Has it really been a month since my last post?! Where does the time go?
Now where was I…ah yes, Santorini! We sailed from Kusadasi, Turkey towards the Greek island of Santorini — a place where we had considered spending our ENTIRE honeymoon. We visited the island under very unique circumstances, which we wouldn’t find out about until we hit land.
First, we utilized our “jump the tender line” cards to hop on the next available tender to the docks. I feel like the penthouse suite sort of paid for itself there, but WOW were the people in line angry! In any event, we sailed on a beautiful old ship for maybe five minutes before we finally made land.
Once there, we had a better understanding of why so many cruise ships were on the island…and why there was a TWO HOUR wait to get up the cable car to…you know, EVERYTHING. The riots and protests in Athens made it unsafe for some cruise ships to stop there so, instead, they changed their itinerary and headed straight to Santorini. There were three additional cruise ships in port that day — roughly 9,000 extra people with only three ways to the top of the mountain: cable car, donkey or walk (with the donkeys). We weren’t waiting two hours for a cable car when we only had eight hours to visit the island and I didn’t have the heart to torture a poor donkey (whose line was also very long), so we walked up this zig zag of torture.
600 steps. That we ran up to avoid getting trampled by donkeys on their way up and down, which almost happened at least a dozen times. (Two guesses what all of those donkeys left behind, which also had to be carefully looked out for.) Then you had the elderly and those with children to get around, although I give them a lot of credit for even making the effort up these very steep steps. Between the running, the heat and the altitude, I couldn’t breathe by the time we got up to the top of Fira. Poor Chris ran and found me bottled water while I caught my breath. We knew then that we were NOT taking the stairs down, so we kept careful watch over the time to make sure we had plenty of waiting time for the cable car line back down.
But really, it’s so easy to forget all your troubles getting to the top when this is your view.
We immediately saw the archaeological museum and decided to take a tour. There were some interesting items in the two or three rooms they had, but I would otherwise skip it and save yourself the 15 minutes (and Euro). We then walked around the maze of shops, bars and restaurants of this absolutely gorgeous island before stopping for lunch.
Nearly five months later and I’m still drooling thinking about all the wonderful food we had on this trip. And the views. Imagine looking across the table at your husband every day and seeing this view behind him?! Yes, please!
In any event, we worried so much about how long it would take to get us back down to the pier (esp since the “jump the tender line” cards only worked one way) that we headed towards the cable car early to find a very, very long line awaiting us. Some very interesting things happened in the 1h 15m wait: (1) we had some lovely people behind us from New York state that made the wait so much more enjoyable, (2) we passed the hotel that we had originally planned on spending our entire honeymoon at and (3) we watched people of several nationalities and languages scream at a French woman pretending to not understand that she had to go to the BACK of the line and not the middle. You want world unity, get someone from each country to stand in a long line and go after the single line cutter. After all that, the cable car turned out to be quick, fun and efficient — loved it. We caught one of the last tenders back to our boat and relaxed with some pirate punches in our balcony hot tub while we waved farewell to Santorini and Greece. I’ll spare you the picture of Chris and I in the hot tub and just leave you with this gem.
Oh, Greece…you are a beautiful country with amazing food and lovely people — I hope to visit you again one day when times are less turbulent for you. Next (and final) stop, the island nation of Malta!
For more pictures of Santorini, check out my Flickr set!
