Day Five – Samaria Gorge

We began the day again on the 10.30am ferry which cost an arm and a leg (16 Euros). On the way to Agia Romeuli, which is where the Samaria Gorge is located, we stopped off at Loutro and 41 passengers got off along with the usual supplies. We left Loutro at 10.53am and along the way to the Gorge we saw a beautiful backdrop of the White Mountains with the excitement of an alluvial fan located on the side of the hill slope.

Upon arrive at Agia Romeuli (E023.96019 N35.22911) we missioned straight through the village, which is purely created for tourism, and headed towards the Gorge. In the village there was;
14 Tavernas
2 Phone Boxes
2 Houses
1 Medical Centre
1 Ruin of a chapel
A supermarket….. And a sleeping cat. Awww!

The Samaria Gorge is the longest in Europe spanning 18km. In 1981 it was declared by UNESCO as a biosphere reserve due to the great interest in its natural resources (Spanos 2008)

In comparison to Illingas Gorge there was a natural looking path which took us all the way through the Samaria Gorge to the Iron Gates and beyond (for Dave). Following the path was a beautiful babbling brooke. We saw lots of tourists coming down the Gorge from where their coaches dropped them off at the top. The tourists were mainly middle age and older due to it being out of season (children are still at school) in most European countries. There were a vast number of bins in the Gorge and no litter. With research from asking questions later on in Agia Romeuli and on the ferry it became apparent that the tour operators encourage the tourists to be environmentally friendly. Whilst in the Gorge we crossed many bridges. Dave became paparazzi for the afternoon by filming us girls as we descended from the Gorge, a video of his efforts will be uploaded soon.

On the return ferry trip Dave and Emma utilised their language skills again to little effect as most of the tourists they tried to talk to where very tired after their long walk in the Gorge. Also on the return Laura and Katie noticed some storm clouds out at sea, which are now approaching us as we eat our dinner in the Three Brothers Taverna. The waves are a lot higher than normal and we are waiting on our first storm of the week.

Our GPS is now expired as the battery has run out. We are counting on not needing it tomorrow as we are taking a trip to Loutro to talk to tourists and businesses about their experiences, we already have a recording of the GPS reference for Loutro.

Interestingly when we left the ferry 14 tourists actually stayed in Chora Sfakion.

Our quote of the day today is from Emma: “Is that another bin? Oh yeah we are still here!”

We all agree that we had an overall good day today and our highlight was reaching the Iron Gates in the Samaria Gorge. The lowlight of the day was someone on the ferry flicking cigarette ash on Laura’s trousers.

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