On our last day before returning home we went on a couple of trips including a sightseeing bus tour. I took some photos from aboard the bus. Taking well-composed photos of interesting subjects is far from easy when you're at your seat aboard a bus whose movements are somewhat unpredictable and when your views are being obstructed by other people, parts of the bus you’re on, lamp posts, traffic signs and whatnot. But I did get something.
This is a view from the western slope of the peninsula of Akrotiri towards the city. The lighthouse and the Venetian Harbour are on the center-left.
This was taken in the city centre before Akrotiri. This is what the new parts of the city mostly looked like.
This was taken shortly after the previous one. This house was the residence of Eleftherios Venizelos, a rebel against the Osman rulers in his youth and a successful champion for the unification of Crete with the rest of Greece, which happened in 1913. Later he served in many cabinets as the prime minister of Greece until the late 1930s. Venizelos was born in a village near Chania.
Here you can see parts of the city center further from the sea.
As the bus was descending from Akrotiri, I took these pictures of the harbour in Souda Bay. These large passenger ships operate routes between the major islands and continental Greece. One line has Piraeus, the harbour city of Athens as its destination. Athens, by the way, is a huge city for a nation having a population of about 10.8 million. The population of the Athens Urban Area is about three million (2011). The population of the metropolital area approaches four million.
After the sightseeing trip, we went on one-hour boat trip to a small island that used to be a leper colony some 300 years ago. The diseased were quarantined on the sad little barren rock of an island for life.
Those little miniature churches were everywhere. I hope the guy sitting on it hasn't been left to die on the island. ;)
Fun-loving people on a boat near the rock.