Knossos
(This is a bit of a retrospective for Ben and my Greece trip)
We met at the moroni fountain in Iraklion — for me this was after a 10 hour ferry trip from Athens sleeping on the floor, and then hanging around from 5:30.
Hanging around in the morning, walking past the Venetian fort as the sun came up, sitting in a square aas the church bells ring out the ‘Kyrie Eleison’ really put me in the mood for Greece. After the panic and stress of gettting there it was a good way to wind down.
After we had breakfast and I had dumped my stuff we decided to hire a car and go to Knossos. We decided that it was easier than catching busses around, and gave us more freedom. we ended up with a beaten up Suzuki — a glorified tin can on wheels — that smoked alarmingly for the first couple of hours.
More alarming even than the car were the Greek roads. Fortunately I have driven in Thailand, so I was used to traffic treating lane markings (if they exist at all) as optional guidelines. If you stick to the hard shoulder normally OK. In some ways its easier in Greece — you don’t generally have to watch out for water buffallo.
But we did get to Knossos, and parked about 1km away and walked back to the site. It was packed despite the heat, and we spent about 4 hours wandering around the palace, exploring every part we could get to.
Its an atmospheric place, even with the thousands of us tourists swarming over it. It is so easy to imagine people once living there — walking the same corridors we now see collapsed. The far past seems remarkably close — true of much of Greece.