Day 2: Santorini

We were up at 5:30AM (which is 11:30PM back home) to catch our ferry to Santorini. We arrived at Piraeus (the main port of Athens) and I went over to the travel agency to pick up our ferry tickets. The woman behind the counter made me a bit nervous, as it took her like 10 minutes to search through a relatively small box of envelopes. We boarded the Hellenic Seaways High Speed 3 and were lucky enough to have seats at the very front of the boat. What a view!





My plan of writing this blog and doing some reading was thwarted by some interesting people we met. First, we met a fun gay couple from Houston, Jorge and Rod, who were in Greece celebrating Jorge’s 50th birthday. Very nice people (we would run into them again on the way to Paros). We also met a South African fellow who runs a small pharma company in Boston. When I told him that I worked at a pharma company too, he proceeded to talk my ears off for the entire 4-hour journey! He was a nice guy with some interesting stories to share, though.

When you arrive in crescent-shaped Santorini, you immediately see the imposingly high 1100 ft cliffs with small white-washed villages perched on top and along the side of the cliffs (Santorini is not for anyone who is out of shape! There are lots of hills and stairs everywhere. We definitely got a work out!) We boarded the bus to Oia (pronounced ee-yah), which is generally known as the most picturesque village in all of Santorini. It did not disappoint. This place is unbelievably beautiful (when the island was first settled more than 4000 years ago it was named “Kallisti”—which translates as “the loveliest.” The ancients had it right).



After walking around a bit lost (with our heavy bags in tow), we found our amazing hotel, the Andronis Luxury Suites. All I can say is “wow.” We were shown around the property by the manager, Panos.









We reserved a traditional “cave room” (many of the hotels are carved into the cliff and feature rooms that look much like caves). Our bed was set in a smaller nook within the cave. Nice.





Our room also had a very cool Jacuzzi:



Our room also had a private veranda just off the awesome infinity pool (which allowed us to sunbathe on the veranda and walk 5 steps to the pool for a dip) overlooking the caldera (which is a huge crater that was formed when the volcano erupted and blew up the island in 1600 BC) and volcano. It is just an amazing sight (I’m starting to run out of superlatives!):











We had lunch at Skala, a restaurant (like many of them here in Santorini) overlooking the caldera. We tried a delicious onion pie (scallions and cheese wrapped in phyllo and fried). Kathy had grilled sea bass and I had pasta with sun dried tomato pesto.







Afterwards, we walked around Oia, taking in the beautiful sights and admiring all the cute shops and restaurants.





We went back to the hotel to relax at the pool and then decided to take a nap. When we awoke, we realized that we had to rush to the Northern end of town to experience one of Santorini’s main attractions, the sunset. Unfortunately, we missed it by about 10 minutes (which we realized when the crowds were walking in the opposite direction). Oh well, the sun will set again tomorrow.





We showered and went to dinner at Katina Fish Taverna, which is located at the bottom of the cliff in Ammoudi Bay. How do you get there? A winding path of more than 400 steps, which was fairly difficult to navigate since there was little lighting and lots of potholes (Kathy wearing sandals with short heels didn’t make it any easier). We ate fresh red snapper (which Kathy got to choose herself), grilled shrimp, fried local eggplant and French fries (Kathy had been jonsing for fries for days, but didn’t like them too much). There was no way we were going to be able to climb all those steps after that meal, so one of the waiters graciously offered to drive us all the way back up (it was almost 1AM by then and its pretty hard to find a cab on the island).