The Cretan Oil

Back home for less than 24 hours, just time enough to unpack the suitcase of Andalucian oils, do the laundry and pack again, this time for sunny Crete. Our Air Berlin flight took us from wet, cold Zurich to baking Heraklion. We stood gasping in the heat as we were introduced to our rental car, a battered Hyundai with barely functioning air conditioning, and made the first of many drives along the oleander-lined highway to our hotel in Rethymnon. The Mythos Hotel had been highly recommended, and when eventually we located it, in the heart of the pedestrian old town, it was indeed a gem, a cool haven of peace. But we were here in search of oil, and our search had us crisscrossing the island, from Rethymnon to Ierapetra and Kolymbari to Avgeniki. The oil, from the tiny koroneiki olives for which Crete is renowned, is delicious, smooth and sweet, and the producers we visited were as enthusiastic as their Andalucian counterparts, lamenting, like them, the damage done to the reputation of their oil by the large producers who label their cheap refined stuff "extra virgin".
But with temperatures soaring as high as 44 degrees, we made time as we travelled to languish in the shade of beachside tavernas, sipping icy ouzos and eating fresh Cretan salads and seafood, cooling off in the clear sparkling sea. In Kalives we found the best taverna of our trip, a heavenly shady refuge from the blistering heat, where we ate cheese pies with honey alongside a huge plate of the local salad, fresh leaves, crumbly goats cheese, olives, cucumbers, tomatoes...

Further on in Georgiopoli we stopped again for another cooling dip (and a beer). The long stretch of beach in the town was busy, but we found a sparsely populated cove between two river outlets, a tiny chapel perched on the rocks at either end. As we drank our beers, I was intrigued by the activities of an independent bare-bottomed toddler in a red dress, playing on the beach while her parents chatted in the taverna. As we went into the water she was there, on a toddler-steeply sloping shelf of gravel. Some long-dormant maternal instinct made me turn to check her, and
when I did the little red-dressed body was face down and weakly struggling in the water. I ran and plucked her out, wide-eyed and spluttering, and she toddled back up to the taverna. I still don't know if her parents realised how close they came to losing their little cutie.