E4 in Crete: General Comments

The E4 in Crete has at least three different styles of walk: popular coastal walks in the western Chania area passed isolated beaches; walks through gorges, some like the Samaria gorge with lots of people, others you have to yourself, and walks up and down mountains. Crete is a very mountainous island with peaks rising to over 2400 metres. Apart from the coastal sections there are few days when you do not ascend and/or descend over a thousand metres. 

Unlike many other parts of Greece crossed by the E4, Crete is very popular with tourists with lots of infrastructure in place. It also has some of the most popular sections of the E4, with many people walking them, sometimes up to 20 times! This means at least in the popular sections hotels, rooms and guesthouses are available. I was glad as I did not find the wild camping options very attractive. Outside olive groves, vineyards and wheat fields, the slopes were steep, and the ground too full of rocks and thistles to make for good campsites. That said, accommodation on the E4 in the eastern section of Crete was in distinctly short supply.
One of the frustrations in Crete is the number of routes claiming to be the E4, making it difficult to know which the official ones are, which ones should you walk? On the plus side it gives lots of scope for creating your own route. I tried to combine some of the "must walk" parts Crete, such as the Samaria gorge and the coast sections in Chania province, while also avoiding too many needlessly circuitous options. Sometimes the effort made to avoid a bit of tarmac by pushing through undergrowth and over fences is just not justified by the reward.
Fences are the other frustration. Unlike in the rest of Greece there seemed to be an awful lot of fences, invariably made out of "rebar", actually intended to be used in reinforced concrete, and often blocking the path.
Caution is needed where the route follows a "path". In places there are very good paths, especially in the popular stages in the Chania region. In other cases you have to make your own path, pushing through thistles and thorny scrub. Even where a path more or less exists, the rocky nature may result in slow progress, this and time taken to work out where the path goes means that you should not assume you can cover the same number of kilometres in a day that you might if walking in say, Austria. 

The Cretan Way is an invaluable guidebook for the E4 in Crete. Foolishly I left my copy at home to save weight, having made relevant notes. Probably a mistake as some additional guidance would have been helpful, although it describes the route from east to west and I was walking in the opposite direction. In places the route described in the Cretan Way is waymarked by two red stripes, but not always. For GPS tracks I downloaded the ones on waymarkedtrails.org, which needed some parsing and tidying up, and a set supplied by the Cretan Way website. I used a Navitracks map of Greece on my GPS, although I could have done with more detail and precise contouring, in addition I took some paper maps which were helpful, Anavasi's Lasithi map and Harms IC Verlag's West Crete map. Rothers walking guide to Crete was another reference that influenced my choice of route. Blogs on Interkriti.org and section descriptions on Cretanbeaches.com were also useful.

Water can be a concern. A dry climate for much of the year, the limestone rocks and the capturing of springs into black plastic pipes for irrigation can mean there are few opportunities to top up on water, so take plenty. I walked in late May and early June and it was hot. Any later in the summer and it would be really hot. Yet I still had to contend with large patches of snow in the Psiloritis mountains. Maybe autumn is the ideal time to walk the route when last winter's snow has melted but this year's has yet to begin, but you would loose the spring flowers that I enjoyed so much.

Start of my E4 blog on Crete.