Santorini,
the place with the picturesque views of white backdrops on the island, Volcano
mountains and beautiful Aegean sea! It’s a place from those fairytale
movies
– so serene, calming and exceptionally beautiful.
There are certain areas that you can stay in Santorini
like Fira, Kamari but I would always recommend Oia (Greeks pronounce it as Eia
with E sound and not O!! We got told off couple of times by the locals before we
got the pronunciation right!)
Kamari is within 1- 2kms of Thira
airport with plenty of hotel options which are good value. Fira is another
place with reasonably priced hotel options and is like a typical
Greek town in between Oia and Kamari, 20-25 min taxi drive depending on the
traffic as there are single roads with 2 way traffic on the whole island.
Oia
takes about 40 min taxi ride from the airport. Taxis are
cheaper in Greece
- it cost us EUR40 one side between the airport to our hotel in Oia (no
pre-booking is required as plenty of taxes are available at the aiport
and we booked the same taxi driver for picking us up for ride back to
the airport). Otherwise
local buses are a way beyond cheaper option running on a regular 15-20
minute intervals
and cost like EUR 1.50 for each ride and the tickets can be bought on
the buses (though no direct bus to Oia from the airport so 2 bus changes are required).
Hotels
can get super expensive in Oia, the most preferred
tourist location during the peak season which is between April till
August. After that the tourism starts dying down on the island and by
October-end, the island gets pretty
much shut down. As the locals said, if you see any tourist here after
October,
it will be Chinese as they visit any time of the year (haha..!!).
If you can manage, I would totally suggest visiting Santorini
during the months of September or October first part. Weather is still between
mid twenties during the afternoons with light breeze in the evenings and the hotels
become affordable in Oia!!
We (I and my friend) landed up in Santorini at the break of dawn (5AM after
over night flight from London)
and at the hotel door by 6AM but since reception was supposed to open at 8.30am (off peak season timings),
we had to wait outside sitting on the open terrace. That was a big
bummer after no sleep and
running around airports to catch our connecting flights etc (we had
almost missed our connecting flight from Athens to Santorini as the
flight from London was delayed). We were
absolutely knackered and all we wanted do is to get some sleep. Hey
ho…..but the advantage we had of gettiing there early was watching the
sunrise over Aegean, that was absolutely SPECTACULAR!!. Had we been given a room, I would have straight gone to bed and
missed the beautiful sunrise sight!! Another good thing that happened was when we
arrived at the hotel, along with us there was a couple from Buenes Aires (Adriana & Horacio)
and a mother-son duo (Terry & Kyle) from Atlanta
who had arrived at the same time.
So
what all bunch of tired people with no rooms or place to sleep at 6AM would have done
- yes, we all started chatting up and by the time reception opened, we
found some
really good friends to talk to or share a glass of wine in the evenings during our trip time in Santorini! Infact
we are going to see the couple from Buenes Aires again in December
during our upcoming trip to South America, how cool is that, eh!!!
Since the hotel was completely booked and the check-in time is 3PM,
they couldn’t allocate us rooms. So we all had some breakfast, the other
guys changed and headed for some stroll. I decided I will swim a bit and
sleep on the sun-beds along the swimming pool! But neither I swam (the
water in
the pool was cold) nor did I fall asleep (the sun-beds were too hard).
So we decided to go for
a stroll too and have lunch along the area which has all the nice
restaurants.
Every
corner of the street was buzzing, weather was warm and every sight of
Aegean from any corner
was mesmerising. For next 3 days, our routine was to get up late, sit on
our
private terrace, enjoy breakfast with Oia's white
backdrop and Aegean views (another perk of staying in Oia is that the
hotels' staff
serve you breakfast on your private terraces or rooms!), spend sometime in our jacuzzi on the terrace, eat-drink in lovely restaurants, go for strolls...mmm!
One of the days we did 6 hours sunset cruise which
started at 1.30pm and finished by 7.30pm. Totally recommend the cruise as they
sail around the sea taking you to the hot water springs where you can go for a swim and show different mountain cliffs, the red beach, the white beach etc and also stop sometime for snorkelling. The sunset sight is totally AMAZING. The greek food served on the cruise was awesome with so many vegetarian varieties available!
We met some really lovely people on the cruise - a family from NewYork, group of 2 couples from San Francisco and a beautiful girl from Miami (whom we are going to see again in London in April!).
Another
day we did a winery trip to Domaine Sigalas which was half
an hour walk from our hotel in Oia on the other side of the hill. There are different wine tasting menus in the winery to chose from (set of
3,/5/7/13 wines). All wines are tasty and so dirt cheap (water bottle
costs more then a gass of wine here!) . There are vineyards
behind the winery if you want to go for a walk. Surprisngly the amount of wine produced in this winery get only 5-7% of
its grapes supply from the vineyards in the backyard, rest come from all parts of Greece.
