Field Notes
The route is drawn over Greek coffee. We meet early at Exo Mouliana, a village a few kilometres west of Sitia, and by the time the cups are empty the morning through the Richtis Gorge is settled to the last turn. Our guides are Christina Chrysoula and Eleftheria Kanavaki, and neither was born to the work. They arrived at it.
We take the gorge in reverse, driving down to the beach and climbing back up. The trail runs four kilometres, and access is counted at both ends, so the wardens always know how many people are inside. Within minutes we are walking beside the water, following its run and the small falls it throws off along the way. The going is easy at first and only later turns moderate, more from the gradient than from anything technical. In winter, the two tell us, the stream comes down hard and the crossing gets serious.
We walk under plane trees through thick green, past wild berries, flowers and aromatic herbs, and after about thirty-five minutes the gorge opens on its waterfall. It clears six metres and pools at the base into a natural basin where walkers swim in the cold water. For a while nobody speaks. We take a wooden picnic table to one side, the fall in view, and the talk turns to how the two of them ended up here.
"I wanted other qualities in my life," she says. "So I came back."
Christina Chrysoula spent years in Corfu, Athens and abroad. She trained and began as a translator, studying in Corfu, then overseas, then working for a translation company in Athens. About four years ago she wanted a different life, returned to Sitia, and with her brother took over the production, bottling and export of the family olive oil. Somewhere in that first year she learned that the state vocational school in Sitia was opening a mountain-guide course. She had years of walking and climbing behind her from an Athens mountaineering club, and she enrolled without a second thought. She graduated, did her placement in the Sitia UNESCO Global Geopark, and this is the first season she is working as a guide.
Eleftheria Kanavaki came by a parallel road. She teaches physical education at a Sitia primary school and coaches trampoline, and she grew up in the village of Agios Stefanos, near Pefki, with these paths already in her. Like Christina, she took the guide course and did her placement across the same geopark.
Ask Christina why nature, and the answer starts in childhood, up a tree or crouched in a field over the flowers, the birds, the insects. The pull never left her, and as she grew she understood how much our health and well-being rest on that contact. Her career began somewhere else entirely, then bent, by chance or by her own quiet steering, back towards the ground she started on. The gorge she now guides through is the argument, made in plane shade and running water, that a place is worth coming home to.
