In April 2000 we holidayed in Rethymnon, Northern Crete.
Crete is stunning, once you get away from the other tourists, who congregate on the coast: an endless line of sweaty, overweight, pallid flesh deliberately giving themselves radiation burns and overeating in an attempt to forget their humdrum existences.
Rethymnon is like all Greek cities: an overwhelming pall of exhaust fumes, droning mopeds and an undercurrent of raw sewage: inadequate road systems, endless moped hire and beachware shops, and Germans in yellow taxis.

But outside Rethymnon, you can touch Greece. One moment you are in the city and a moped mile later you are back 1,000 years in a little Greek village with old women in black, old men playing cards and drinking Ouzo, the smells of cypress and pine trees, old monks in black with wispy beards swinging incense and muttering in olde Greek, beaten silver ornaments, dusty streets and writing you can't even guess at so any menu becomes an adventure. The city is still audible, but the modern lifestyle hasn't leaked in yet.

We visited several restaurants where the language gap was so wide we had to go in to the kitchen and point to the (universally delicious) items available.

Actually, Rethymnon is not so bad down by the harbour. Here the trade is mixed fishing and tourist activities, the harbour having been done up, doubtless with EC money.

We left the city as quickly as possible and visited markets and gorges, monasteries and villages, fuelled by Greek salads and Ouzo, fresh fruit and curiosity. One supermarket on the outskirts of Rethymnon wouldn't let us leave the shop (at 10am!) without 2 glasses of Ouzo each, which contributed to our driving, certainly. Is it any wonder they have a dreadful accident rate?

Many of the roads on the island are unsurfaced and very rough as a result, making moped riding unpredictable and wearing. So eventually we gave up on the mopeds and hired a Renault Twingo-thing which buzzed and screamed and barely had the power to get up the hills.

The hills are remote and peaceful, with goats and monasteries dotted across the hills.

The monasteries are quiet: too quiet. They absorb sound. In the back of your head a monk-chanting soundtrack runs all the time but in reality there is no sound. Perhaps there is something in Terry Pratchett's theories of monks absoring and storing time, but maybe it's sound they're absorbing...

Much of Crete is built on limestone and we are always suckers for limestone caves so we visited the Melidoni cave for a cool refreshing afternoon's bat-guano and Alien-like accretion viewing.

Crete played a bit part in World War II, when it was considered strategic, like Malta. But unlike Malta it was invaded by the Germans, who treated the Greeks very badly. Reading Anthony Beevor's account of the war in Crete, I can understand why the Greeks like the English more than they like the Germans...

We hired a boat from Bali. This is the most fun you can have on the water: get right away from anyone else and do your own thing. Picnic in bag, mobile phone (thank goodness for GSM, we broke the prop on some rocks.....), towels, a good book and some suntan lotion.

We found a deserted bay inaccessible from the land side and just chilled out all afternoon in the sun.
We ate our packed lunch, read and sunbathed, swam in the rock pools, climbed a bit, read and sunbathed a bit more then then headed for home. The best day I've had on holiday for years.

We visited several ruined and abandoned villages: now the tourists, and the money are on the coasts, many of the traditional villages up in the hills have been abandoned, which is a shame.

Endless winding paths, maintained as much by the passage of goats as by people, wind up and down the hills and everywhere is so quiet, just the absence of noise is restful.

We visited the Irini Gorge, a remote spot on the tourist map. Every year in the late winter and early spring this gorge is scoured by runoff from the melting snow on the mountains above. For the rest of the year it is remote, quiet and pleasant. The high cliffs protect you and the flora and fauna from the direct sunlight for much of the day, giving a cooler, more pleasant experience than out in the open countryside.
Starting out at the top of the gorge the riverbed is utterly dry, giving the illusion of a lack of moisture. And yet the plants grow well. Half a mile down the gorge, however, damp patches begin to appear as the water climbs closer to the surface, and soon small rivulets are wending their way down, parting and joining around the bigger rocks.

Further on down the walls close in and someone has gone to a great deal of effort to ensure the path continues, by adding wooden walkways and dynamiting tricky sections. But by that time we'd had enough walking in the hot sun and were ready for a dip in the pool...