幾鬼秘的部落格

Our flight to Paris was rather uneventful.  Our connecting flight to Athens, on the other hand, departed one hour late.  We were supposed to arrive in Athens at 5pm, giving us 4 hours to catch the 9pm ferry to Crete.  That may sound like a lot of time but Athens is notorious for its crazy traffic jams, so we had our fingers crossed.

Contrary to what our online research told us, we were unable to buy our ferry tickets at the airport upon our arrival.  We quickly looked for and caught the bus to the Piraeus port by minutes (no checked baggage paid off!).  This was 6pm.  The ride to the port was uneventful, until 8pm, when the traffic was really stuck.  It turned out that a car had double parked on the street such that our bus could not get by.  While waiting for the tow truck to come, a few fellow Canadians, an Englishman, an Aussie and we decided to walk to the closest metro station (Faliro) and take one stop to the port (Piraeus).

As we were following the Canadians out of the Piraeus metro station, the Englishman told us to follow him instead via a faster route.  He was an old guy and was very late for his ferry, and abruptly decided to take a cab soon after leaving the station.  “Not good”, we thought.  We didn’t know where the ferry ticket counter was but I knew that the way that he pointed us to was not where the ferry was docked.  We took a guess, turned around towards the ferry and ran.  I was very glad to see the ticket counter beyond our ferry.  I left Chris at the ferry and ran to the counter and caught up with those Canucks.  Alas, our adventure had just begun.

Our original plan was to ferry to Hania, spend the day there, and bus to Iraklio in the evening.  Unfortunately, the Hania ferry was fully booked.  But wait, it gets worse.  The ferry to Iraklio only had “deck” class seats, so we’d have to sleep upright for another 9 hours, after just as many on a plane (well, at least that’s what we thought).  I guess it could be worse - the ferry to Iraklio could be full and we would’ve been stuck in Athens.

We boarded the ferry with empty stomachs and grabbed a couple of “pullman” seats.  Chris immediately fell asleep while I went around to take photos.  Soon the ferry left the port.  Chris and I thought that since everyone should have settled in by now, our seats should be safe (deck class seats are not assigned).  We left our seats and had dinner at the on board restaurant.  When we returned we found our seats taken!  Well, not exactly.  Some guy had taken the floor under our seats to sleep.  In fact, the whole ferry was strewn with tired travelers sleeping on the floor.

Ferry from Piraeus to Iraklio

There were actually plenty of seats available in the room, but the room really stunk with all these people sleeping with their shoes off.  We got out of the room and searched for a comfortable place to sleep.  But who are we kidding?  This was an hour into the ferry ride and people were all over the floor.  How could we possibly find a comfortable place to crash?  We ended up picking a place in the reception area.

I woke up about an hour into my sleep and looked at the clock.  This was going to be a long night.

A few hours later Chris and I, along with some guy nearby, were all awaken by a loud snorer.  After some futile attempts to go back to sleep, we packed up and moved to the other end of the open area.  Another few hours later we woke up and noticed that a sofa had become unoccupied.  We quickly grabbed it and spent the last few hours of the ride on it.

Scare of the day: almost getting stranded in Athens

Lowlight of the day: spending 9 hours on a ferry, on the floor

This entry was posted on Monday, September 22nd, 2008 at 10:06 pm and is filed under Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.