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Sorry for not posting anything this last week, me and my coworkers and friends at Tachyon Labs have been on vacation in Crete, Greece.

Accomodation

We stayed at the Santa Marina hotel in Ammoudara. The conditions were pretty good and the staff was wonderful. There were two fellow Romanians working at the hotel for the summer, and we also met lots of other Romanian people working at shops, pubs and clubs in Iraklion and Hersonissos.

Hersonissos is where it’s at if you’re young and want to have fun, it’s basically the youth town of Crete and the night life hot spot. Ammoudara is a bit quieter and relaxing, catering better for a family vacation.

Trip to Hersonissos

Two days into the vacation we rented a car so we could go to Hersonissos (yes, we’re not nerds, we’re all still pretty young and we like to have fun), and this was pretty interesting. I was the one to drive, and a friend was guiding me using a map that we got from our hotel reception.

Needless to say, we got lost — the geography of Crete is amazing, we strayed from the main road by only 20 kms or so and we were on top of a mountain at an altitude difference of 1500m from where we started. The road signs didn’t help either, because we wandered out of the main road, most of the signs were in Greek, and as much as we tried to make sense out of them, we couldn’t.

I drove around for 2 hours before we got back to the main road. It was rather creepy because this happened during the night, it was pitch black outside and I was driving on regional, non-illuminated roads and we didn’t see any cars for miles and miles. It felt like being in a horror movie at one point when we were passing through a forest and the trees were branching over the road like a tunnel.

We finally got back on the so called main road—which is only like 1 lane and a half wide for each direction—and we got to Chersonissos, about three hours later for what was supposed to be a 20 minute trip. I blame the dude holding the map.

Anyway, Chersonissos is great, there’s an alley right by the sea with dozens of pubs and clubs, each with a different theme. There’s a Scottish Pub, an Irish Pub, a pub for Dutch guys, clubs that play older music, clubs that play newer music, and just about any other type of club that you can think of.

Sightseeing

The next day we decided to drive to Spinalonga, which was a former leper colony that is now a major tourist attraction. Well, guess what, we drove to an Island which we thought was Spinalonga, but having arrived there we felt like the penguins in Madagascar—except that island sucked more than Antarctica (see the Wikipedia link if you’re confused).

On the way back we learned that island wasn’t Spinalonga after all, it was some other island. I blame the dude holding the map.

Wrap up

We had a lot of fun in Crete, and I would definitely recommend anyone to consider it as a possible holiday destination. Next year we’re going to Ibiza, but I will certainly come back to Crete some day.

Technorati Tags: Vacation, Greece, Crete, Holiday, Ammoudara, Hersonissos