Summing up Greece

I'm going to try real hard to sum up, briefly (for a change), the last week-and-a-half or so that I was hopping around the Greek islands with Dianna. Last I wrote, I was on the volcanic island of Nisyros, after camping for 6 days there. We planned next to go to Santorini, partly to see it and partly because we had to go there first anyway, in order to get to another island that we were more interested in, Milos.

Our plans got changed, however, due to another ferry snafu (the first one was when we tried to go from Patmos to Ikaria, but the connecting ferry to Samos was cancelled due to high winds, so instead we started heading south). We caught a ferry from Nisyros to Kos, where we were supposed to catch the next ferry to Santorini an hour later. But we missed that boat by a hair because of two separate delays: first because of high winds that slowed the ship down, and then at the port apparently the anchor got hung up somehow and delayed us another fifteen minutes. We could actually see the boat we were supposed to be on to Santorini, from the ferry that we were still on, and we watched it sail away, with a tear or two in our eyes.

So, we bought a ticket for a ferry leaving the next morning from Kos to Rhodes instead, where Dianna had a good friend. We spent that night at a hotel on Kos and then caught the ferry at 5 am, arriving at Rhodes a few hours later. There we spent just one night at a scruffy, quirky hotel in an interesting part of old town, and then another at Dianna's friend's house. But we had three full days to explore (although, the first day we spent sleeping much of it, after getting up at four o'clock that morning). In short, we weren't too impressed by Rhodes. The one good thing about it was that we were there well outside of tourist season, and the place was fairly empty. The old town of Rhodes was beautiful, but scarred simply by tourist shops lining every inch of it. We did find a couple of nice beaches to hang out on, but everywhere you went you felt the presence of the hoards of tourists that descend on it every summer.

From Rhodes we ended up taking a ferry back to Santorini, which retraced our steps first to Kos. But we ran into yet another snafu when our boat didn't arrive, and we ended up being shuffled onto another one that was also going to Santorini. But it was the slow boat going to every little island along the way, and would be arriving seven hours later, at seven in the morning instead of around midnight. We actually didn't find this out until we were already on the ferry. We were pretty annoyed, to say the least, at being stuck in a position where we had to spend the night unexpectedly sleeping on a ferry. So, we went to the reception desk there and demanded that they give us a cabin for the night for free, since it was their fault that the boat we were supposed to be on didn't show up at all (apparently it just broke down and never started the trip). And to our surpise, with a little pushing they relented and gave us the keys to a cabin.

We arrived on Santorini the next morning, and spent only one day there. Santorini was also extremely touristy, but I'd wanted to see it because I had been there once before, when I traveled Europe at the age of 18. And unlike Rhodes, there was reason for the crowds, as it was exquisitely beautiful. I made the most of the one day we had, rented a moped and went all over the island taking pictures (there's a link somewhere below, if you want to check them out).

The next morning we caught a ferry over to the nearby island of Milos. The weather forecast said it was supposed to rain. But fortunately it was wrong and we had two days of brilliant sunshine to explore the deserted island and its beautiful beaches. Finally we caught a ferry to the island of Serifos, and the bad weather hit along the way. We stayed just one night there, and spent the evening huddled in a tavern, playing scrabble and drinking wine. The next day I tried to go on a bike ride, but had to turn back because it started pouring down rain hard. Then Dianna and I hopped on another ferry back to Athens. I spent two nights and one day there doing last minute packing, etc., hopped on my flight to Cairo yesterday, and here I am...