Greece Part I: Iconic Islands

Back in Oxford from Greece! This country is a place I've wanted to visit for a very long time, and sometimes when dreaming of seeing places like those, the anticipation and the yearning builds to such a point that the reality falls short of expectations. Let me tell you, though, this was NOT true in the case of my most recent trip. Greece was incredible, beautiful, and laced with Mediterranean scenery and a deeper sense of history than I'd ever encountered before. (This is, of course, skimming over the grimmer economic realities there at the moment, which we did see. So fascinating for me, as an outsider, to contrast my long-held visualizations of Greece as a celebrated classical/intellectual society with its more modern-day version, where the tourist areas are stunning but the back streets are not necessarily.) I spent the last two weeks hopping around various parts of Greece, and to break that trip into a more manageable chunk of blogging, I'll divide it into three separate posts. So, on to the first part -- the islands!

I was traveling with an Oxford friend of mine, Emily, and we left Oxford around midday on Sunday two weeks ago. We'd been planning this Greece trip for a couple months, alternately looking up beautiful photos and articles on the country's history, geography, and culture. In other words, we were stoked (and a special shout-out goes here to my sister Leigh, who has been to Greece not once but twice, and whose invaluable advice on everything from travel time to sights to food 110% helped us plan our trip). We flew to Athens, where we got on the metro and trekked across the city from the airport to the port of Piraeus, where we'd gotten a hotel for the night since our ferry to our first island destination -- Mykonos -- departed at 7:30am the next morning. With getting in late, navigating our way to our hotel, and needing to wake up at 5:45am (aka 3:45am Oxford time, ouch!) to catch our ferry, we didn't get much sleep that night, but visualizations of island sun kept us going. We boarded our ferry with the crowds of other haggard travelers and settled in for the 5-hour trip to Mykonos. The Greek islands are served by a few different ferry companies, and many times travelers have the option of taking a high-speed versus slower ferry. High-speed ferries are, of course, more expensive, and on our student budgets we'd opted for the slower ones -- but the time spent reading and chatting in the ferry lounge areas was relaxing and worth it! (I read a grand total of five novels/nonfiction books while on this trip. So good.)

Around noon, after we had sailed past several other Mediterranean islands and grown more excited, Mykonos drew into view. We got off to brilliant sun, blue skies, and a feeling of incredulity -- we were in Greece! The woman who owned our hostel in Mykonos met us at the port and drove us back into Mykonos town, telling us along the way about how she'd come to the island thirty years ago for vacation with a friend, met a man, and wound up staying and opening her own business. (Hey, you never know... neither of us met the Greek man of our dreams, though. Not all that disappointed about it.) We'd originally planned on staying along the coast, but space had opened up in the hostel right in the middle of Mykonos town, so we decided to switch to the new room since we were only in Mykonos for a night and the central location sounded attractive. Good decision -- our hostel was right along one of the narrow, climbing, whitewashed Mykonos streets and, as the hostel owner put it, good luck finding it if we tried to come at it from the opposite direction or center of town! We left our stuff in our room and set out to get deliberately lost and explore.

Mykonos is a former agricultural island now famed for its windmills, its nightlife, and its run-ins with celebrity guests like Jackie O. It's grown into one of the most popular island destinations in Greece, and while it had a distinctly touristy feel it was also very beautiful with its whitewashed buildings and views of the ocean. (We saw so. Many. Greek. People out painting and repainting the buildings white. These tourist destinations take a lot of maintenance! How many gallons of white paint does Mykonos go through in a year, I wonder?) And, of course, the island is also famous for its windmills, which were originally used to power wells and other means of agriculture but which are now purely scenic. We wandered through the town, took photos, walked up to the windmills, and took many narrow, twisty passageways through the streets all afternoon. The entire time, we couldn't help but marvel at the beautiful contrast of white Greek buildings with blue sky, or of the rich floral and jewel tones on white, or of sea against shore. It did not feel like a real place. Some photos:

In the late afternoon, we were both tired from our sleep-deprived night and long travels, so we settled down to drink smoothies and read beside the water for an hour or so. Then we grabbed dinner, found our way back to our hostel, and climbed the roof to watch our first Mediterranean sunset of the trip. Just beautiful.

The following morning, we got up (after sleeping quite hard) and had a relaxing, slow-paced morning in Mykonos before boarding our 10:30am ferry to head to Santorini, another island farther south in the Aegean. More marveling at clear blue Mediterranean waters followed, and we made it to Santorini by 1pm, where our hostel owner again awaited with a van to take us up into town. What a contrast between Santorini and Mykonos. While Mykonos is a low-lying island, its shores right up against the water, Santorini is a towering semicircular cliff that rises up out of the ocean, centered around a volcanic crater far below. The entire island, formerly called Thira, was formed by a series of volcanic eruptions, which has given the landscape a sheer, rocky, many-textured feel. (Indeed, the variety of rocks we found on Santorini, from burnt sienna to dusty granite gray to rich red to black, was astonishing for such a small land area.) The towns on Santorini are famously built into the cliff tops and cliff faces, and to get up to our hostel we had to drive on a winding, switchbacking road, not unlike the switchbacks to get down into some rugged canyon of the West. The entire time on Santorini, I kept being reminded of trips I've taken with my family to canyons and mesas and cliffs in the American West. Being on top of those island cliffs made me think of standing on top of the rim of the Grand Canyon -- though of course not as high, and with water down in the plunge below rather than rivers and canyon bottoms. Still, the islands of Greece strongly resembled a series of mountaintops rising out of the valley bottom of the sea. We were on mountain peaks in the Alps of the ocean, so to speak.

After dumping our stuff in the hostel in Santorini, Emily and I decided to take a bus out to the far end of the island, where we'd been told we could visit some excavations of ancient ruins. We had a full two and a half days on Santorini, in contrast to our brief day on Mykonos, so we figured we might as well spread out and explore. The ruins were well worth visiting -- the prehistoric Bronze Age civilization of Akrotiri originally existed on the island of Thira as early as 3000 BC, and reached its peak in around 2000 BC before being destroyed by the volcanic eruption. (There is speculation that this vanished civilization on this far-flung Greek island could have formed the basis for legends of Atlantis. Fascinating stuff.) Excavations have been ongoing in the area since the 1960s and have unearthed a wide range of pottery and tools and other art, which we saw later at a museum in Fira, Santorini. I think both of us were astonished at the beauty and quality of these artifacts from four or five thousand years ago (!!). At that end of the island, we also got to visit Santorini's red beach (which exists in addition to a black beach, and a white beach, and a... you get the amazing diversity of this place) before heading back to the main town of Fira for dinner. We ate at a delicious hole-in-the-wall Greek place our hostel owner had recommended before heading out to watch our second Mediterranean sunset. It did not disappoint, and we headed to bed.

The next day, Wednesday, was a full day on Santorini, and we started it with breakfast and some shopping and sightseeing in Fira before setting out on the afternoon's planned activity: hiking along the ridge of Santorini from Fira, in more or less the center of the island, to the town of Oia, at the island's northernmost rim. Oia is famous for its sunsets (and especially for its beautiful blue domed churches, the iconic images of Santorini), and we left right after lunch with the plan of having dinner there before taking a bus back. This hike was probably one of the most beautiful I've ever done, with wildflowers in full bloom and many incredible panoramic views of the cliffs and ocean. We took our time and arrived in Oia in the late afternoon.

Once in Oia, we wandered some more, then grabbed dinner right by the ocean before heading out to the very tip of the island to watch the sun go down. This is said to be the most beautiful sunset in the Mediterranean, and honestly I believe it. Many other people had gathered to watch the sunset, and I'm sure Santorini is even more packed in the summer with droves of tourists, but none of that could detract from the evening's beauty.

One more night in Santorini. On Thursday morning we got up to considerably gloomier weather than we'd had the previous few days, but still decided to brave the threat of rain to take a boat trip out to the volcanic crater in the middle of the Santorini/Thira island complex. While there, we hiked to the top of the volcanic rocks with our tour group, saw the crater steaming with sulfur, and marveled at the size and color of the massive volcanic rocks that had once been tossed out of the crust of the earth. It gave us yet another view of this remarkable place, and after visiting a hot spring our boat took us back to the main island, where we took a cable car up to the island, grabbed our stuff, and went to the new port for our ferry. (They also, famously, have donkeys and mules that carry tourists up from the old port to the top of Santorini, but I was rather sad at how ill-treated and dull these animals seemed. I did my share of mule-flirting as I passed by on the walk down the cliff, but would never have been able to bring myself to ride them, forced as they were to descend and ascend the slippery cliff path over and over again in those conditions.)

We had planned on leaving Santorini on the 3:30pm ferry back to Athens, but we hadn't planned for one thing we kept running across in Greece... Greek time. All the buses, ferries, etc., that we took over the course of the week left late, and in this case our ferry left an entire hour and a half late! (It didn't even arrive at the port until an hour after it had been scheduled to leave.) This was just one example of the inefficiency we saw while in Greece, something which also extended to the way the locals ran their shops and businesses and restaurants and other operations. "Get there when you get there" seemed to be a good way to describe Greek time, and the Greek attitude at large, so we punctilious Americans got a good lesson in adopting a more laid-back perspective while on travel. Still, once we got on our way and settled down into reading and watching the Mediterranean waves go by on the ferry, we felt more than content after our days on the Greek islands. Delphi, Athens, and the Greek mainland awaited! More on those adventures in the next post.