Alessio Michelini Photography

Last full day in Crete, so we spent the early morning by doing some silly shopping for my girlfriend, while I was taking some photos in the old market of Heraklion. I'm not really a big street photographer, I kinda like it, but not really into it, but I have to say that I took some interesting shots in that place.

So after my girlfriend fed the black market of counterfeit shoes and bags with good money, we headed to another famous beach in this island: Matala.
According to my girlfriend's cousin, who is living here for a few months, Matala used to be a famous place for hippies in the 60s and 70s, and they used the caves surrounding the beach as a perfect place to sleep after a long day of continuos copulations and song writing about flowers and other nice things.
Anyway, after Elafonisi, my standards regarding beaches suddenly became pretty high, and anything less than that reference would be "meh". Sirolo, one of my favourite place in Italy, once was cool, now it's boring.
To be fair Matala is really nice, but it's like a candy with a very nice package, but with a strange taste that you could like it or not.
The sand was full of of cigarette butts, and in my list of things I hate I can definitely say that cigarette butts are in the top 10. Also the sand has the same colour of an ash tray, and that didn't help, at all. I sincerely felt like I was walking on a big ash tray, and the other tourist treat it as a big ash tray, especially the british couple beside us.
Then the sea: the water was extremely clear, not like Elafonisi, but very very clear, but, it's very deep after a few meters from the beach, which is great if love to swim, but not so much if you can't, and that's my case. I never learnt how to swim and I will probably never do.

I have to apologize: after the fourth day in Crete, I couldn't keep up with the blog, I just had zero time and less than zero of energy to write anything on the laptop. And the week after in Italy didn't help, essentially I spent a week eating, and I didn't turn my laptop on for more than 10 minutes.
Then I came back to Dublin, but again too many things to do, I went to some other gigs (which I'll talk about the next few days), and again no energy to do anything else...
But I don't like to leave unfinished jobs, so lets start from where I left.
The good thing of writing this post after 3 weeks is that now at least I have some more photos to show you, even if from the my 5th day in Crete I've nothing really exciting, unless you get excited with rocks and history.
Anyway, the fifth day was totally dedicated to the culture, and to goats. We started the morning in the Archeological Museum of Heraklion, nice museum, but that's the only thing I could actually say about it.
After that we headed to the ruins of the ancient palace of Knossos, probably the only well kept place for tourists.
It is an interesting place, especially if you are into history like my girlfriend, but even if you are not, unfortunately it's packed of tourists, especially the kind of tourists that do not understand that they cannot do whatever they want, and if the guides say don't climb the ruins, don't feckin do it.
I've also have to say that the tourists guides are like hookers here, like piranas when they see meat, they'll surround you with depliants and with their offer to guide you through the palace for a very good price (for them obviusly).
I generally don't like pushy people, actually they make me a bit nervous and they awake the "rude Alessio" in me, but apparently being pushy in this island is the standard.
Yes, I took a lot of pictures here, but I took them with the idea of showing them to my mother, so don't expect amazing photos, they are grand for my mum, not for me.
After Knossos we did our lunch break to the Cretaquarium, a nice acquarium in a not so nice area (it was build on an old military base), and after plenty of insanely big fishes and a cheap but good lunch, we drove to Phaistos, or at least that's what I thought I was doing.
In fact, the Phaistos my GPS was pretty sure about, it wasn't the Phaistos I was looking for. If you use a free GPS software, and you use OpenStreetMap's maps, it's grand most of the times, but sometimes it could lead you to a different place. After a quite confy road, it told us to turn to a small road, I wasn't sure about this detour, but I don't know the road, how he could be wrong, right????
He was waaaaay wrong, he led us (I know I should use "it", but I like to humanize objects, so I can offend them more easly) to a feckin place in the middle of nowhere, after 10 very, very, very long kilometers on roads made out of rocks and goat shit. I don't know how the tyres survived to that road, but I'm glad they did it somehow. After a few swearing, and a few stops due to flocks of goats, I stopped using that damn thing and I used my brain. After another 40 kilometers, and many changes of directions, we finally arrived to the actual Phaistos, which is NOT ABOVE A FUCKIN LAKE as previously shown on the bleeding map.
Honestly I was hoping that, after that insane road to get there, Phaistos was a place that would blew my mind. In fact, while Knossos is quite well preserved, Phaistos is more like the poor brother of it, it's ok if you are passing on the way to Matala, but otherwise you can skip it.
Obviously on the way back we found the road we supposed to take do in first place, and obviously it took an hour to get back to Heraklion, not two.
Feckin GPS.

Down here some of the most decent photos I took that day. I hope my mum likes them.

In theory we supposed to spend day 3 going to Balos and the following day at Elafonisi, but at the end we went first to Elafonisi, and the day after to Elafonisi again, as we really, really like the place.
It is possibly the most beautiful place I ever been to. It turned all the cool beaches I've been in the past to puddles. Crystal clear sea, amazing panorama, chea prices, and a reasonable number of tourists. I'm sorry Sirolo, I'm sorry Bondi Beach, I'm sorry any other beaches, but this one rules. The only downside is that you need to drive almost two hours from Chania on insane and extremely dangerous roads, which are fun for me as I love to drive, but not that fun to who doesn't.
To be honest I didn't take to many photos, and so far I wasn't really prolific as usual, but hopefully I'll publish them next week if I have some spare time :-)

Heraklion
The only good things I can say about this city is the cheap food, and some cool bars in city centre. That's it. I know, I saw the city only a few hours, but what I saw was just chaos. No urban plan, it's just a mess of bad roads and a mix of modern buildings in between ruins of old buildings. This city it also introduced me to how cretan drive, which is bad, really really bad. It's essentially the far west of driving. To get to the airport to get the car I rent, we went to the Bus station, we got the ticket, and then they told us that the bus for the airport doesn't leave from there, but we had to walk half km on a not very safe road with insane sidewalks, and then get the bus there. 
Why one of the main bus lines, that supposedly should serve to all the tourist coming to this city, is hidden in an industrial area, it's mystery, and a non-sense.

Rule number one when you have to do at least one stop when you fly somewhere. Always give you plenty of time in between two flights, I would say at least three hours. Probably a couple of friends of mine would say I'm exaggerating, but if today I didn't give me enough time, this post it would be probably different, like raging against Aerlingus or the airport or some sort of unknown divinity who has something to with fog, as my flight was delayed by a hour. Thankfully I had almost four hours in between the flights, so even with the delay we still had plenty of time.