It was the fifth of November but it looked more like a summer day. The land was parched, there were no signs of grass and the mountainous village of my grandparents looked like a scenery for a western movie. We were at the middle of Crete, at an altitude of 530 meters (around 1740 feet) and the place that should have been all green at the end of fall, was discouraging dry.
At least we were welcomed by some familiar and always inquisitive creatures, our neighbour's livestock :)
The younger sheep are always the cutest, no matter if they are white, patchy or black and I can never resist taking a few (or more than a few) pictures of them. But then again all the baby animals are cute, aren't they, even the ones of the most vicious and terrifying kinds!
As for our (always a baby in soul) canine companion, he was devastated by the existence of this ruthless fence that didn't allow him to go and play with all those furry animals. Although the sheep were obviously preferred their end of the fence :)
The next morning we visited the olive grove, which was the actual reason of this trip, in the first place but what we saw was so disappointing that I just want to forget about it. Not only there were no olives to harvest but even the trees were so stressed from the drought that we worried about their well being. And we are talking about olive trees, a plant life that exist on this island for thousands of years and a kind of trees that are practically immortal.
But we can't fight the weather and with no access to irrigation water there was nothing we could do. Obviously I didn't took any pictures of the suffering olive grove, so I just keep showing to you more pictures of the charming livestock next to my grandparents house :)
Fortunately we have more olive groves at the east side of Crete and at this point we could only hope that they were in better shape. The truth is that there was no reason to think so, other than the fact that hope dies last!
Going east would only get us to more arid areas and the chances that we would manage to harvest any olives at all this year, were very slim.
This was the fifth part of our trip from Nafplio to Crete, in order to harvest our olives and visit the places and the people that formed our daily life for almost a decade. I can now tell you that it lasted from the first of November till the fifth of December and it was much different from whatever we anticipated. The first four parts were edited and written on the go but now that I am back home, I hope that I'll prepare the rest of the posts in a much faster pace :)
Below are the links of the previous posts or you can just visit my blog and scroll down.
All the pictures and the words are mine.
Thank you for reading and if you want to know more about me you can check out my introduction post.
Commenting, upvoting and rebloging are highly appreciated!
