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19day

2008-10-24

Day 8 – Fast Ferry, Santorini landing

Filed under: Greece 2008 — 19day @ 00:26:43

Today we had to check out (and finally return our towels) of the Hersonissos Maris and we were bussed down to Eulonda to meet our Fast Ferry, named Flying Cat 4. It was sort of like an airplane on the inside, small spaces, narrow aisles, but the seats were much more comfortable. But it still felt crammed. We were assigned seats by our ticket. I sat in the middle seat of the middle section, Laura sat to my right, and Alicia sat in the left hand seat of the right section in the same row. A guy who we had seen from previous excursions sat to my left and seemed to hunch up as far away from me as possible. I can understand that if we were both large and spilling into each other, but he was a very thin guy, so I’m not sure what his problem was, if any.

I know what everyone else’s problem was though… the boat itself. I think we all figured that because it was supposed to move fast, that it would sort of cut through the water, or skim it. Unfortunately, if the scene passing the window was any indication, it just rolled with any wave that passed by, including those made by canoes. I don’t usually consider myself sensitive to motion sickness… I saw Blair Witch and Cloverfield in the theater with no ill effect, I can read in the car, I can play Mario Kart, etc. But this was the real test. But it wasn’t a fair test, since I normally consider myself quite good with motion, I am decidedly less good with people vomiting all around me.

Flying Cat 4

Abandon hope all ye who enter here

People were throwing up (or doing very good impressions of same) all over the boat. The honeymooning couple we continually ran into had the same story, he was motion sick and she helped him to the back area, where apparently people were lying on the ground as if the casualties of a battle. Once everyone started throwing up, she eventually had succum as well due to the smell and sounds. The trip lasted for 2 hours, and did it ever feel like it did. A worker came out of a closet with a stack of barfbags so high that it would have been comical if not for it being tragic. Laura was completely unphased, while Alicia was getting pretty green for a while and reportedly was at the threshold of vomiting halfway through the trip when her gravol kicked in and she recovered. I expected myself to be fine, and I was fine, but during the last half hour I started to develop a headache, and I can’t be sure if it was due to incroaching nausea, or just because my head felt like it. But once the trip was over, it went away.

It was chaos getting the luggage back though, they had us get off the boat and then all of us had to get back on from another location to claim our luggage and then take it off again, using a single gangway. I got screamed at in Greek for apparently stepping across one of the mooring ropes, and was subsequently skipped over many times for the line to get onto the boat. When we finally got our luggage, we were told by Transat people that everyone going to King Thiras hotel was to dump their bags onto a fairly unofficial looking open-back truck. With the feeling that I might not see the luggage again, I tossed it to the guy and we made for our bus.

The Transat person on the bus described Santorini as the most dangerous island, and thought they meant it jokingly, I could beleive it. The roads are the type to inspire the taking out of more life insurance. The road from the port to the region of Fira where our hotel was located was basically back and forth along a cliff, narrow roads, no guardrails, on huge busses making the occasional blind 180 degree turn. But after a while, I rationalized it to myself… the bus drivers here are basically all doing it for the tourists, meaning they do it all the time, and all the bad ones will have already died from misadventure, while the successful ones have bred, so just sit back and wait for the call for King Thiras.

King Thiras is a 2-star hotel, and did feel like a bit of a letdown after the last place, but that was short lived. King Thiras doesn’t do anything wrong, it just has less stuff. Only a small breakfast buffet is included, no pool (at least traditionally, apparently Transat worked out something with a nearby hotel for the use of their pool), smaller rooms, but where Hersonissos Maris was a moderately-grand hotel (for me anyway) trying to seem Greek, King Thiras was a real Greek place that made itself a hotel. Everything seemed more charming, more real, or as frequently described by Alicia and Laura, “cute”.

Santorini Hotel Room

What can I say? I like feet

The room consisted of a true double bed, so Laura and Alicia got to cuddle again. I had a single to be lonely in. The room had a relatively spacious bathroom, but you still couldn’t flush toilet paper. And, according to the Transat rep on the bus, the tap water wasn’t merely non-potable, but was actually salt water. The room had a nice shuttered window, a nicer shuttered balcony door, and a not-so-nice creepy picture hanging on the wall of weird eyes and naked people. There was also a clock tower nearby that announced the passing of time with very loud noises. Our baggage eventually arrived as well, which was handy. Only 6 of us from our Transat bus ended up in this hotel in the end.

We asked the manager for a good, authentic place to eat nearby. I’m not sure if he was just searching for the words or what, but I got the distinct impression he wasn’t pleased talking to people so much You could ask him something, and he would go off behind his desk and spend a bit doing something while you still wondered if he had actually heard you at all. In any case, he eventually advocated a place called The Greeks, which was an easy enough name to remember.

View of Santorini

I can see my hotel from here

Santorini is a beautiful island, too beautiful in fact. You just want to take a photograph of everything, including stuff that I’m sure the locals only just threw out the night before. Santorini is also a physically challenging island as well, since basically the whole place is like a hill. The stairs are everywhere, and as fate had it, our hotel was up high, and all the shops and such were further down. The place greatly added to my sense of dehydration. I mostly drank water to quench the thirst, but every now and then, as it was at The Greeks, I’d get beer, and always the same beer, Mythos, since it is greek domestic. I guess I developed a taste for it, since I kinda liked it near the end. You can get half-liter cans of the stuff for less than a small bottle of coke.

We wondered around shops for a while and then watched the sunset into the water, it was pretty nice, but also pretty expensive. The locals have set up a mini-economy at the edge of the island for those wanting to watch the sunset. I had a 9 dollar milkshake to celebrate the sun setting, and then it got really quite cold with the wind, and we eventually looked for a place to have dinner.

We ended up at a place called Naoussa. The girls ordered the Moussaka which the place touted as the best around, but then again, so did all the other places. While we waited they offered us house wine, and when we inquired of the price, they said it was free of course, which delighted us. I ordered some feta-stuffed pastery appetizers since my stomach was upset again. They gave us bread in the meantime, and we’d learned in Greece that an order of bread is both assumed, and charged for, per person, this time it was 1 euro each. My actual food arrived and I was politely waiting for the Moussaka to arrive, but it seemed to take forever, and I finally started eating my lukewarm dish. They came by with the Moussaka at last saying that there had been some problem, so they brought me another hot round of my appetizers and a jug of their house wine to do well by us. And at the end of the meal, gave us reasonably watered down Ouzo, which made it a lot easier to drink. We were quite pleased with the service by the end of the evening, but the drinks made it all the harder to get up that hill to the hotel. In the restaurant we ran into that Honeymooning couple yet again, and it was sort of getting embarassing at that point. They apparently had seen us walking in the sidestreet before even going inside. And it wouldn’t be the last time we’d see them either.

We slept our first night in the hotel, and it was reasonably comfortable. We watched BBC world news telling us of the continuing global financial meltdown, and with that in mind, we dropped off to sleep.

To be continued

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