Vafes runs

Two attempts on two different mornings to get to the top of the local peak - an eye-catching mountain directly above Vafes that was called....well, I'm not too sure. It was something like 'Skoufou', but that was from the mouth of a local shepherd. I made the first attempt on Sunday - driving up the tiny road to 'upper Vafes' (where Patrick Leigh Fermor hid with the partisans in WWII) and continued on foot up tracks to another of those distinctive and wonderful Cretan mountain plateaus. This was directly below the peak in question, and I thought I could see a way up, so continued until encountering a shepherd outside his hut. He was friendly, although we had no words in common - and told me the name of the mountain, which I struggled to remember or convey in print, gesturing vaguely westwards at a possible route up. I ran along the track before ploughing direct through the maquis in an attempt at the summit - giving up half an hour later with bloodied legs, dehydrated. It was never going to work, so later I asked the English-speaking shopkeeper in Vafes if there was a route. He thought not, which seemed extraordinary given how eye-catching and obvious the peak was - remote parts of the Balkans are the only European equivalent, otherwise you would have to be in the developing world to encounter a similar situation. Anyway, two days later - our last day - I tried again, sticking to the path for well over an hour of running, a good few miles, and then contouring west and upwards, getting quite close but still seeing no route through the maquis: very frustrating.