monastery and museum

Sitia

Thursday

Getting out of Zakros

Driving over mountains higher than I've ever driven before, really scary for the second time this trip, but it's shown on the map as the same standard as something else which was absolutely fine ...

getting out of Zakros
- click for a larger view
if you really want to

Prehistoric cave shown on the map, and indeed signposted when you got to the top, but even so I can't see where it's supposed to be. There's a dog in a kennel, though, a soft retriever or something of the sort.

Then it gets dark before I'm really safe; twice I have to ask the way - asking's no problem, you just say the name of the place with a rising inflection and point in various directions: but making sense of the answer is another matter, when it seems to take you across someone's private courtyard and to go off in completely the wrong direction, and high up over yet another vertical mountain-side ... a wide tarmac road will suddenly and without warning turn into a narrow bumpy bit of concrete as it goes through a village, crossroads leave you guessing without even the most basic help like the tracks from other cars: too often it turns out that the main road is actually the narrower of the two ...

To end it all I find myself in a dead-end which really is someone's back-yard... backing out I flag down the first car which comes along, and the driver shouts out something which can only be "Follow!" - fortunately for me, they are on their way to an evening on the town ...