Santorini, Greece - July 12-15, 2005

Santorini, Greece - July 12–15, 2005

(Bill)
We enjoyed Santorini although I didn’t find it to be as amazing as the travel books make it out to be. The huge cliffs surrounding a portion of the island are beautiful. The cliffs were created by a volcanic eruption on Santorini long ago. The volcano left a crater on the edge of the island from which the cliffs drop into the ocean. I felt the most beautiful view of the island was actually from the ferry entering the new port and not from the island itself. There is a white stucco building town on top of a portion of the cliffs – the white buildings look like snow on a mountain top from afar. I was expecting to see countless white stucco buildings with blue tile roofs lining the cliffs of Santorini but there weren’t many that were worth noting. The few that we did see seem to be photographed over and over again on postcards, travel books, etc.

We rented a scooter again and survived our adventure all over the island. Santorini is much larger than Mykonos and therefore there were many more people and traffic to navigate. We spent our first full day on the island exploring the various beaches. Black sand beaches (or more gray compared to other black sand beaches I have seen) are the norm on the island, but I felt the beaches, while definitely dramatic, were not what I would call beautiful. The red sand – red rock would be more appropriate – beach was definitely worth the hike. We actually went back to the red sand beach on our second day and spent most of the afternoon relaxing on a beach chair under an umbrella.

On our second full day we found an amazing little fishing village near Oia on the north part of the island. There were about 5 or 6 tiny one man wooden fishing boats (one unloading its catch as we arrived) and two restaurants at the bottom of the cove in the harbor. We walked down into the village and had lunch overlooking the small harbor - definitely a highlight of our Santorini experience.

We stayed at Rena’s Place, a family run hotel in the heart of Fira, the main town on Santorini. Rena’s had a nice pool overlooking the ocean and made some pretty good homemade sweet wine. We are definitely finding our stride with the hotels…phew!

(Victoria)
Santorini was definitely not the most beautiful of the Cylcades. It had some interesting sights, but the beaches were very rocky and seemed a bit dirty. I enjoyed driving around the island on our scooter. (This time we wore helmets, although Bill’s helmet part flew off to reveal only the Styrofoam core – nice.) When we arrived in the harbor it was so dramatic that I was really excited. I couldn’t wait to see the beautiful white buildings with bright blue roofs I’d seen photographed. However, as we drove around I was getting quite irritated. I was determined to see a blue roof before we left. We drove around the entire island in search and by the end I think we finally saw maybe five small blue roofs. They were anti-climatic to say the least. We definitely had fun, but I was not wowed at all. Oia looked like it had more charm than Fira, but it seemed touristy. By the end I was starting to think we may want to cut our Greek isles trip short, but I’m so glad we didn’t.


Oddities or Things We Noticed
(Bill and Victoria)

There are countless restaurants surrounding the island that purport to have the “Best Sunset View”. Can’t tell you which one was the best, but we definitely found a beautiful sunset at a winery on top of the volcano wall overlooking the ocean.

Wine was drinkable :) There may be a reason why I have never seen Greek wine for sale in California.

There are many unfinished structures all over the island – a theme that tended to play itself over and over throughout Greece.