It's been 35 years since Joni Mitchell sang "Come on down to the Mermaid Cafe and I will/buy you a bottle of wine/and we'll laugh and toast to nothing/and smash our empty glasses down" in her timeless song "Carey." The Mermaid Cafe was the epicenter of a colony of hippies who lived in the sandstone caves lining the beach near the town of Matala, on the southern coast of Crete in the late 1960s. Mitchell spent a few months there.

The cafe closed in 1980, but man-about-town Dimitris Houstoulakis says he fields questions daily from travelers seeking the famous gathering place - a place as mythical as Matala's ancient caves where Mitchell also hung out. "People come here and they can feel how it was," says Houstoulakis, who owns the popular Dimitris Villa Hotel.

The Mermaid cafe may be gone - the taverna Delfini is now in that building - but, like the song says, the wind is still "in from Africa." Today, capture the hippie vibe at the nearby tavernas of Nikos in the village of Pitsidia, or at Vafis in Sivas.