One can spend many days here, closely similar but never quite the same, in a sort of ruminative pottering. It is almost a shock to emerge from the town with its cafés and gift shops and kiosks with foreign newspapers, and find the unyielding Cretan landscape awaiting you. Two hours by road—and a very tortuous and vertiginously winding road it is—southward from Chania into the White Mountains, brings you to the gorge of Samaria, which has been a national park since 1962. At eleven miles it is famous as the longest gorge in Europe, and it is perhaps the most spectacular on the island—though about this there are differences of opinion; Crete is home to a hundred gorges at least, all with their own distinctive qualities and their own advocates. However, Samaria is certainly the one most popular with visitors. Many thousands of people set off to walk the length of it, a mistake in some cases: It can be a taxing hike, steep in places, stony underfoot, and much of the way exposed to the sun.
