"Today you walk 18km, with 1250m elevation change, all down hill.  This is how you choose to spend your day." - Dimitris, dry humoured tour guide.  
Today Pierre and I tackled the Samaria Gorge, in the South Western end of Crete.  It was exactly as Dimitris described it to be. After setting a good pace for the first 9 kms of beautiful mountain scenery and getting past the hords of tourists, the gorge begain to narrow and on came the geology jokes. We had lunch at the ancient Samaria village which has been inhabited since 4000 years BC and lots of old buildings and walls are still there! After lunch there were several more kilometers of hiking through "rockfall, not stop" (still stopped and took lots of photos) and we get to THE great token picture stop which is on all of the post cards.
The gorge finally opened and we arrived in a sort of quant little village which kind of reminded me of a farm animal zoo.  We finished up on the southern coast of Crete in a little village called Agia Roumeli.  None of the photos we have do it justice, but the water was aqua blue and the swim in the Lybian Sea was well deserved after the hike in the sweltering heat! Oh did I mention that it was 30 degrees today =) - SJ
P.s. Another fun fact we learnt today: Crete has many big mountains with many peaks that extend above 2000m and they all get snow on them in the winter! Our guide said it gets down to -15 up top in the winter, who would of thought!