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Published: March 31st 2023
When the gods are angry with a man, they give him what he asks for… ~ Greek Proverb
HE SAID... Today we were travelling south from Mykonos to
Santorini– by ferry.
We woke early to planes flying overhead. Aegean Hotel Mykonos, our accommodation on the island, was only four kilometres from the airport, and I was surprised I hadn’t noticed any planes since we’d arrived. A quick glance at the harbour in front of our hotel confirmed that it was currently free of cruise ships (hooray), but I could see three gigantic white liners steaming in from the western horizon. They would soon anchor directly in front of us, and the constant announcements over their public address systems would begin. Then, the inevitable and unescapable horror would commence. Endless battalions of cruise ship tourists would land and occupy Hora, the island’s stunning capital…
Before long there were four ships floating in front of us, along with a cargo liner. Transfer boats were working overtime to taxi the tourist hordes into Hora. As small group travellers, we are not very fond of large group tourism. However, cruise ship tourists have as much right to enjoy Mykonos as we do. I just wish their monstrous vessels were anchored elsewhere, and not spoiling our exquisite morning view of the
shimmering Aegean Sea.
We settled on our private terrace and exhausted the eclectic basket of breakfast provisions provided by our hotel. The complex was undergoing extensive renovations, and the breakfast room was out of action. Ignoring the unsightly cruise ships as best we could, we enjoyed a very relaxing spread of tea, juice, yoghurt, kiwifruit and croissants with fig jam and thyme honey.
We organised our packs, clambered into a minibus and headed down to the New Port around 9am. We were leaving Mykonos and sailing to Santorini (by ferry), and our departure time was imminent. It was a reasonably cool morning – the breeze off the Aegean Sea was brisk and there were clouds in the sky, so the sun wasn’t breaking through.
It was a short distance (around two kilometres) to the New Port. We’d been able to see the port from our terrace, which allowed us to keep an eye on ferry arrivals and departures over the past few days. As we waited for our ferry in a covered holding area, an ever-growing queue of tourists formed outside in the sun – which had finally appeared from behind the clouds. When our ferry berthed
and its boarding platform was lowered onto the pier, mayhem ensued! The restless throngs of Santorini-bound tourists surged towards the ferry and tried to board while cars were still trying to disembark.
We clambered over the busy boarding platform, found a metal shelf to store our packs in the bowels of the ferry, then joined a long queue of tourists scrambling up narrow (and very congested) stairs to the seating section. A couple of female tourists (in their early 20s) had accidently boarded the wrong ferry, and they were desperately trying to get back down the stairs. Their frantic effort seemed to be so futile against the unceasing upward flow of tourists. I don’t know if they managed to get off.
We eventually found our seats and settled in for the two-hour journey to Santorini. We soon realised we were on a very different ferry to anything we’d travelled on since arriving in Greece. For a start, it was very comfortable, and it was very fast. It also seemed to pitch and lurch more in the wind-swept swell of the Aegean Sea. I knew this could potentially lull me to sleep (in much the same way as train
travel), but I fought against it to catch up on my travel notes.
We docked in Santorini’s old port just after midday, and the disembarkation process was chaotic. For some unknown reason, I thought the process would get easier, but it didn’t. If anything, it got worse. Progressively worse. The following is a transcript from my notebook, which I somehow managed to scribble down in the minibus that transported us from the port to our hotel:
> Madness getting off ferry
> Madness at Athinios Port, especially the taxi drivers
> Madness driving up the steep zigzag hill from Athinios Port to Karterados.
Hotel Albatros, our accommodation for the next two nights, was located in Karterados. It was a relief to arrive. We were just over one kilometre from Fira (the capital of Santorini), and the daily trek was going to take around 20-minutes. Our rooms weren’t ready, so we stored our packs and walked over the road to Erotokritos, a busy Cretan bakery. It took a while to manage our option anxiety, but we eventually decided on
spanakopita (spinach and feta phyllo pie) and a cheese and ham croissant. Yummo!
We settled at a small wooden
table outside the bakery and devoured our savoury snacks. It was a very welcome lunch. Feeling suitably refreshed, we walked back to Hotel Albatros and picked up the keys to our basic but comfy room. With minimal views and negligible ambience, the hotel wasn’t an ideal base for our stay on Santorini, but we were getting used to one-kilometre treks to major towns and attractions.
In the mid-afternoon we jumped into a minibus and headed to the nearby village of Vothonas to visit the Koutsoyannopoulos Winery, which also houses a wine museum. Our intent? To tour the museum and taste the wine. It sounded interesting, and I was looking forward to the wine tasting. On arrival, I noticed poorly clothed mannequins standing in awkward poses outside the winery entrance, and my ‘kitsch radar’ sounded a very loud alarm and flashed a very bright red light in my head. Oh god no!
I should explain my issue with mannequins. It all started when my father – who was a paramedic – had to travel to different towns in Tasmania and stand-in for his colleagues. We occasionally joined him as a type of family holiday, and I absolutely loved it.
Except when we stayed in Smithton. The local ambulance station in this small town was attached to a decommissioned hospital, and this is where we all had to stay. Old training mannequins stood lifeless in the long corridors and rooms of the old hospital, and they were so eerie. When I ran past them, they followed me with their eyes…
Then there were the Zeehan mannequins. My family used to live in Zeehan, a remote mining town on Tasmania’s west coast. It was a great place to grow up, and it had an expansive mining museum. I used to explore the museum every weekend, and I never once tired of its captivating exhibits. Except for the mannequins. An underground mine had been crafted with papier-mâché in one of the rooms, and it housed a couple of papier-mâché mannequins. They were ‘meant’ to be miners, but they were so unrealistic. I wasn’t scared by them. I just wondered why they were there in the first place. I much preferred looking at the old photos of real miners on the museum walls.
Anyway, back to the Koutsoyannopoulos Winery. The staff suggested that we tour the museum first and taste the
wine last. The museum is located in a series of tunnels under the winery (eight metres below ground level), and it is accessed by a long flight of stairs. Thankfully, the tour was self-guided. We were given a handheld audio guide with pre-recorded summaries, which we triggered by pressing a number that corresponded to dioramas at different points in the tunnels. Each diorama depicted a key chapter in Santorini’s wine history, and there were 25 of them. All with mannequins…
The mannequins were terribly unrealistic. They were even worse than the mannequins in the mining museum in Zeehan. However, the stories depicted by the dioramas were very interesting, so all was not lost. I retained three very interesting facts from my self-guided tour of the museum. Firstly, I was surprised that the founders of Koutsoyannopoulos Winery were, at one point in time, the only people in Santorini who could read and write. Secondly, I was enthralled by the aging process of red wine when it is stored in a barrel. The deep red colour it achieves after ten years is extraordinary.
Thirdly – and this was an absolute revelation – I was delighted by the alleged ‘health benefits’
of red wine. The following ten points were described at length on a sheet of paper titled
Red Wine: 10 Unbelievable Benefits:
1) It helps you lose weight
2) It strengthens the brain
3) It cures gum disease
4) It fights fatigue
5) It releases endorphins
6) It cleans the palette
7) It reduces cholesterol
8) It is perfect for the heart
9) It reduces the risk of cancer
10) It helps in the fight against urinary infections.
By drinking red wine, we can lose weight, stay awake longer and become smarter. What’s not to like. This was my biggest takeaway from the wine museum! 😄
It was a relief to emerge from the tunnels under the winery, knowing we were about to sample a few of the wines that featured in the dioramas. We settled at a long narrow table (in a room full of long narrow tables) and tasted the following four wines:
> Assyrtiko (a fresh white) – this was easily the best of the four
> Orange Wine (a fresh white) – this was okay
> Ambelones (an aged red) – this resembled a sharp pinot
> Kamaritis (an aged red dessert wine) –
we tasted this concurrently with a small dark chocolate, and the combined taste was quite nice – but a little too sweet and thick for me.
Now to the ambience of the wine tasting. The solitary pours were very small, and the lack of interest and attention from the staff was very apparent. For the first time on our Greek adventure, I felt we’d fallen for a pretty poor tourist trap. However, we did learn a fair bit about this wine making company (that considers itself the best in Santorini). After wandering the grounds near the entrance of the winery, we climbed into the minibus and headed back to the hotel, where we relaxed in our lower ground floor room and caught up on our travel notes. We were feeling a little exhausted from our travels.
We headed out to explore Fira (the capital of Santorini) in the early evening. It was a 20-minute walk from our hotel along a busy main road, and we became familiar with this route in a very short period of time. We wandered Fira’s narrow cobblestone streets until we arrived at an extraordinary lookout area that offered views of Thirasia, Nea Kameni
and Palea Kameni (three small islands that lie just off Santorini’s western coast).
Fira sits on the edge of a 300-metre-high
caldera (a large volcanic crater) that drops sharply into the Aegean Sea. Despite being perpetually crowded with visitors, Fira is a truly beautiful place. When you stand on the caldera’s edge, your breath is completely taken away by the vista before you – blue sea stretching to the horizon, dotted with parched brown islands and cruise ships. I’d seen countless photos of Santorini before arriving in Greece, but I was unprepared for the sheer beauty of the place.
We walked a little further to Rastoni and settled at an outside table. Split over three different levels, this restaurant offers eyewatering views – of the Aegean Sea; of the whitewashed structures of Fira; and of the distant village of Oia. We were on the restaurant’s highest level, and the panorama really enhanced our dining experience. As the sun dipped below the horizon, we ordered:
> Risotto (mushroom, feta cheese and smoked pancetta)
> Santorini salad (cherry tomatoes, cucumber, feta cheese, olives, onion, caper leaves, barley nibbles, olive oil, oregano and parsley).
This was our second last night
in Greece, so Ren enjoyed a Porn Star Martini, while I enjoyed a beer. The food was fabulous, as were the amazing views from our open-air setting. On leaving Rastoni, we walked a little further along the narrow touristic streets of Fira until we came to another picturesque lookout area. This time it was a little different for me. The narrow path was packed with tourists, and the retaining wall was only waist high. I didn’t feel comfortable at all, and it was a long way down the steep caldera to the old port 300 metres below. I quickly retreated, only to discover that this narrow path was part of our 12-kilometre hike from Fira to Oia the following day.
We were leaving at 5:30am, so there would be no crowds. It would also be dark during the first part of the hike, so I wouldn’t be visually confronted with the 300 metre drop to the old port. I decided to give it a go. If it was too difficult, I could always make my own way back to the hotel. We meandered through Fira’s narrow cobblestone streets for a while, then slowly made our way back to Karterados,
arriving at Hotel Albatros around 9:30pm.
We needed an early night for an early start the next day. It was also Ren’s birthday the following day – one of the main reasons why we embarked on this Greek adventure. We were looking forward to what lay ahead!
SHE SAID... We woke to a cloudy, cold and windy Mykonos, and my first thought was that I hoped the sea wouldn’t be too rough for our trip to
Santorini later in the morning. My second thought was that I would need my warm Kathmandu puffer jacket at some stage during the day… and I felt vindicated! I’d been kicking myself for packing a warm jacket that I’d been lugging around for a month – I certainly hadn’t needed it in Dubai, and apart from a couple of nights that required a light cardigan, Greece had been almost sweltering until this point. I really should learn to travel with less. But alas, I always get cold on planes and I need a warm jacket with a thick hood to cocoon myself for my naps.
So there we were, rugged up in jackets and enjoying our cups of tea
and breakfast croissants (with fig jam and thyme honey) on our breezy deck. We had a view of the beautiful Aegean Sea… and a view of the not so beautiful cruise ships. We were both learning not to look at the cruise ships, but it was a bit difficult when there were three of them, plus their loud announcements that were carrying over the water. On our first day in Mykonos, I had kept track of the comings and goings of the ships anchored in front of our room; but at some point, I conceded victory to those gargantuan contraptions and had been trying to blank them ever since.
The group met at 9am and we climbed into the hotel’s minibus for our return trip to the New Port. The port was heaving with activity and Nasos (our group leader) managed to find a spot for us in a small undercover area where we received a briefing on Santorini while we waited for our Seajet Worldchampion catamaran.
The name of our catamaran intrigued a few of us, so I looked up Worldchampion’s history when writing my notes, and I was chuffed to note that it was an Australian-built
vessel. As far as I know, we only have two catamaran builders in Australia. One of them – Incat – is in Hobart, and the other in Victoria. Either way, I had a link (albeit somewhat tenuous) to the provenance of the vessel, and it made me smile that the ferry had journeyed all the way to the other side of the world from our Bass Strait. Worldchampion was the fastest catamaran in Seajet’s fleet, so the trip to Santorini was going to be much quicker than the normal ferries we’d been catching so far.
When the stocky looking catamaran pulled into the New Port, we steeled ourselves and dived into the already super packed pier. We lined up and eventually charged ahead into the boat to store our luggage. I say charged, but after a few seconds of committing to the crowd my momentum was not mine to control. This time we had to contend with open metal shelving in the middle of the ferry’s bowels that was already overflowing with luggage. The only free space was on the top shelf, and I had absolutely no chance of reaching it. In one of our previous blogs, I mentioned
that we had a few taller than average people in our group, and their height came in very handy on this ferry. 😊
Bags successfully stored, we breathed a sigh of relief and joined a long queue to get to the stairs that would take us to the first level of the ferry. The catamaran was plusher than any other ferries we’d caught, and the unexpected carpet and polished wood-grained finishes made it look like it belonged in a Bond film. I half expected to see a smirky Roger Moore-type lounging at one of the bars as we rushed past looking for our seats.
The two-hour trip on the catamaran started out being so smooth that I couldn’t even tell we were moving. However, as we gathered speed, the vessel started bouncing slightly on the water. Like with low turbulence on planes, I found the movement quite comforting. Normally this would have provided ideal napping conditions for me, but unfortunately, we had some loud talking passengers around us. 😞
At some point Nasos appeared and warned us that the disembarkation process was going to be extremely hectic. I thought he was joking, but unfortunately, he wasn’t. After
shuffling our way towards the stairs and then surging forward to get our luggage, I realised Bobbi (one of the tall people from our group) had taken control of the situation and had already put all our bags in a pile on the floor! What a trooper! 😊
With all members of our group present and accounted for, we disembarked our last ferry in Greece. With each ferry we caught, I thought I’d get better at this crazy process… but regardless of how many ferries we catch in Greece, I don’t think I’ll ever get used to the craziness. It’s the very definition of chaos!
Barely recovered from the ferry experience, none of us were prepared for the mayhem on the port of Athinios. A throng of taxi drivers and promoters of hotels swarmed us and were yelling in our faces. Luckily, we didn’t have to engage with any of them. We merely had to keep together and follow Nasos.
As we waited for our minibus to arrive, we stood in a shaded area in a small driveway of a hire car company… but we were asked to move on. This was in stark contrast to the
Greece kindness and hospitality we had encountered elsewhere in the country. I kind of understood their point – they were trying to compete with many other operators, and felt we were hindering their chances. It was becoming very clear to me that we were going to encounter more tourists and tourism operators in Santorini than anywhere else in the country!
Finally on our way to Hotel Albatros in our minibus, I suddenly noticed the massive cliffs of Santorini around us! I couldn’t believe I hadn’t noticed them until then. We climbed up higher and higher from the port on a narrow switch-back road. I don’t get vertigo or have a fear of heights, but trying to take in the beautiful view of both the island and the surrounding water as we climbed was strangely disorienting. I wondered if it was some remnant motion thing from being on the ferry, or if my brain’s self-motion sensors were confused by the depth of the view constantly changing on the bendy road.
Santorini was the last stop of our Greece trip, and where I was celebrating my milestone birthday (the main reason for this trip to Greece). We were excited to
get to know this famous island with its unique and stunning geographical features. For the lovers of fables, Santorini is alleged to be the famous Lost City of Atlantis, and it’s thought that most of Atlantis (and all its wealth) was still sitting at the bottom of the sea waiting to be discovered. 😊
The island was once circular, but a catastrophic volcanic eruption (they think around 1620 BC) caused the centre of the island to sink, leaving a ‘caldera’ (a volcanic crater) filled with water. Modern-day Santorini is actually the rim of what was left of the volcanic island, and it forms a bulky crescent shape around the eastern side of the caldera and its main towns of Fira and Oia (pronounced EE-ah) both very attractively hug the cliffs above the sea.
Santorini is advertised as one of the premier Greek islands, and both Fira and Oia have a reputation for getting swamped by crowds. As a result, I was pleased to note that our hotel was in the village of Karterados, just over one kilometre from Fira and almost in the centre of the island.
Our rooms weren’t ready when we arrived at Hotel Albatros,
so we left our bags and headed across the street to a local bakery for lunch. The small Erotokritos Bakery was doing a roaring trade, and I was surprised that a village bakery such as this was open 24 hours. We shared a
spanakopita (spinach and feta phyllo pie) and a ham and cheese croissant, and they were both delicious!
When we arrived back from lunch, we were a bit taken aback that the entire waiting area of our hotel was packed with a large tour group. We could hardly walk in the door. Literally. The only space we could find to wait for our rooms was so close to the automatic front doors that I kept triggering the motion sensor. The group looked to be from West Africa and seemed to be speaking French. They were very curious about our small group, and openly stared at us. At one point I resorted to waving and saying hello to a group of women in the hope of embarrassing them into stop staring – but it didn’t work. 😄
The hotel hadn’t looked very large from the outside, and it wasn’t until we were allocated our rooms that I
realised there were lower levels of the hotel cut into the hillside. Even though our room was one level lower than the hotel’s ground floor, we had a small balcony and a side view of a beautiful white building where a wedding photoshoot was taking place. It reminded me that we were yet to get a photo of a wedding in Greece! It’s become a bit of thing between us, that we try to get at least one photo of a wedding whenever we travel. My preference is to ask permission and take a close-up portrait photo of the couple. However, when that’s not possible, we’ve deemed it okay to take street-style shots of wedding photoshoots. 😊
We had a free afternoon before our scheduled orientation walk, so on Nasos’ suggestion, a few of us decided to do a wine tasting at Koutsoyannopoulos Winery and Wine Museum. Santorini wine has a good reputation, especially as they claim the conditions on the island and the way the vines are cultivated produce a unique wine. Santorini also has a long winemaking history which goes as far back as Roman times.
Nasos was particularly impressed with the onsite Wine Museum, and
was very insistent that we would be amazed. At 2pm a minibus transported us to the winery, and we began our experience by walking down into the old cave cellars where small alcoves and rooms had been converted into numbered ‘stations’ that provided a history of wine on the island, as well as explaining the wine making process – complete with audio guide. This is definitely not something Andrew or I would normally have chosen to do, but we went with open minds.
Within a few seconds I came across possibly the most kitsch diorama I have ever seen. There were many badly fashioned mannequins alongside marginally better-looking model donkeys. I immediately knew this was going to be one of those experiences that would stay with me a long time, but for all the wrong reasons! It was seriously hilarious, and I couldn’t make eye contact with Andrew because I knew we would both burst out laughing. 😄
I have to admit that even though the dioramas didn’t improve as we progressed through the museum, being in the labyrinthine cave cellars was pretty cool, and some of the information was actually quite interesting. The only things I remembered
from the museum when writing up my travel notes a day or so later were:
> the members of the Koutsoyannopoulos family who started the business were the only two literate people on the island at the time!
> the vines in Santorini grow in Mediterranean warm temperatures, with low rainfall but high humidity in the growing season.
> The area is subjected to strong winds off the sea which would damage vines and grapes if pruned in the ‘normal’ way. Instead, the vines are pruned low to the ground in a basket shape (basically resting on the soil) and the grapes grow inside this protected space.
With our museum visit thankfully over, we started our tasting of the following four wines:
> a fresh dry Assyrtiko wine from the white Assyrtiko grape (that’s indigenous to Santorini);
> a very ordinary Orange wine that’s also made from the white Assyrtiko grape (but I can’t remember why it was orange in colour);
> a dry red Ambelones wine that I didn’t really like; and
> a sweet red Kamaritis wine which we tasted with a small piece of dark chocolate. I quite liked this dessert wine.
The pours of
wine were probably the smallest we’ve had in any wine tasting anywhere in the world. Despite this, the tasting started off well enough and we were having fun. However, soon after we started, a much larger group entered another tasting room and the woman serving us disappeared to serve them. She’d return to pour our next wine, but would then rush off again. I know that we had picked the smallest tasting package of four wines, and the other group looked like they had gone for a bigger ranging package… but I was very disappointed with the blatant disrespect shown to our group. The wines weren’t that brilliant, and it wasn’t surprising that none of us bought any wines at the end. However, if the service had been better, I would definitely have considered buying the Kamaritis dessert wine and possibly the Assyrtiko too.
I’d have to say that in all good conscience, I wouldn’t recommend the experience at Koutsoyannopoulos Winery and Wine Museum to anyone. However, I can totally see why Nasos genuinely loved the museum aspect of this winery. He has a background in primary education, and it was a great educational resource… if you were a
child… and/or you liked seriously kitsch dioramas. 😊
We returned to our hotel at 4pm and rested for a while before we left at 6pm on our orientation walk of Fira (Santorini’s main town). Our small village of Karterados was a 20-minute walk into Fira and the majority of the walk was along a main road… not what I’d call the most pleasant of strolls. The area wasn’t quite gritty, but it wasn’t posh either. There was an assortment of support businesses that you’d normally find on the edges of a town – the head office of a storage company, pest controllers, a packing business etc.
What interested me most about the walk was that much like in Kardamyli on the Peloponnese peninsula, red gum Eucalyptus trees had been planted all along the street. Eucalypts are so synonymous with home that it always jumps out at me when I see them outside of Australia. As nice as the trees were, their root systems were pushing up the pavement and creating hazardous walking conditions. I don’t think they were the best choice of tree to plant on a narrow pavement along a busy road.
We entered Fira via
the road with the main KTEL bus station, so it probably felt more hectic than it really was. We walked past the impressively large white Orthodox Metropolitan Church of Santorini, which was to become a landmark for us whenever we visited Fira. Santorini was badly affected by an earthquake in 1956, and this church like many other buildings, had to be rebuilt. That would explain why it looked more like a mid-20th century church than an early 19th century one.
Across from the church and directly in front of Hotel Atlantis was a small square which was also an informal lookout which faced west towards the Aegean Sea and a soon to be setting sun. The area was understandably packed. Fira sits on the top of a cliff that plummets 300 metres into the sea, and this lookout had a panoramic view of the other islands that lie in a broken circle around the caldera. Despite the overcast weather and the crowds, this really was an amazing view!
We took a few photos and kept walking along Ypapantis Street. We walked past the entrances and backdrops of many ‘sunset bars’, and I was amused that I recognised them
straightaway from Facebook and Instagram posts I had been perusing before our trip.
Apparently, congregating in these bars to watch the famed Santorini sunset – with a costly cocktail in one hand and selfie stick in the other – is THE thing to do in Santorini. According to a Santorini Facebook group I joined, the sunset bars are routinely booked out weeks ahead! I suppose I can kind of see the attraction, but looking around at the wide curve of the rest of the island, I’m sure any point on Santorini’s western side would offer an equally good view of the sunset. Actually, it would probably be better, because it wouldn’t have the hefty price tags or other people’s selfie sticks in your shot.
Having said that, we were partaking in the next most popular sunset activity – dinner with a view. We ducked down a few more cobblestone lanes and arrived at Rastoni Restaurant. Nasos had booked this place, and we had a table on their uppermost terrace with a direct view of the sun slowly sinking into the Aegean Sea. To the side of us we had an equally fabulous view of the whitewashed buildings of
Fira cascading down the steep terraced slopes all around us. Being on the slope while looking at this scene was a very different experience to looking at it from afar. It really accentuated the feeling that the buildings were built deep into the rock and stacked on top of each other like Lego buildings. And following the curve of the island further along, we could see the town of Oia perched on the tip of the landmass. Santorini really is quite spectacular!
We didn’t have to wait long for the anticipated sunset. However, there were a few clouds in the sky and it wasn’t as dramatic a spectacle as we had seen elsewhere in the Cycladic. Instead of the fiery red golden light of Syros and Mykonos, we had a show of muted pinks and oranges. However, the unique setting of the dramatic cliffs and the volcanic caldera was pretty incredible.
It was my birthday eve, so I celebrated with a Porn Star Martini cocktail while Andrew had a beer. We shared a mushroom risotto with feta cheese and smoked pancetta, as well as a house salad of many ingredients – cherry tomatoes, cucumber, feta cheese, olives, onion,
caper leaves, barley nibbles, olive oil, oregano and parsley. I had been curious about the caper leaves, but couldn’t really taste them. The food was delicious, but not particularly memorable or stunning (especially taking into account the very high prices). But then again, I would say that sitting on the edge of the Santorini caldera and watching a Cycladic sunset was absolutely priceless! 😊
Nasos said he had a surprise for us after dinner, and given his playful but sometimes offbeat sense of humour, I really didn’t know what to expect. We exited the restaurant via a tiny lane that took us past people’s hotel rooms – Fira is extremely cramped and there’s absolutely no privacy! We walked uphill along more cobblestone laneways and through tiny squares.
At a certain point Nasos stopped us and requested that we close our eyes and shuffle forward towards him. We must have looked quite comical to any onlookers! He was setting us up for a big reveal. After a few seconds, he asked us to look to our left and there was a stunning night view of Fira all lit up and cascading to the sea. It really was spectacular, and
Nasos got his collective ‘Oh Wow!’ moment. However, it wasn’t long before I realised Andrew wasn’t feeling very comfortable and needed to get back to solid ground! I had been so captivated by the view that it hadn’t occurred to me that we were standing on a narrow ledge that hugged an open section of the cliff face; and the wall I was standing at was barely at waist height for Andrew! 😱
After a few photos at the lookout, we started our return hike back to our hotel in Karterados. I was quite surprised at how packed the streets of Fira were, even at this late hour of the evening. It occurred to me that even though Santorini has more than its fair share of cruise ship hordes who plague it during the day, it differed from Mykonos in also having a massive number of people staying in hotels in Fira. A double whammy. There was no escaping the crowds in Santorini.
We returned to our hotel room and prepared for a very early start the next morning – a 5:30am meeting time for a sunrise hike along the coastal path from Fira to Oia. Despite being
excited about a spectacular sounding walk that would take us across half of Santorini… I was concerned about my post-COVID lungs coping with the cliff climbs, and Andrew was concerned about facing steep drop-offs that may trigger his issue with heights.
In spite of this mixed bag of emotions, we hoped we would still get a solid night of sleep.
See you around Santorini!
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Chris L.
non-member comment
Shaking the tree
The ferry does not seem a good fit for the frail or faint hearted. You have covered a vast part of the country and uncovered vast differences. Fascinating stuff.