Santorini bus tour in parts - Pyrgos monastery, a kitten and Kamari beach

The previous post on this series is here..

After our lunch, ocean fun and ice cream at Perissa, we were back in the bus climbing to the top of the hill on this side of Santorini to go to the Monastery.. a few hundred years old, this place had reclusive monks who did not want to contact outside world for some time. They even buried their dead inside is what our guide told us.

 They did open up and have a store near the outside chapel eventually. The whole place was interesting and quiet. Then it got pretty windy and we were told not to have high hopes for later in the evening, given rain clouds were rolling in. 

We saw everyone go kiss the same objects and pictures.. couldn't have been good during COVID times! The small chapel was really beautiful. 

While we were being told that, a kitten walked out of nowhere and decided to sit on my lap. I love animals. They seem to love me too.. however god has played a cruel trick. I am almost allergic to all cats. Initially the family panicked. They did not want me sick before the last stop. A few people tried to lure it away, but no! The kitten just sat on my lap for a good 10 minutes. Finally the little one grabbed it and placed it on the floor and we had to leave. Apparently six kittens were just born a few weeks back in the Monastery. This was one of those six. Did have watery eyes for a few minutes later in the night, but didn't get sick as everyone expected. 

We got amazing views of the Perissa beach from the Monastery.

The little one was still mesmerized by the cat...

Then we drove down to Kamari beach area. Guess this tour has a tie up with some wine makers in Santorini. So we stopped at a rest area near the black beach, and were offered three wines or Cherry juice. Skipped it and ate the crackers. For some strange reason we were hungry. We walked to the beach across the street and took pictures. This beach was full of pebbles but there were no people on this side as far as the eye could see! There were pistachio trees here other than olive trees in this area.. that was a change!

Caught the little one in one of her moments..

We did get to see a real donkey on the way to this place..Apparently there was a time when every house had a donkey to haul things up and down the hillsides of this island !!

A video clip of this leg of the bus tour! 

After this short break, we were off to to go up and around all the way to Oia.. the last stop and grand finale for the tour!

A Bus tour in Parts - Emporio and Perissa Black sand beach

The previous post in this series is here..

After the ruins our next stop was the largest village in the middle of Santorini island called Emporio. It included a small castle, beautiful small walkways (that reminded me of the Galli's of Varanasi) and a village center with a rebuilt Church.

This all blue and white combination gave us the best family pictures on this trip.. 

we had a good laugh over this sign..there was a lot of potential at this place.. but a lot of hard work to be done.. given my history of house remodeling projects, the family kept mocking me for a good 10 minutes..

fortunately we arrived at the next photo spot 

The whole place seemed to be desolate with no inhabitants (a few of these old places are now Airbnb's apparently) but we did not see a single resident in that walk. 

After touring the old Emporio area, we walked back down and headed to Perissa. Saw this "cheese" church on the way down!

There is a beautiful black sand beach here and a lot of eating places around the beach. If you eat in a restaurant, they let you use the beach umbrellas for free (in some cases 10 Euros).

We observed that most of the folks who were waiters and ushers in these restaurants were Syrian. There is some Syria Greek connection we don't know about. These folks were extremely nice and kept making jokes and made us laugh as we tried to decide our lunch location..

it was a bad idea to go into the water after a heavy lunch.. but went into the water with the kids for a good 30 minutes. That was part of the tour and the break. Almost everyone in our group had someone from the family go into the water as the rest of the party sat on the reclining chairs and were taking photos of their feet while sipping drinks!

Jr. ventured into the water with me (as did the little one for some time) and took pics of me doing yoga poses on rocks. One of these is very slippery and I got my legs cut up in a few places.. 

It was a pleasant afternoon, thanks to the clouds!

Post water, we had some yummy ice cream and we drove off to our next stop! 

 

We said bye to Aquarius and started back on the bus tour to the next stop..

saw more churches and blue domed houses on the way..

A short video of this segment of the trip..

The next stop was a drive up the hill to the tallest point on the other side of the island with a lot of weird history!

The best way to begin a new year!

Wishing everyone a wonderful 2024!!

Started the year with an allergy attack 30 minutes before midnight and cheered in the new year with a stuffy nose and watery eyes.. my friends made up for this small inconvenience!

It was lights out after coming home. 

The only cure I have for most illenesses these days in hot yoga! So it was good to start the year with Yoga and this has become a routine.

This is before class..

and after class..

You always leave the room wiped out, but happy.. "feeling like a million bucks!".. or after 13 years, adjusted for inflation "feeling like 2.3 million bucks!" 

Before walking into class we all get to pick an Angel card for the year. The idea is to internalize that and see if you can change your behavior.. this years card was "Light" (my wife got Love).. so we are now love and light!.. Hopefully we don't go light on love! See, even an angel card teaches you to put your wife first! 

2023 was not great, but it done. My goal for Yoga attendance is to do at least 200 classes a year which is about 4 times a week given all my travel schedules. 2023 was 218 classes. 

Going to stay more positive in 2024! Blogging defiintely helps me be more positive! 

Wishing you all a healthy 2024!

The 60 day Winter challenge in on at BYSJ! So if you want to challenge yourself this year, please go ahead! Will cheer for you all the way!

A bus tour in parts - Akrotiri : Caldera rim view, red sand beach and historic site

The previous post on this series is here..

On our second day in Santorini, we had booked an all day tour of the island. If you have only one day in Santorini, just do this tour. Apparently this is not news. There are cruise ships that dock in Santorini. The tourists get off the ship and go straight to this bus tour.. almost a 1000+ people. Puts a huge surge in the population at breakfast time as some of them try to grab food before getting on the bus.. (same thing happens when you get dropped off!). 

So to beat that, we went for an early breakfast and waited for the bus to pick us up. They were on time and off we went. Viator really rocked this tour! Recommend you book this well in advance like we(San) did! She got 110/100 for booking this!!

My own Blue Angels.. they all looked so pretty and happy that I was glad to be at their bidding for anything they asked for..

We started with a ride along the rim to see the caldera to the ancient city of Akrotiri.

This is one of my best clicks of San on this entire trip.. so including it in the blog as it will get printed as part of the blog book.

There were two options given the time we stopped there:

a. walk half a mile to the red sand beach and walk back (part of the path to the beach had caved in and was dangerous) 

b. walk right out of the bus stop and see the excacation site of what was probably Atlantis before the volcano covered it. 

We decided to go to the beach with half the group. The other half of the bus went to the site. There is also a nice cafeteria outside the site and good restrooms. 

It was already hot and bright. So me and Jr. bought blue sunglasses to match everything else..

we learned that all buildings had to be blue and white in Santorini or they are fined!

Spent 15 minutes in the beach which was really nice.

I went from "not getting the memo" to the Bluest guy from head to toe over the two days!

this is the caved in section of the walk.. you have to cross this to go to the beach. if you are not able bodied, don't risk it and block the rest of the folks trying to make it into the beach below and back! 

Even the locals were proud of my blue at this point!

A pretty girl I saw on the beach..

Then we walked back. We still had 30 minutes. So I decided to make a run for it and also see the excavation site while the rest of them walked back. 

The run wearing wet Bata chappals paid off. Rushed to get tickets and walked through the entire site while clicking pictures of the boards and the site and made it back to the bus with 1 minute to spare. The rest of the folks were giving me the look, but once I explained that I saw both.. they were impressed!

The excavation site deserves a post in itself, but given that my blog backlog is growing.. have added a slide show of this massive complex. This is mind blowing. 2 storied buildings which date back 8000 years ago. Someone is doing something wrong in our history books.

Look at the pictures and you will start wondering why our timelines are messed up!

A video clip of this segment of the trip..

After this we were off to our next stop.. this was a 10 hour thing which ended up being much longer including the pickup and drop off. .  

As the day went by it just got better and better..

Santorini - A blue and white beauty!

The previous post on this series is here..

We used Agean airlines to go from Athens to Santorini first flight out. Given that Syntagma square was a good 40 minutes away even without traffic, we woke up real early to get a pre booked Uber in Athens and made it to the airport on time.

Santorini has a small airport that flies to Athens and other islands on small planes. It is an interesting island in a lot of ways. At one point it was considered as a possible candidate for the last city of Atlantis !

We had booked an Airbnb in Fira which was literally 10 minute drive from the airport. Our landlady had arranged a car for us and she greeted us at the place. It was small, incredibly cute and a walk down the slope across the McDonalds on the one main road in Fira. 

We put our travel bags down and wandered around the street a bit. There is a nice bakery right next to the McDonalds which had amazing pastries and juices, not to mention hot cocoa. We ate a brunch at one of the shops on the main street right next to the donkey statue in the main square. 

Then we had to make our way down the hill to the Caldera walk and boat ride tour.. again prebooked through Viator! There were three options to go down. Climb down ~700 steps , go on a donkey ride down or take a cable car. We took the cable car option.  Walking or donkey would have meant smelling donkey poop all the way down. So we got two way tickets for the cable car.  

Also the family had told me to bring something blue and white to wear. However my idea of blue was not Santorini or Greece blue! It was navy blue. When I came out ready to go, everyone was giving me the "what is wrong with this guy?" look! So to stop looking like a guy who didn't understand basic colors, we shopped for a linen shirt right outside the cable car entrance. This is the costliest shirt I have purchased to date in my life's shirt purchasing history. At 30 USD, this shirt actually ended up being a great wardrobe addition. It is light and seems to breathe well.. and also dries fast! I did not know all this at the time and was only experiencing sticker shock. For a guy who shops exclusively in Sri Kumaran in Mylapore or wears Bikram Yoga 60 day challenge T-shirts which were all earned the hard way.. this was an interesting experience! 

Did I mention the 30 dollar shorts that was also bought to match greek colors? 

Moving on... now that we were all Santorini ready, we went down and had to wait a good hour before our boat showed up. There is not much to do once you go down the cable car. Most of the eating places are closed. There are gelato shops. So we had some and took pictures.

Once the boat showed up, we were off to see the Caldera. Hiked that mile and a half to the top wearing bata chappals! Tip for you.. wear hiking shoes for the hike but take your sandals for the boat ride!  The hike was nice and pleasant. The guide told us all about the Caldera called George that erupted and blew a big hole in the middle of Santorini. We got to stick our hands into a few vents which were still very hot and fuming!

That is the tallest point.. a small pillar from which you get a 360 degree view!

Then came the kicker. We were told at pre booking that novice swimmers would still be able to go swim in the volcanic waters as part of this tour and everyone will be given floating noodles. When it was time to do that though, the guide said we had to jump off the boat and also the water was 50 feet deep and we had to be decent swimmers to go the distance. The boat was not allowed to get too close to the sulfur brown waters per some regulation! So San and me stayed on the boat and watched the experts (our kids included) go to the volcanic water for the swim like monkeys that have just tasted ginger (something got lost in that translation from Tamil to English on that one). You can see it all in the video!

The water outisde was 14 C and the sulfur water was only 20 C.. warm, not exactly hot. It was supposed to be medicinal. When the kids came back they cursed us for sending them there. The smell was bad, it was cold and not easy to breathe in that smell. "What were you thinking?".. we said our plan was for all of us to go.. but we were not expert swimmers! In any case, they forgave us after a few minutes knowing they did something we couldn't and that we actually wanted to do it!

We have to rectify this swimming situation. Time for me and the missus to start taking some joint swimming lessons till we can swim in open water. We are missing out one too many times..

Once the boat got back,we waited again and got back on the cable car and made our way up. 

Did laundry and had the pleasure of drying clothes outside...The place is windy and clothes dry in a jiffy.. so washers and no dryers!  Hadn't done that in a while! 

It was late evening and beleive it or not, there are vegetarian options a plenty in Santorini compared to Athens! The wife and kids got some veggie mediteranean bowls and I went back to the airbnb and made Maggi noodles for dinner.. added some nice pastries to go with that from the bakery! 

We were all talking about how beautiful the slopes and buildings were.. inspite of it all being blue and white! It was very different from anything we had seen in recent past..

A video highlight of our first day in Santorini! 

Given we had woken up early, we slept. early.

The next day was going to be the highlight of the entire trip. An all day tour of Santorini island from 7AM to 9PM with 7 stops! 

That has to be broken into a lot of little blog posts..