Crete balls of fire

© Simon Poulter 2018

There is a stray cat, one of millions loose on these islands, stalking me around the house. I open the back door to let some morning sunshine into our kitchen, and it is there yelping at me. I walk up a level to the living room, then through the patio doors and there it is, yelping at me on one of the numerous terraces this big, multi-layered house we've rented in Crete appears to have. It's as if it has thermal imaging and can track me through the house's interior.

The cat's relentless meowing is then completely drowned out by the roar of a fighter jet, looping around over the Akrotiri peninsular, a stubby little knob of land towards the island's western end. It is home to Chania International Airport, the start and end destination for countless holidays as well as, it would appear, ageing F4 Phantom fighter-bombers of the Greek Air Force, screaming off to practice war. All this noise notwithstanding, I am incredibly, unbelievably, overwhelmingly and many other adverbs, chilled out.

In fact, I haven’t felt this degree of relaxation, this disconnected from life's tribulations in...well...I cannot actually remember when. Sure, I’ve had relaxing holidays in the past, but none I can remember where the compulsion to do anything other than lie in the sun and read a book has been magically removed. And that, as I reach the end of this amazing, blissful week under poster paint-blue skies, is the conclusion from my first ever visit to Greece and its islands.

Over the last 30 years I’ve tended to holiday in places like California, where every day is an endless road trip. Relaxation would be driving into the Mojave Desert with the latest supermarket sweep of (in those, pre-Brexit referendum days) cheap new CDs from Tower Records on Sunset Boulevard, with which to simply gawp at the Great American Wilderness. On other occasions I've whizzed around south-eastern Sicily in search of filming locations for Il Commissario Montalbano or, last year, obsessively exploring northern Sardinia for places where The Spy Who Loved Me was shot. All fun stuff, I swear. Just not completely relaxing.

So, when my girlfriend - no stranger to the Greek isles - suggested Crete, and then found what has turned out to be a fantastic house to rent in a small, quiet hill town north of the ancient port of Chania, I had little reason to say no. Simply because I’d never been anywhere in Greece before and, frankly, it all sounded idyllic. And thus it has turned out to be. Profoundly so. And yes, I do mean all those salads and lovely little beachside tavernas that no Greek travel guide can fail to mention. Or this blog.

Now, I’m sorry if I’m coming late to the Hellenic party (and with my lengthy Balearic and Italian history, this substantial part of the Mediterranean has hitherto escaped me), but I have absolutely loved it here. Firstly, the sun has shined every day and the temperature has been at least 30 degrees. Tick that. Secondly, I have eaten more than my own weight in Greek salad and actually feel healthier as a result. This is a precedent that was set on our first day when, on the 100-mile drive from Heraklion (yeah, I know - we're staying near one airport and yet land at another on the other end of the island...), just past Rethymno, we stopped for lunch at a beach cafe so achingly cool the bottled water we guzzled didn’t even need to have come from a fridge. Being two hours ahead of the UK, we'd already lost track of time. It may have been mid-afternoon by the local clock, but we stayed for what seemed like hours (mostly because we'd ambitiously ordered salads each, which turned out to be the size of one of the smaller Greek islands).

© Simon Poulter 2018

It’s always a testament to a good holiday that you feel you’re on one soon after you arrive. From that beach lunch onwards, it’s been the same. Relaxed. Chilled. Whatever expression of insouciance you care to apply, that’s been us. The house in Chorafakia has a small pool and a choice of balconies, verandas and seating areas with which to while away the days. Technically, the house is made of two: almost by accident we discovered an entire basement apartment, complete with kitchen, bedrooms and a properly equipped living room, like a well-provisioned nuclear bunker beneath the other-purposed property of someone expecting to see out a particularly irradiated winter. For those days we chose to hang out there, the house was perfect (thanks, Vintage Travel), with a superbly provisioned welcome pack on arrival (which actually lasted the week), and a jolly ex-pat handyman from Devon on call to take care of one or two minor technical things that needed fixing.

There is so much to the well-storied Crete that seven days is barely enough to scratch the surface of the Chania end of the island, let alone anything else. Chania itself is a delight: the world's fourth oldest city, under permanent population for four thousand years, with its charming Venetian port mixed with bustling modernity. If you visit, lunch at Salis on the port's eastern end. You will not be disappointed. Equally, indulge a little tourism and take one of the glass bottom boat tours out to an island 20 minutes away, where you can watch the thinnest man in Europe attract various species of small fish to congregate beneath the tub. If you remember your swimmers, you can even dive in with him.

But, I guess, the main attraction of these Greek islands to most tourists are the beaches. If you have an aversion to vast, industrialised commercial resorts, the Akrotiri peninsula has the antidote, less than a kilometre from our patio - Tarsanas. It's just the kind of cute, sandy, family-friendly cove you'd expect from the guides - splendidly unpretentious, a delight to swim in, with an informal beach cafe and, overlooking it, the most romantic taverna you will ever find. Anywhere. Around the headland is Stavros, made famous by Zorba The Greek, the uplifting 1964 film about an unlikely friendship and starring Anthony Quinn and Alan Bates. Sitting on the beach on a busy Sunday, looking up at the huge, triangular rock that provided a backdrop for Quinn and Bates, a local cafe will bring drinks and food to your sun lounger, for a premium, of course, or you can lever yourself up to one of several other establishments offering good food and cold drink (yay, Mythos beer!) at significantly less than exorbitant prices.

© Simon Poulter 2018

As my post the other week [Package delivery] should have conveyed, sitting still on holiday is an unusual experience for me, less so being in the confined and relatively regimented environment of an all-inclusive hotel. Likewise, I’ve rarely been one to not bother looking at the time, or simply slap on the Factor 30 and bury myself in a good book for entire days at a time. But that is exactly what these two consecutive holidays (“Get him, turning into Colleen Rooney...!") have been about. And as much as the previous week in all-inclusive Majorcan sunshine was wonderfully 'holiday', these seven days in Crete have been magical. Dreamily so. The kind of excursion that you spend the next 51 weeks longing for. And I don’t think I could give any more stronger endorsement than that.