much bigger than we thought. Wikipedia says it has a population of 160,000. The Venetian harbour is the area just above the bare branch on the right.

It's the Venetian harbour that is the real highlight and we spent our four days just hanging around its edges.

Chania is on the northwest coast of Crete. Its 14th-century Venetian harbour, narrow streets and waterfront restaurants are a delight. At the harbor entrance is a 16th-century lighthouse, old ship yards and ancient warehouses all with Venetian, Egyptian and Ottoman histories.