It only takes one enthusiastic friend to drag you in an adventure that you may temporarily regret but will finally become a charming memory!
You know how it goes. It usually starts with a casual conversation.
What should we do on Sunday?
Let's go to the gorge before "Sfaka", I've been there and it is great!
Small details like the fences we have to cross, the absence of marks on the route or even the fact that there isn't a visible path to follow rather than a vague direction, didn't seem to matter.
We made an appointment for Sunday morning and made a few calls to whoever could be interested to join!
Entering the gorge was a bit tricky but we managed it without much difficulty. We weren't experienced hikers, just average people enjoying walking in the nature but if we had to overcome an obstacle then that's exactly what we would do :)
Inside the gorge it was truly mesmerising, our friend was right about that! And he was also well prepared. He had a couple of ropes with him, to help us climb the steepest parts. So far so good :)
The way the sun light was entering the gorge was brilliant, adding to the wonderful scenery even more charm! The oak trees are lovely but I particularly liked the rock formations. I think that those are the special element that makes this gorge so different than others.
I usually avoid to include people in my nature pics but in this case they added a very interesting size measure helping you understand better the scenery, or at least I think so.
And anyway it is always fun to take pictures of your friends :)
And slowly but steady, we were entering deeper and deeper in the gorge. The day that we were planning it, our friend insisted that it is "just a couple of hours" to cross the gorge. Maybe it is when he is alone but with a big group of all ages from child to senior and with different levels of fitness, we were proceeding a bit slower :)
Finally after almost four hours of walking and resting and more walking and more resting and some climbing and a lot of laughs, we did it! The plateau that was on the end of the gorge was right in front of us! A very successful, although challenging hike, without any unfortunate events!
Or not?
What we didn't know at the time being, was that almost all of us would return home bitten by a kind of bug and that we would suffer from itching many days ahead!
But now that the itching has gone away long ago, it is only the pictures and the memory of a lovely Sunday that has remained :)
The camera that I used is a Canon EOS 40D with an EF-S 15-85mm lens attached. I edited the photographs in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Classic .
The hike itself happened in 14/10/2018 when I was living in Crete. I wrote back then this post and another one fungi orientated, in 2022, both with different pictures than this one. There are also some details about the gorge in the first post if you want to try to find it yourself :)
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.
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