Santorini

Presently, I’m sitting at the pool on the Insignia, after a hot day of touring on Santorini, composing my blog entry for today and this is my view.



That’s the capital city of Santorini, Fira - more about that later.
The weather has been fabulous since we hit Greece. It hit 34 degrees today with the bluest skies and the bluest seas and the whitest houses. Of course the blues of water and sky are dramatically different, which makes the vistas all the more spectacular.
We tendered in to the island from our anchored ship at 7:45 this morning. We then boarded buses and had an absolutely hair-raising drive up the cliff side with its sharp switchbacks and guardrailess cliff edges.

They first took us to the highest summit on Santorini for an overview of the island. There was incredible bus congestion, since this was clearly the first stop for all of the tours, but somehow the buses stayed on the road as they passed each other on what are essentially one lane-width roads. The scene above is of their active volcano that has not erupted since 1950.


We visited the pretty village of Oia next – pronounced ee-ah. This is the village that everybody sees when viewing photos of Santorini. The stark contrast of white building and blue skies was breathtaking. What a feast for the senses! Our guide, a macho Greek named Nick, informed us that today’s visibility conditions were remarkable, even for him. He said they get no more than 15 days like this each year, despite the average 300 days of sun that Greece experiences.


Following Oia, we went to the capital of Fira – more breathtaking views. To get off the cliff we took a cable car to the beach below to catch the tender back to the ship.
The afternoon was spent in the shade around the pool – in and out of the water. It was possible to get to a Santorini beach, but they were on the other side of the island, we’d have to hire a cab and they wouldn’t have poolside bar service. Their 3 main beaches all have different coloured sand – black, red and white. That, once again, has to do with the volcanic origins of the island.


We’re at that point into the journey, when people are starting to want to compare the various destinations we’ve visited. We’ve seen a lot of really beautiful places and you actually can’t compare them. I can’t even tell which one I, personally, liked the best.
Dawn wants everyone to know that the sailing has been absolutely smooth – in fact in most cases we forget that we’re on a ship – and she hasn’t suffered from any motion sickness.
We could have had a donkey ride down the hill to the pier – but no thanks. There’s a smell and comfort factor there.


Each evening now, our biggest decision is in which restaurant we wish to dine. Since the food is great everywhere, it really doesn’t matter. We ate in the Grand Dining Room with Roberta and Harding last night and that’s likely to happen again tonight since we generally meet them at Happy Hour.