After a crazy few days in Mykonos it was off to Santorini to
explore!
We arrived in the late afternoon and were picked up from the
port from the owner of our hostel/hotel – I don’t know what to call it.
Although the husband and wife who owned the rooms were really lovely people the
room was not so nice… We were one of the only rooms with no air con, instead we
got a fan with no cover that I was afraid of getting my air caught in the whole
time. Also, we got some cockroach visitors…. Fortunately the island itself was
worth staying in a dump.
The first afternoon we spent most of our time figuring out
how to survive the accommodation (featuring a pool, or what we nicknamed the
‘paddle pool’) and then wandering down to the beach. We were lucky to be
staying at Perissa, a beautiful town in Santorini that is built around a long
stretch of sandy black beach. Santorini
is a volcanic island and was quite literally the result of a volcanic eruption
sometime BC, so all the beaches are either black or red as a result of the
volcanic rock. The beach was lined with heaps of lively restaurants and we
grabbed dinner at one of these. Perissa is a little quieter than the two big
towns in Santorini, which means that everything is cheaper – I ordered stuffed
squid for dinner and yes, I did get an entire squid on my plate!! I’ve said it
before but I will say it again: Greek food is AMAZING!
The next day we hired a quad bike for two days (I will admit
that thanks to the hotel owner we did get a pretty awesome deal…) so we could
ride around and explore the island. Michael got a 30 second lesson on how to
drive a quad bike and then we were off. The bike wasn’t the most powerful best,
we think the fastest we ever went was about 35km but the speedo was broken so
it was hard to tell (as was the fuel gauge and pretty much everything else on
the dashboard).
First we headed for the nearby town of Akrotiri, to visit
Red Beach, which is a pretty well-known beach on Santorini.
As you can see we got a pretty cool view on our way there!
It was really weird
and also kinda cool going to a beach with red sand! We didn’t spend too long
here because it was a tiny beach and packed with people so we both had a
refreshing dip in the water (which was amazing) and then jumped back on the
bike.
Our next destination was Thira one of the biggest towns on
Santorini. I love Greek Island towns, the tiny white houses with blue roofs and
the white footpaths – there is so much bright white surrounded by bright blue
ocean, it looks amazing.
After walking around Thira for a while and grabbing some
lunch we were in search of a beach for some more cooling down.
We stumbled on
this little black beach after seeing a few hand made signs saying ‘beach’ on
the main road. It was a really quiet little black beach and we spent some of
the afternoon cooling off here. As you can see there are some pics of us with
our beast of a quad bike!
We then drove our quad bike along the coast of Santorini, which provided us with some pretty amazing views of the coastline, we stopped when we felt like it to take some photos and enjoy the view.
We really were in a beautiful part of the world - it was hard to take a bad photo!
As you can see I was having some fun taking photos in the mirror haha!
We headed for the small town of Amoudi, which pretty much
consists of a small port and a group of restaurants right on the water (so
close that waves can get tables at the restaurants wet).
In the above pictures you can see Amoudi behind us right on
the water and up on top of the cliff is the famous Oia.
Beautiful Oia
Oia is THE most photographed place in the whole of Greece,
it’s on nearly every advertisement and postcard related to Greece. It is famous
for its beautiful small white houses and apartments that cascade down the cliff
face, there are heaps of villas with pools, balconies and little churches
spread all along this stretch of coastline – the views are amazing and photos
do not do it justice!
The whole town is perched on the edge of a cliff and the
white houses and blue-roof churches contrast beautifully with the blue ocean
below.
We spent some time wandering through this incredibly
photogenic town and taking in the amazing view.
When we first arrived there
weren’t too many people in the town but Oia is famous for having beautiful
sunsets and as this time drew closer hoards of people suddenly arrived and the
whole town became so packed you could barely move – this is not my thing so we
decided to get out of there and make our way home.
At this point we had literally driven from the very southern
to the very northern point of Santorini and were now making our way back south.
We drove past many traditional Greek towns and had some fun taking photos
before we arrived back in Perissa right as the sun was setting (which is just
before 9pm here) – it was a long but seriously fun day!
The next day we almost had a full tank of fuel and were
reading to explore more of gorgeous Santorini. Pyrgos was our first stop; a
tiny inland town that was not far from where we were staying so we decided to
check it out. We headed off the main
road to get to Pyrgos, which has one road and one roundabout in the whole place
and the rest is for foot traffic only (too bad if you live on a house at the
top of the hill).
In the above pictures on the right are pictures taken from Pyrgos from the road, also the vines that are grown here for wine!
We spent a while walking through the pedestrian only area,
which was extremely pretty and very traditional. More white houses, blue roofs
and cool white tunnels to walk through. We also found this really cool art
gallery with heaps of paintings on wood and small wood works!
Finally after walking up lots of stairs and around a lot of
corners we came to a kind of look out thing, we were literally walking along
the tops of houses and it was almost abandoned but we had followed a kinda
footpath and some home made signs and there were a few other people around
checking out the view.
From here we were able to see the whole of Santorini –
from the northern Oia (far right), Thira (middle right), straight ahead of us
was the volcano and south (left) was Perissa and Akrotiri.
Back on the bike again and this time we were headed back to
the coast to the beach side town of Kamari, this town was very similar to
Perissa, cafes and restaurants lined the sun lounge filled sandy black beach. We
opted for relaxing on our shared beach towel and going for dips in the water to
cool off. The airport was almost directly behind this town and planes kept
passing really low overhead which was pretty cool! We grabbed lunch and had an
afternoon of beach-ness.
Before returning our cool little bike we made one last trip
to the southern-most point of Santorini: the Faros lighthouse.
On our way we quite literally stumbled upon the Donkey Brewery
– yep, Santorini has it’s own brewery that specializes in boutique beers. This
is like Michael’s heaven so we had to stop and check it out, we were lucky
enough to get some samples of each of their most regularly brewed beers and
there were really good (similar to Little Creatures apparently). We savored the samples, bought a few beers
and were on our way again!
We rode along the coast and were greeted by amazing views of
the gorgeous ocean and the volcano. As you can see from our photos there were
heaps of cute little churches along the way.
Above is another cool look at we stopped at along our way = amzing volcano views!
The Faros lighthouse itself is not
accessible as it is used by the Greek Marines but the rocky area around it is a
public space so we were able to explore around here and take in yet another
amazing view in the afternoon sun.
I was
a little sad to see our little quad bike go but we were really happy we had
decided to hire one for the few days we were here because it was a really
awesome way to get to see Santorini.
We didn’t do a whole lot on our last day in Santorini and it
was awesome. We headed down to the beach and found a nice little place in the
sand where we could jump in and out of the water as we liked. We spent most of
the afternoon paddling in the water and reading books – in other words relaxing
our little hearts out haha!
Santorini was one of the most stunning places I have ever
visited in my life, I would love to go back and do it all over again because it
truly is a beautiful place!
Our final Greek islands destination was Rhodes.
We caught an overnight ferry at midnight from Santorini,
which was a pretty awful experience, we ended up in this room that was arranged
kinda like a tiny cinema and much to my disgust the lights were left on ALL
NIGHT LONG! I don’t know how anyone was supposed to sleep properly! I was so
annoyed…
Somehow we managed to get a few hours of sleep but then
somehow wound up waiting for 40 mins at a bus stop outside the ferry terminal,
which it turns out is no longer in use, we bit the bullet and got a taxi to our
hotel (one of the first real hotels we have stayed at!). When we checked in the
receptionist told us we had been switched to a room they don’t normally used,
we expected the worst but our room was amazing, it even had a small Jacuzzi!
After spending the past few nights with dangerous fans and cockroaches for
company we could not have been happier!
What’s more our lovely new hotel had a bar, restaurant and
an incredible rooftop pool – we felt like we had hit the jackpot!
To prevent from falling asleep we caught a local bus into
Rhodes Town and explored the Old Town (yet another Old Town), this was a huge
Old Town compared to all the others we had seen, every time we thought it was
ending there just seemed to be more!
This Old Town even had a little bridge you could cross to enter.
Most of Rhodes is very different from the
other two islands we have visited, the buildings are more modern rather than
traditional and the island itself is huge and even has a freeway – probably not
suitable for our quad bike! However, the Old Town was very quaint with
cobblestone streets and many of the original signs for old shops still in
place.
The Old Town was built around the port of Rhodes and even had a small beach that lots of people were swimming at!
We tried to get a little creative with our photography
To be honest we spent most of our time in Rhodes not doing
much else aside from lying on beaches and lying by our amazing hotel pool – it
was very relaxing and I got to start reading the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
which I have been looking forward to for a while (awesome book if anyone is interested)!
We were really sad to be leaving the Greek Islands – we have
loved every bit of Greece, it’s such an amazing and beautiful country (and the
food is the best of any country we have visited thus far) and if I had to
choose out of Greece and Portugal for my favourite country I would have a hard
time choosing!
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