September 15: Chania–Mt. Pelion
9.07 km; 493 m (-499) ascent.
Greek hotel breakfasts are often a surprise. When there are just a couple of guests, the hotel won’t assemble the usual breakfast buffet. Instead, the kitchen will put together dishes one by one and ferry them out to individual diners. And you never, ever, know what will be coming.
Manthos had self-service coffee, but otherwise we sat passively at our table while the waiter brought us bread, croissants, butter and jam in little bowls, pancakes, cake, a plate with two slices of cheese and two slices of luncheon meat, and finally a small omelet. No yogurt, which was unusual.
The difficulty with this mode of service is that if you are at least trying to restrict your diet (I’m fairly strict low-carb), you don’t want to eat something inappropriate only to have something you’d rather eat appear just as you finish. Also, there’s the danger of just plain gorging.
Manthos’ beautiful Serbian wife Elena drove us to the trailhead this morning. Today we were hiking around the ski area, up the slopes under the ski lifts and through the forests.
One can reportedly see the Aegean and Pagasitic Gulf simultaneously from Mt. Pelion (well, not simultaneous, but from the same spot). The first peak was overgrown to the west so the Pagasitic Gulf was invisible.
But the Aegean was perfectly clear! We could see the Sporades, the three fingers of Halkidi near Thessaloniki, and if we squinted we could imaging that Turkey was visible.
The trail was mostly through beech forests, quiet and soft underfoot.
We took a break in a clearing that commemorates an accident in which several Greek Air Force pilots on a training exercise in a cloud crashed their F16s into the mountainside.
The inscription reads (the ranks of the four airmen are inscribed in modern Greek military epigraphic abbreviations):
In this place the airmen…
Επισμηναγός, Major, I. Kommatas Σμηναγός, Captain, A. Sioutas Υποσμηναγός, 1st Lieutenant, G. Antonōpoulos Υποσμηναγός, 1st Lieutenant, G. Loukoudis
…sacrificed their lives for their county on October 14, 2004
When we reached what we thought was the third peak, we encountered rocks and ropes and a scramble.
Assuming that this peak would also be socked in with trees, we decided to turn around there and head back down. Apparently we were mistaken. Had we just continued a few hundred meters further, we would’ve achieved the grand panorama we’d been promised. Oh well.
I called Elena as we descended to the ski lifts. She came to collect us, expressing some surprise that my phone had revealed us to be Americans. This area gets lots of German and British tourists, but Americans don’t tend to venture this far afield either geographically or temporally. Throughout this trip, Greeks tended to assume we were German. We tended to say “Ja!” and roll with it.
And that was the day. We spent the evening working on our computers and eating dinner at the hotel, where we met Elena and Manthos’ adorable two-year-old daughter Elpiniki (I think?). She’s already pretty good at English, and also she likes kittens.