We awoke the next morning, or at least I did, porting into Turkey. Specifically Kusadasi, which is actually mainland Turkey. My thoughts about Turkey are very short: tourist trap, annoying merchants with fake American goods, hot, hot heat, getting lost while trying to hike to the top of the city. Turkey was a very interesting experience and I think that I would’ve loved to visit Istanbul. But Kusadasi just wasn’t my cup of tea, and I love good tea.
From Turkey we flew across the sea towards Patmos. We didn’t literally fly, we did about 10 knots or 20 miles per hour. I experienced one of my “cruise ship firsts” while in Patmos. Our cruise ship was far too large to port in the bay at Patmos so we had to anchor outside the seawall and shuttle ourselves on the emergency lifeboats into Patmos. Patmos, for those of you who aren’t familiar with Greece’s thousands of islands, is one the Greece’s smallest inhabited islands. And boy is it a gem. It is also the place where Saint John the Theologian wrote the Apocalypse. An observation about Patmos: my extremely religious and Catholic teammates knew who Saint John was. Everybody else, myself included, had no idea whatsoever. Anyways, Patmos will forever be the first place I ever swam in the Mediterranean Sea. The water was spectacularly clear and the perfect temperature. Not too hot and not too cold. At this point in my vacation I am thinking “I could do this for a living.”
My time at this oasis was brought to an end by the echoing of our cruise ship’s fog horn off the hills. “From one oasis to another,” I remember thinking to myself. Tomorrow we port in Crete and then we’re on to the crown jewel of the cruise: Santorini.
The following morning I watched the sunrise as we ported in Crete, Greece’s largest island. My time in Crete was wisely spent exploring Europe’s earliest civilization. The Minoan civilization’s crown jewel: the Palace of Knossos. This palace is most famous for the legend of the labyrinth. For those of you who want to learn more about this, look it up on Wikipedia. I, for one, am not the right person to be describing such a historically relevant myth. I have to say that I had goose-bumps when I thought about the fact that I was walking on stone that was laid during the Bronze Period (3200-600 BCE).
After my brain had exploded and I had just began to piece it back together, we dropped anchor in Santorini. My brain exploded and melted all over again. Santorini is THE spot to visit in the Mediterranean. Nothing else even compares. Again, like we did in Patmos, we had to take little boats into the harbor. However, this time it wasn’t because the harbor was to shallow. It was because there wasn’t a harbor at all. The island of Santorini used to be one giant piece of land. But, a long time ago, don’t ask me specifically when, there was a volcanic eruption and part of the island sank into the sea. Now, in the year 2011, the capital city Fira sits atop a giant cliff looking out over the sunken volcanic caldera.
I took more pictures in Santorini than anywhere else in Greece. I legitimately took roughly 1,000 pictures over the course of our six hour stay. I was simply mesmerized.
Because Fira, the capital city of Santorini, sits atop a cliff there are three ways to get there:
Option one: you can take the gondola which will get you to the top in under two minutes. Just pay the reasonable fee of four Euro each way. Here is the catch: everybody chooses this option. So your 2 minute ride can turn into a 20 minute wait in line plus a two minute ride. Now I’m no math major but I think that adds up to 22 minutes, not 2.
Option two: you can ride donkeys, yes donkeys, up the almost vertical trail that leads to the top. This will get you to the top in approximately 20 to 30 minutes. All you have to do is pay the reasonable fee of 3 Euro. Here is the catch: once you hop on your donkey, you’re at its mercy. It is going to do whatever it wishes and you can’t do a thing about it. And it gets better: it only understands Greek. So you can yell and curse all you want in English, Spanish, Portuguese, but the donkey will keep on doing what it was doing. Good luck with that one.
Option three: you can walk. You can walk for free up the nearly vertical, donkey crap covered, sweltering hot path and get there in about 20 minutes, 15 if you speed walk it. Do I really need to tell you which option we, broke college athletes, chose?
Fifteen minutes later, three of my teammates and I stood atop the cliff looking out over the caldera, at our cruise ship anchored in the deep blue water, at the barren and desolate landscape of the lone island in the middle of the caldera covered in volcanic ash and soot. We had made it.
In all honesty it wasn’t that hard of a climb. Although it was an intense, almost 45 degree incline, it wasn’t too hard. What made the climb slightly difficult was the sun. We were on a cliff face with no trees to shade our bodies, unprotected against the beating sun. But when we reached the top and stared down at our accomplishment, it made all the sweat worth it. When were we ever going to be here again? Why wouldn’t we make the trek up a cliff face? We’re college students, we love taking risks!
For the next three or so hours my teammates and I walked all over Fira. We took countless photographs, shot hours of video, climbed a few walls, and stood on top of a couple rooftops. One time we were chased off a roof by a screaming, rather large Greek man but other than that encounter we pretty much did as we pleased. Santorini truly made the trip for a lot of my teammates.
By the time most of us had begun to lose the memory of how we got up to Fira, it was time to go back down. I have to say that nearly every single one of my teammates preferred the climb up over the scramble down. I chose the word scramble on purpose because it literally was a scramble back down the path. The terrain was so steep that most of us gave in and let gravity push us down. It was impossible to walk down without having gravity force you to jog for a few seconds.
We sailed away from Santorini with sore legs, but as we watched the sunset on the beautiful blue buildings, it was all worth it. We literally sailed into the sunset when we left Santorini. Most of us couldn’t believe that we still had five more days left in Greece. Our trip felt like it was over when in reality we were just beginning.
To be continued...
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