Mykonos, Paros, Santorini

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49. Mykonos, Paros, Santorini

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This morning we're definitely ready to head somewhere else. Mykonos was lovely, but I had the feeling of crashing a party long after it had ended. If I had to do it again, I'd have gone to Delos one of the days, traded one of the Mykonos days for Lecce in Italy, or perhaps visited additional islands such as Naxos (which is supposed to be pleasant for hiking). We took the ferry around 9:30. The first leg to Paros is on one of the fast ferries — so fast that you can't go out on the deck because the wind is too strong. We changed in Paros, with a stopover of about an hour. I visited the lovely round church and its museum here. It was interesting to see that they were still painting those inescapable Madonna con Bambinos here — just like the medieval ones elsewhere — in the 19th century. So Greece may have taken a while in subscribing to the update of the Renaissance.

The ferry from Paros was a larger, slower one, taking a few hours to get to Santorini. I got a view of Naxos, on which there is a fairly high mountain. Approaching Santorini on the deck of the ferry is amazing. It's worth taking the slow one so that you can go outside. The island used to be circular, but a volcanic explosion thousands of years ago broke it into pieces. Much of the volcano is submerged. The highest part of the steep wall of the crater rises about 300m straight up out of the sea, facing west. Perched preposterously at the top of this wall is the white town of Fira. From a distance, this looks like a cornice of snow on top of the ridge. The rocks in the cliff have a variety of colors — red, black, grey, brown. To the east of the cliff, the volcano slopes gently down to the sea. It's unbelievable that the Greeks actually considered this to be a good building zone!

The new port is south of the town, and buses ferry you up the switchbacks and along the ridgeline into Fira. Apparently the transportation for getting up from the old port directly below the town had been by mule! My acquaintance from LA called a cheap hostel down at the eastern end of the island and headed over there, but I felt like splashing out and enjoying myself as my trip was coming to an end. So I went to the Kavalari, a hotel which sits insanely on the edge of the cliff in Fira and has a fantastic view.

On Santorini, the lack of tourists is wonderful, because the place is an amazing natural wonder — I could enjoy it without crowds, and I had no expectation of a party scene. Plus, I could get this amazing room on the cliff with no reservation and for only €70. It's definitely one of my favorite hotels anywhere in Europe. From the reception at the cliff edge, I walk down steep stairs to get to the room, which is on the top floor of a small two-room cylindrical building with the typical blue roof. There's a fantastic view from the room looking west. The place is run by a friendly guy who has been here two decades but was from San Francisco, along with his Greek partner.

I rented another of the little four-wheelers, thinking that the roads might be too rough for an unskilled scooter driver. In fact, the roads aren't bad, so a scooter would have been better and faster. I drove out to the village of Ia, which sits above the sea at the far northern edge of the island. It's really lovely, smaller than Fira with beautiful buildings lining narrow lanes. I drove all the way down to the sea where some restaurants sit in a cove, and then back up to the village, which was not uncrowded as a tour bus was parked here at the same time. I talked with some nice Canadians on scooters; tried to follow them back to Fira, but I wasn't fast enough.

As you can imagine in a place at the top of a west-facing cliff on a volcano at sea, the sunset in Fira is a big deal. Everyone seems to come out to watch it. It seems very fitting to have these, the most spectacular sunsets, here at the end of my trip, the farthest south I will go. Even though I had been going south for a longtime, this actually wasn't very far south — still over 35° latitude, well north of Los Angeles. For dinner I tried some places in the Lonely Planet; the first was too crowded and I didn't want to wait, while the second didn't have great food. Oddly, there are a huge number of jewelry shops all around Fira. I wanted to buy a new watch, but I noticed they charged around €40 even for the same crappy cheap watch I had once bought in Thailand for $5. So I couldn't bring myself to get one here. Later I had a drink at the pleasant Tropical, just a short ways down the cliff with another great view. Here I think the Frommers guide writer was entirely smoking crack; most likely he just fell for the (admittedly drop-dead gorgeous) DJ and then constructed an elaborate fantasy about the place. I slept very well tonight, happy to be in this stunning place (although somewhat worried about the whole place tumbling into the sea in an earthquake, or another one of those explosions redrawing the map overnight again!).

Jonathan's Travel Blog :: Europe

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49. Mykonos, Paros, Santorini

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