Travel Story: Egle Gerulaityte - crete
Gravel Travel along the
Mediterranean
Sometimes, Crete feels a little like Mexico: there’s a
definite siesta tradition, everybody drives around in
enormous pickup trucks over spilling with sheep,
rolls of wire and kids - and black - robed priests
hurrying back and forth on their godly errands are
still a common and deeply respected sight in towns
and villages. And just like in Central America, a road
here can turn into a dusty gravel path within a
matter of a few kilometers: perfectly smooth tarmac
suddenly gives way to a potholed, cracked strip of
pavement, and you suddenly find yourself
negotiating a pebbly piste leading to some long
forgotten, sun - baked valley hidden away in a maze
of mountain passes.
Crete is criss – crossed with a network of hundreds
of off road tracks, ranging from graded dirt roads
and gravel trails to narrow sandy bridleways and
steep rocky paths. Because there are two of us on
the gargantuan Super Tenere, we mostly stuck to the
bigger gravel and dirt tracks in the southern part of
the island: we were after an honest off road
adventure, but attempting to climb a sheep herders’
trail up the rocky inclines of the mountains or try to
roll down a sandy bank would have been a just little
too much fun, so we decided to err on the side of
caution.