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Topics - Chris H.

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1
PlakChat / 360 degree view of 42 places around Crete
« on: October 02, 2012, 10:16:26 AM »
I thought you all might enjoy these panoramic pictures:

http://richterresponse.de/panoramen/kretarundgang/

While the descriptors are in German, it is pretty self explanatory. By clicking on the four squares at the bottom of the picture, you'll get a preview of all the sites.

2
Plakias / Library
« on: December 04, 2011, 10:36:43 AM »
This will interest some of you I guess:


http://www.rethymnonnews.com/Current/community4.htm

3
Plakias / Preveli
« on: February 06, 2011, 01:59:45 PM »
This article and photograph I found in the 'Rethymnon bugle'

Good News From Preveli!
On August 22nd last year a devastating wild fire caused an immense amount of damage to the South Coast of Crete. At the time it was estimated that about 70% of the ‘wild palm’ forest at Preveli had been destroyed (on the left you can see a photo that was taken shortly after the fire). However, it would appear to be the case that Cretan Palms are really tough cookies. Roving reporters Derek and Gill (thank you both!) recently made an exploratory visit to Preveli, and from one of the photos that they took (this one seen here to the right) it can be seen that despite being scorched the palm trees are already demonstrating abundant new growth. Brilliant!


[attachment=770:Picture20.jpg][attachment=769:Picture21.jpg]

4
PlakChat / Reporting in from Makry Gialos
« on: August 09, 2009, 12:06:55 PM »
Yassas!
Although I'm aware that this is the Plakias forum I thought that one or two of you people might be interested to hear how life is in a simular place like Plak.
After not being able to sit on the beach because of the wind for 15 days of our 30 days holiday in july/august last year we had big doubts about where to go this year so I did a lot of research on other destinations on Crete. I scanned the whole southcoast with Google Earth and first thought Mirtos might be a good alternative. One of you good people (I think it was Graeme) spoke very highly of Mirtos so at first we thought to give it a go but decided not to because it was perhaps a bit smallish  for a 4 weeks holiday. We actually went there this year for the day and were glad we did not go there. It's a cute little place, very pretty but indeed to small for our liking, not much of a beach either. So I scanned on and ended up in Makry Gialos (meaning long beach). From the air it looked very much like Plakias so I did some more research and found a Makry Gialos forum (nothing much, just a Tripadvisor thing, nothing as unique as this Plak forum) One thing I noticed was that people speak of Mak in a simular away as people do about Plakias, very good atmosphere, very laid back, people going there year after year, the feeling that one stays with family rather than just renting an apartment aso, aso. ( and much more important: far less wind than in Plak!) So Mak it was and believe me, we had one of the best holidays of our life. Only 2 1/2 days of strong wind!! Other than in Plakias the first row of buildings is right on the beach (apartments, bars, restaurants) and the road is behind it. Makes a big difference, one walks out of the building and is right on the beach, very fine golden sand, ideal to build sandcastles, very shallow sea so ideal for children (you must like them little buggers otherwise this is not the place for you!) Once you rent an apartment you have beds and umbrella free of charge and if one is not in an apartment right on the beach all the bars and restaurants have their own beds so one just orders a drink and the beds are free of charge! Nice little harbour just a bit bigger than in Plak, unfortunately some motorized watersport but strictly a good 100 yards from the beach....plenty of restaurants to choose from and an atmosphere very simular like Plakias. There is no far end for people that like to bounce balls on the water but plenty of secluded bays in de direct vicinity. Instead of the far end there is a big all in Swedish resort but it's not disturbing at all, they all stay there and some of them just come out in the evening to eat in one of the restaurants being fed up with the all in food I suppose  Population: at least 50 % Greek families, 40 % British, a few French, German and Dutch and no East Europeans at all!
Enough to see and do in the surroundings, Sitia is a pretty place with remarkebly few tourists (dissapointment for the misses, no shops to speak of, very local) but with a beautiful boulevard. Going west, Ierapetra is not very interesting, a bit ugly bit of coast really, too many plastic greenhouses, yuk.
We stayed at Villa Plori apartments, I reccomend highly! We did our shopping in the little supermarket nextdoor and the lovely people there gave us a present EVERYDAY!!! 1/2 litre of their own oliveoil, two beers, 2 cokes, a packet of figs, a meze dish, a raki bottle and 6 glasses, more oliveoil, 2 icecreams on the day that Poppy their daughter turned 8 and on and on, amazing and very moving, aahhh! Crete!!!
Enough...just see....oh and remarkable thing, people love fancydress parties, see photograph, they have special parking lots for people in fancy dress:)
And ofcourse I have to mention Dimitri and his wife Hara of the Olympio bar, great place, great people, snail race every tuesday, very exciting! visit their website and you get the idea.
Bless you, Chris H.

[attachment=674:makcostume.jpg]

5
Gossip / cheer up!
« on: November 18, 2008, 10:41:36 AM »
It's grey and drizzly outside and all the leaves have gone so to cheer you all up here's a little sunshine:
Chris H.

[attachment=SA551237.JPG]

6
Plakias / report
« on: August 05, 2008, 02:27:57 PM »
Kalimera!

Just got back from 28 days Plakias, stayed at Skinos this time, what a lovely and warm family!
Wind (*^#@^^%^^#Y$$^^), lots of wind  (*&&%#^^^&%&U^&) first week 4 days gale force ten and the whole last seven days of our stay again, stretchers flying through the air on the beach, parasols breaking of like matchsticks, a bit much sometimes cause the beach is out of the question (the sand peels your lovely brown tan of) and in the evening on the balcony gazing at the stars one feels a bit chilly cause of the never resting wind while it's 28 degrees, still...as the misses always says: this wind will keep the sort of tourists out of Plakias you don't want there and there is probably a lot of truth in that.
Restaurants: ate at Christo's one night cause I heard good things about it, what a disaster!! customers shouting at the boss: 'I'll report you to the restaurant guide' ( I suppose Christos is mentioned in some restaurant guide), boss shouting back: get out of my restaurant!!! Other customers loudly complaining cause they have to wait so long for their food, unfriendly staff, mediocre food, had to wait long time for service, at least 45 minutes between starters and maincourse and worst of all in my opinion I got my main dish 10 minutes later than the misses, yuk! never again. Ate a lot at Harakas, very friendly, good cook (always big flames!), very talkative, intelligent waiter. Excellent freshly made pizzas at Kri-Kri (the best in the world according to Manolis, better than in Italy he always says) Gio ma always good, ate at Medousa one night because a lot of you people hang out there a lot I understand, what a pleasant guy! very good food, only thing was, we where the only customers there that evening and the misses really likes a restaurant to be almost full. Very nice place also is the Greek next to 'On the rocks' I still don't know the name, big, big Greek guy, superb free garlic bread for starters.
New harbour: at the end of our stay they even worked on sundays, Manolis says they have to be finished before the end of the year otherwise they will be fined heavily. Asked if the new harbour will atract a lot of pleasure boats to Plakias he said he did not expect that, main reason for building it was because the fishing boats are in danger at their present place when the wind blows to hard (and it did, it did!)
Very noticable this year: the presence of police cars in Plakias, many! every day, last year I saw 2 in 3 weeks, this time I saw 50 in 4 weeks, dunno why....
Leaving Plakias; Agia Galini, a pleasant little place tucked away in the rocks, Ghania: really nice, of course it's a big tourist tit but we both really liked it, much better than Rethymno last year, beatiful old harbour, had a meze for two (23.50 euros!!) in a restaurant in one of the back streets, best meal we had this year, worth every penny of it! Chora Sfakion, uhhh no thank you, you can tell the staff in restaurants is used to having customers that only come there for 1 day, unfriendly, lousy chicken souvlaki, unedible, my shoes where more tender, that chicken must have been over a 100 years old.
Only positive thing was that one of the waiters provided us with a running gag for the rest of our holidays, when asked for two Mythos he kept repeating completely puzzled: Tomatoes? you want tomatoes? so every time after that when we sat down for a beer some where we asked each other: you want big tomato or small tomato.....
Kurna lake: beautiful but only when you think away the few 1000 tourists that hang out there, like flies, small beach absolutely packed with people, hundreds of boats on the water, excellent oregano chicken in taverna overlooking the lake, a lot of the famous Cretan smile from the serving ladies, packs of geese shouting for food all the time.
By the way, we spotted the last goose in Plakias outside Gio ma one evening begging for food, he (she) looked lonely.
One day a giant container ship went by real close to Plakias, one could tell by the reaction of the people on the beach they thought there might be something wrong being so close but apparantly it comes by every 20 days and the captain is from Crete and lives nearby so when he is close to his home he beeps his giant horn to say hello to his family!!! Cretans!!
We want to go back!!!
Yassas!
Chris H.

7
Where to eat...or not! / Fresh ham
« on: June 26, 2008, 03:32:09 PM »
Can one of you experienced Plak people tell me where to by fresh cut ham?
Looked all over last year but could only find pre packed industrial ham of rather poor quality
Don't the Greek eat fresh ham or what?
Thanks!
Chris H.

8
Forum and Website discussion / virus alert
« on: April 22, 2008, 12:02:48 PM »
Hi,
For a couple of weeks now I get ( both at work and at home) a virus alert (trojan horse found and removed) everytime I visit the board.....
Chris H. (only 9 weeks to go..........)

9
Gossip / maffia
« on: November 21, 2007, 08:03:54 PM »
Wow! Did you read this article in the Independant?


Greek police retreat after ambush by Cretan drug gangsters
By Daniel Howden in Athens
Published: 12 November 2007
The ambush was not wholly unexpected. More than 40 armed police officers arrived at the Cretan mountain village of Zoniana in a convoy of a dozen vehicles. But even they were shocked by the force of the response as at least 20 gunmen opened fire on them with Kalashnikov assault rifles before they could pass the first houses in the village.

The one-sided gun battle lasted a matter of minutes as the police who had come searching for drugs withdrew with three officers wounded, one seriously.

What the firefight has achieved is the lifting of a veil of silence surrounding Zoniana that appears to have been at the centre of a lawless mini-republic controlling orchards of cannabis plants, drug dealing, protection rackets and armed robbery from a mountain base among the olive trees and the shepherds.

Crete has long been famed for its independent streak. It has the highest gun ownership rates in the European Union and even a high profile weapons amnesty, led by the composer Mikis Theodorakis, who was born on the island, has failed to end Cretans' love affair with guns.

However, the lax attitude to law enforcement and the culture of non-co-operation with the state appears to have spawned a criminal enterprise in the mountains that the rest of the island can no longer tolerate.

Last week, the Greek Prime Minister Costas Karamanlis was forced to give assurances in parliament that the law does apply even above sea level in Crete: "We will no longer tolerate behaviour outside the law – the law applies to everyone and will be enforced for everyone," he said.

The ferocity of the ambush on the local police unit prompted authorities to fly in 75 officers from an elite unit in Athens who have succeeded where none of their colleagues had previously by maintaining a presence inside Zoniana for six consecutive days. Despite being home to more than 1,600 residents, neither Zoniana or any of the other villages – all within an hour's drive of the tourist resort of Rethymnon – has a police station. The bullet-ridden signposts that mark the entry and exit to the village make it clear that the law is not welcome.

By the time the main force of police arrived at the village on 7 November, up to 200 local males had disappeared and hundreds of hectares of cannabis plants had been removed from earth among the olive orchards where police sources say they were located to make use of the natural camouflage.

So far, 14 arrests have been made and a torrent of evidence from stolen cash machines to explosives has emerged to reveal the extraordinary lives led by many of the villagers.

A local man who claimed to police that he was a shepherd was found to have more than ¿1.5m (£1m) in his account. Local media claim the initial raid was prompted by the arrest of a man from Zoniana who was picked up driving a new Porsche and stated his profession as builder. Unconfirmed reports stated that the unnamed man had up to ¿6m in the bank.

On Friday, police were confronted by angry local men in who demanded the police presence be removed from the village immediately. A school has been closed until the police withdraw.


Interesting uh?
Anyone ever been there?
Chris H.

10
Gossip / coal mine
« on: September 25, 2007, 08:08:53 PM »
As a relative newbe I'm not exactly sure if this has ever been discussed before (could not find anything about it in the search option) but I discovered something on Dutch and German Wikipedia (not the English one mind you!) that may interest you.
I was fooling around a bit and typed Plakias in the various Wikipedia's and some interesting information popped up.
You all know the two openings in the mountain at the end of the Plakias bay. Sitting at Ostraco's terrace one day, sipping our cold beers (sigh!) we noticed that in the smaller opening on the right there seemed to be a rectangular shape (see picture) and the misses and me fantasized for ages what that shape could be. (btw, what a great way to pass a lazy Plakias afternoon) We once took the boat to Prevelli and had a chance to take a better look at it and were convinced that this structure was man made but it stopped at that, no more information.
Wikipedia says that once there was a coal mine run by a German businessman between Plakias and Lefkogia and that there was a lorry track through the mountain to allow ships to take in the coal, they had to do it this way because the water near the coast is to shallow. Apparantly the coal was of such poor quality that it could only be used in steamships. This coal business stopped in 1930. The mine was closed of with concrete only at the end of the 80's because a child drowned there. During world war 2 the Germans made the tunnel longer and made a second and bigger opening in the mountain to enable German submarines to take in food, water and torpedos.
The German Wikipedia also states that the name Plakias comes from a certain kind of sand that is found in many places in the bay. In German it says: 'Sandstein-Platten'  According to the dictionary this means: 'Sandstone-tiling"???  Between brackets they also call it: 'Naturzement' , in English this should be: 'Natural cement'.

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