Finally I am blogging: Santorini

I think I have found a place where I can find solace, the place where I can find an escape when I need some peace and time to rejuvenate myself.

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.

We went to see the old castle on one of the evenings which gives amazing sunset views from the cliff and rest of the free time strolled around the streets, eating-drinking all the time! You can go into Fira town if fancy trying some local greek food and seeing the places where the locals live but we didn't bother going into Fira really as we wanted to spend most of our time in Oia.

Our 4 days break flew with a blink of an eye and felt really short.

Attaching some Santorini pictures here in case my poor quality blog writing has not caught your fancy yet to make you want to visit this place definitely once in a lifetime!