The Honeymoon Adventure Part 2: Sunset Selfies
It took a few connections to get from Kayseri, in the middle of Turkey, to the island of Santorini, so we had time to do a little reading about where we were going.
Santorini as we see it today is basically the aftermath of a collapsed volcano that erupted with great force [7] about 3500 years ago, possibly ending a civilization 45 miles to the south in Crete, but also creating some very cool geographic features that we get to enjoy today. The island has high, steep cliffs that sharply drop into the Aegean Sea, and the middle of the volcano structure can still be seen popping out of the ocean from the remaining eastern semi-circle where all the people live. We booked a spot at the top of the crescent shape in a town called Oia, pronounced EEE-a. The nicest hotels were built on the inward facing cliffs with dug-out caves for rooms, which have amazing views, but all the beaches are on the backside of the island that gently slopes into the sea. At some point the government had mandated that all the houses need to be white, and the resulting contrast with the blue church domes made the spot great to photograph.
[7] this was one of the largest volcanic events that we know of, ejecting 23 cubic miles of earth.
We arrived in Oia to find it absolutely packed. It seemed to us that all the tourists from Turkey had just shifted their target southwest, and landed in Greece instead! [8]
[8] one of our cab drivers in Turkey had told us that all the Russians that normally visit were in Greece now, due to Russia cancelling travel visas to Turkey after the fighter plane incident.
And all of them were taking pictures. All the time. Everywhere.
This was by far the #1 activity to do, and we were constantly ducking, dodging, going around, or bumping into people taking pictures of the view, and yes, taking selfies.
We also quickly discovered that Santorini was expensive. We ended up staying in three different spots over five nights trying to keep a reasonable rate, but still couldn’t believe how much more it cost than Turkey, or San Francisco for that matter.
The food was good though, and we ate a ton of it. The best food we had ended up being the least expensive. TripAdvisor led us to a souvlaki stand that was so good we ate there multiple times.
The #2 activity to do in Santorini is watch the sun set from Oia. (And take pictures of it!) People in Santorini take the sunset very seriously, and if you can see it from your hotel or restaurant you make that the leede of all your marketing materials.
If you are an unsuspecting tourist who arrived that day, you start to sense the mass migration to the top of the island around 5 or 6 PM (assuming a nice summertime sunset of 8:30 PM or so.) People start rushing by you, and all the cars, buses, and even awkward middle age folks on ATVs hop on the road, only going one direction. The locals look afraid, and the tourists look anxious. Many cruises only have a one day stop in Santorini, which gives only one chance to see this sunset spectacle, and when people start panic-walking north three hours before your almanac says the sun is supposed to set, you start wondering what you’re missing.
We were staying in Oia, so if you can’t beat ’em, join ‘em! We made friends with the head server at the restaurant where we were staying, got a primo view of the sunset, and clapped and cried when it finally dipped below the horizon.
After having so much fun on a dirt bike in Turkey, we quickly tried to rent a scooter to gain some freedom from the expensive and slow transit options on the island. There is only one road connecting the northern city Oia with the larger cruise-ship port city Fira, and we found bus service unpredictable. There were a handful of cabs, but nothing close to enough to support the throngs of tourists trying to see the island. So lots of people end up renting ATVs and then drive them cripplingly slow on this one road, creating the problem they tried to avoid in the first place.
What I didn’t realize is that all these idiots on ATVs were smart enough to get a scam “International Driving Permit” by mailing AAA $20 and a sheet of paper with your name on it. (Or they were EU citizens, but that was less maddening.) And to my bewilderment, every scooter shop in Oia turned me down without that bullshit AAA printout!
Bribes, prayers, flattery, pictures of me riding Vicky back in SF, nothing worked. I was shocked that I couldn’t get my way, and dismayed at my own reaction to feeling like I deserved to drive in this country so much. I wanted to explore, and through the dumb luck of being born in the USA at the right time, I had the 20 euros that it takes to rent one, and I was mad that nobody would let me. I felt stifled in paradise, and I started relating my craving to burn carbon for my own enjoyment to the correlation of wealth to meat consumption, of which I continue to fail at curbing myself, which led to dismay about the future of humanity and sustainability.
I had plenty of time to wallow in my thoughts as we decided to get back at the full buses, non-existent cabs, and law-abiding scooter rental companies by just WALKING to Fira. That will show them!
It turned out to be a spectacular idea, and I would recommend the hike to anyone that visits. Just bring along a trash bag, because there are zero trash cans along the way (of course) and in my fragile state of mind I felt compelled to clean up all the litter we saw, and we filled up a grocery bag by the time got to Fira.
This “main” city was dreadful, with fast food chains, even more people, and tchotchki vendors crammed into every space they could fit. We were assaulted from every angle, and I am usually able to respond to persistent merchants with a friendly smile, but I lost my composure with the scooter rental places. I knew it wasn’t their fault, so I screamed about the agreement that AAA has fashioned with the US State Department where they can scam people out of money without providing literally any service at all, and basically yelled at them how much I hate AAA.
Luckily for me, people who work on Santorini are accustomed to deranged tourists, and one gentleman understood my tirade, and calmly let me know he was willing to work out a deal! We negotiated a bit and I ended up with a scooter after all! This was very welcome news, as the 6+ mile hike was fun, but we did not want to repeat it in reverse.
The scooter came in handy when moving between our hotels. At this point we were two weeks in, and happy about our choice to only take one small day pack, and one carry-on sized backpack for the two of us. The backpack we settled on, the Tortuga Travel Backpack V2 really did work as advertised, and allow us to sneak a heavy over-stuffed bag onto every plane [9]. And since trying to find a cab would have been very annoying in walker-centric Oia, the ability to transfer all our possessions on a scooter was great. (I also wanted to see if we could do it.) Another benefit to travelling with less than a carry-on each, is that it makes souvenir decisions so much easier. I’m a general optimist, and can find unique, interesting, and I-need-it features in the most mundane objects. Over the course of our trip I saw 100 year old hand woven rugs, brass naval objects, rare Vespa parts, and hundreds other things I really wanted to buy. But I didn’t have room for anything so was able to say no to it all without my usual crying, shoving my hands in my pockets and pouting at Erin. No extra room was a blessing.
[9] Every airline had a limit for carry-on weight, but our main bag was only weighed once, by Turkish Airlines in the Kayseri airport, and it was overweight. Erin and I disagree on whose charming smile got us out of it, but they let us take it anyway.
A pair of generally awesome people from San Francisco that we know very well happened to be sailing through the Greek Islands during this time period, and they took a day out of their trip to come see Santorini, and us!
Their sailboat was docked at Ios avoiding the 30 mph winds on the Aegean that day. Having a few days under our belt, we considered ourselves experts, and as soon as their ferry arrived we took them to get a souvlaki, and to watch the sun set!
They recommended that we check out some of the other islands, as they offered similarly stunning views, and were not overflowing with tourists and their associated remora.
We actually heard this a lot in Santorini. All of the service staff that we asked lived elsewhere (mostly Athens) and only came to Santorini during the summer high season. Some left their family at home, some brought them along, but none of them could figure out why Santorini was the only island in Greece foreigners had ever heard of. Most of them said the Cyclades have about 60 islands worth visiting, and they would go to just about all of them before Santorini. But that’s where the money is, so they come and put up with the traffic, constant photography, and high cost of living. A few of them also felt comfortable enough to share their racist views on the increasing number of Chinese tourists. We hadn’t noticed more Chinese selfie takers than what we would have thought is normal, but our ‘normal’ is based on the large number of Chinese friends and co-workers we have back home. Our minds now being aware of this bias, we did notice a half-dozen Chinese wedding photo shoots taking place on the cliff-sides. They were hard to miss, since they also usually had videographers and boom microphone holders following them around too! As Biggie said though, mo money mo problems. I think the Greeks would be wise to find the Chinese version of TripAdvisor and hope that it’s as easy to “growth-hack” ;) [10]
[10] see https://www.google.com/search?q=buy%20fake%20reviews%20tripadvisor
We spent a lot of time on Santorini relaxing, and were embarrassed that we didn’t end up visiting any of the beaches, ruins, or vineyards. So we took an excursion down to Amoudi Bay, which people without scooters usually do on a donkey. It took us 5 minutes but we felt like we accomplished something.
By this time our Athens to Vietnam flight was a few days away, so we decided to head to Athens a day before we needed to to check out the city. I wasn’t expecting every flight leaving Santorini at a decent time to be full, which they were, so we booked a high-speed ferry instead. This wave-piercing monster machine was super cool, and able to cut through 10 foot seas with out spilling a cup of tea. I spent most of the trip studying the MEANS OF ESCAPE PLAN on the bulkhead, as they included the schematics of the ferry that showed where all the cool bits were (the engines were below the water line in the hulls!)
Athens was awesome…for the day were were there. There were also tons of tourists, but there was more area for them to spread out! There was ancient looking stuff everywhere, and the food was fantastic and insanely cheap. I got a souvlaki for €2! And it was amazing!
Having a Greek telephone number was very useful for Athens, as we just started calling tour guides and seeing if anyone was able to do a custom one-day tour of the Acropolis and anything else cool the next day. We ended up finding a great guide who met us first thing in the morning at the new Acropolis Museum.
Our tour guide was fantastic, but our gain was definitely Greece’s loss. Marta was a well educated full-on archaeologist, who used to work for the Greek government on sites of national importance. But one day she didn’t receive a pay check, and after a few months (!) of that nonsense she had to make the tough call to give up her dream job, and enter the tourism industry.
She was proud of her heritage, and pointed out which of the preservation efforts were fully funded by the Greek government, without the help of the EU. I did my best to respectfully pester her non-stop with questions for the duration of our time together. I hope she enjoyed our time together as much as I did!
One more €2 souvlaki and we hit the sack, to get ready for our big flight the next day!
We bought our Athens --> Ho Chi Minh City flight about a month earlier, as we figured it would be one of the more expensive ones. At the time we looked, the route was best served by two of the Gulf carriers, Ethiad and Emirates. We had never flown either, and picked Emirates because the layover times seemed better. Our Dubai lay-over was 9:35 PM to 9:30 AM the next morning. I had already reserved a hotel when I found out (on the flyertalk forums) about an Emirates program, Dubai Connect, where you get a free hotel stay right next to the airport if your layover was long enough, and you paid enough for your tickets. I checked my reservation, and sure enough there was a little button on the bottom that said “Book Dubai Connect”. Well jolly good on them to tell me what the hell it meant! So we took advantage of it and ended up sleeping in an extremely dingy hotel that night, but didn’t pay any extra for it.
I was very interested in the route we would take, since it looked like the quickest way from Athens to Dubai would be over Syria. Since MH17 was shot down in unrestricted airspace (over a conflict zone) by a Russian missile, I was a little nervous about flying over war zones. Luckily we burned extra fuel and avoided Syria and Iraq all together, and flew over Turkish, and then Iranian airspace on our way into the Persian Gulf, and landed quite safely.
The Dubai airport is about the size of Rhode Island, and it took us something like an hour to reach the free airport shuttle. We had to pass through immigration, where I previously read online they scan your retina. I tried to opt out of this, but in the literally ½ second I glanced at the random post behind the immigration officials head, they were able to capture it from four feet away! I’m all talk anyway, but I was blown away when the lady told me she already got my retina image. Scary tech. I also decided to get a SIM card for the 12 hours we were there, and they needed my fingerprint for that. So if the UAE ever wanted to open up a Wells Fargo savings account in my name, I’m sure they could.
Not all was lost, as in the lobby of the free hotel there was a company offering 2-hour driving tours to all the major attractions! They had a tour leaving at midnight and we signed up. From the time our plane landed, until we got to our Emirates economy class hotel room, was 2 hours. We washed our faces, changed shirts and hopped on the tour bus.
Even at 1 AM, Dubai felt hot and humid. Our tour guide had memorized the room counts of all the grand hotels we were passing, which were all really large numbers. He also dropped some knowledge on the local Emirati, how only 10% of the folks in the UAE are actually citizens, and they get free housing and nice government jobs if they want them. Someone like him could only expect to get citizenship by marrying a UAE women…but the rub is that it’s illegal for a UAE woman to marry a foreigner. He wasn’t hopeful.
When we visited the breakwater crescent of the famous Palm islands, they were still doing construction in the middle of the night. I assume they were engaged in the constant battle of keeping the thing in existence. Our driver said the gulf is 30–40 feet deep that far from the shore, and along the outside edge that we were driving on, they placed 5.5 million cubic meters of large rocks into interlocking positions, protecting the actual land that is pretty much made of sand.
We made it back to our hotel and got a few hours of sleep. Early the next morning we went back to the airport, hiked the 5 miles through the enormous air conditioned bio-domes and made it to our 777–300ER. Next stop, Vietnam!
