The island of Santorini in Greece is truly paradise. Eva and I started our Greek adventure by joining up with the Basque boys (Jontxu, Ivan, Josu, Flo, and David) in Santorini for some good times. However, we had to endure the nightmare of getting to the island before we could live the dream. We arrived in the Athens airport late and discovered that the metro to our hostel was under construction, so we had to take a bus to Syntagma Square and then take a short metro ride to our hostel. But, by the time we got to the metro, it had closed for the night, so we hoofed it with our luggage and managed to find the hostel after going the wrong way and seeing the Temple of Zeus. Once we found our hostel, we were informed that our room was in another building and we got lost...again... with all of our luggage. When we finally got to our room, it was approaching 2am and we discovered there we two boys already in it. Apparently it was a 4-person-mixed-dorm room. Luckily, they turned out to be quite nice. Well, one was American so he didn't count, but the other was Australian and we made fun of the American together which is always an enjoyable pass-time. We managed to get 2 hours of sleep before we had to get up to be at the port at 6am (our ferry was leaving at 7am). We managed to make it to the port on time, but couldn't find our gate since the port in Athens is GIGANTIC and no one knew anything. We eventually found our port with 10 minutes to spare only to find out they had cancelled our ferry and there were hundreds of other angry passengers already filling the empty seats on other boats. However, Eva and I got lucky and were able to find tickets for 8am. At least we thought we were lucky until we discovered we were on a smaller boat which meant it rocked like no other for 7 hours. The other bigger boats were much smoother and only took 5 hours. Moral of the story: never book with SeaJets.
We turned a horrific shade of green along with all other passengers. When we finally made it to paradise where the boys were waiting for us. So we showered, and headed out to rent some quads to go the Red Beach. But... our quad (the blue one which we requested because we thought the blue one was cooler than the yellow ones) broke down after we got half way to the red beach. At this point, Eva and I were thinking Greece was a bad idea... But, we eventually made it to the Red Beach and began to realize how beautiful Santorini really is and stopped running into so many problems.
The next day we went on the popular Volcano Boat Tour which I would recommend to anyone going to Santorini. We set sail at 11am and made our first stop at Nea Kameni (the Volcano) and climbed to the top. The neat part about the volcano is that it's still active! While hiking up the volcano we discovered a hole about a foot deep that was emitting an impressive amount of heat! (Really Jontxu discovered the hole by almost falling into it, and then almost falling into the large crater behind him. The tour guide kept very close eyes on him after that.)
The next stop was the hot springs on the other side of the volcano where the water was red. To get to the hot springs, we had to jump off the side of the boat (definitely a few meters drop) and swim a bit to get into the sulfur and iron water. It was strange to jump into cold water and them swim into warm water just a few meters closer to shore. After the hot springs, we stopped on the small island of Thirassia to have lunch in the village of Corfos. It was a change from the other villages because it was completely void of anything tourist-y. Just a small and quaint place with nice local people. Then, we got on the boat once more to go to our last stop of Oia, which, in my opinion, is the nicest part of Santorini. If you've even seen a picture of Santorini you were more than likely looking at a picture of Oia. It's the village that is completely full of the little white cave houses with blue doors and is home of the famous sunset. To get there we had to take a donkey up the steep-steep cliff. Riding a donkey was an interesting experience to say the least. The view from the donkey was quite amazing at times (unless your donkey stops to let all the other donkeys pass in front) but you had to feel sorry for the poor donkeys that had to carry us up there. I just wanted to give them water. However, being in Oia was truly breathtaking. One day when I no longer want to be an engineer, I plan on moving there and opening up a small shop along the street where you can see the amazing sea view out the open door.
More on the Greek Adventure to come.
Hasta la proximá vez,
Kathlene
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