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2017-12-23T19:01:00+00:00

Santorini

2017-12-20T17:00:00+00:00

The last stop on our trip was the island of Santorini.

Great views

On a few of the other Greek Islands, people told us Santorini was the most beautiful island in Greece.

They weren’t wrong.

Geography

The geography of Santorini is part of what makes it so amazing. It’s the largest of a ring of islands in the middle of the Aegean.

The islands were formed 3,600 years ago by a big volcanic eruption called the Minoan eruption. They’re what’s left of the caldera it created.

The caldera started off as the top of a massive volcano. When the aftermath of the eruption caused the top to fall inwards, the space it left filled with water and became a lagoon. The cliffs on the inside of the caldera go straight down, revealing a cross-section lots of different layers of rock.

There’s another island in the middle of the lagoon but it’s the top of a volcano that appeared later. It was active as recently as 1956 when it last erupted but it’s now dormant enough that there are tours around the crater.

You can see other signs of Santorini’s origins everywhere you look, particularly on its beaches. They have either red, white or black pebbles or sand depending on the type of lava they’re made of.

They also make a great sound when the tide comes out.

Download this video of the tide going in and out on a beach on Santorini.

Cave houses, churches and windmills

We stayed in Fira and Oia, which are towns on the inside edge of the caldera. The houses there are all built into the cliffs in a mass of (mainly) white geometric shapes.

There are also lots of small, blue and white churches that almost always have pleasing blue domes.

We saw two excellent windmills at the top of the island in Oia. There are a few more in the town but these two were the only ones with the frames of their sails still intact.

Out of season

Arriving in the middle of December, we were in Santorini out of season. This meant most of the shops and restaurants were closed.

The majority of the houses in Fira and Oia are for tourists. Most of the actual islanders live on the other side of the island - away from the tall cliffs. Clever.

According to local shopkeepers, at peak season they get up to 1.5 million visitors a day. Off-season, there are only a few people around so it feels like a bit of a ghost town.

We were told that most of the people working in the local tourist industry live in Athens. They come across to work for the season so when it’s over they close up shop.

Donkeys

Free of tourists, off-season is when the locals of Fira and Oia get most of their building and repair work done.

The houses are built into the cliffs and accessed by passageways and flights of steps. The builders still use donkeys to move all their heavy materials around.

Download this video of donkeys on Santorini.

They were everywhere.

Even when we didn’t see donkeys, we usually saw trails of their poo wherever we went.

Cats and dogs

We read that one of the outcomes of the 2008 final crisis in Greece was that lots of people gave up their dogs because they couldn’t afford them any more. This led to a big increase in strays.

There are stray cats and dogs everywhere in Greece but Santorini had the most. They were all pretty friendly.

At one point, a spookily co-ordinated group of cats almost tripped us up. The way they organised themselves we started to feel like we were in a feline version of The Birds.

Scary walks

We always try to walk on well-defined routes with as few steep drops as possible. But the bit of Santorini we were in has a steep slope inland on one side and a sheer drop to the sea on the other side. This made hiking much more… interesting.

In theory, there are a few walking routes around Santorini. But we found that a few of the surfaces were a bit sketchy and some routes had been covered by rocks after landslides. That, together with Roz’s vertigo, meant we didn’t do as much hardcore walking in Santorini as we did everywhere else.

The famous bookshop

Atlantis Books in Oia is a beautiful bookshop built into in some cleverly organised caves.

It’s got a lovely mix of new books, rare editions and some original works from its own print shop.

We loved it so much it was hard to leave. It was only later that we found out that Atlantis Books is kind of famous.

Goodbye Greece

On our last night in Greece, we read this quote by Odysseas Elytis in a restaurant menu:

“If you take Greece apart,
in the end you will be left with
an olive tree, a vineyard and a boat…
which means that in the end with these items,
you can rebuild Greece…”

Not that we’re planning on taking Greece apart or anything. It just seemed like a neat quote.

The end is near

2017-12-15T06:01:00+00:00

In a little over 5 months, we’ve walked about 2,200 kilometres in 8 countries.

We’re coming to the end of our trip now so we thought we’d look back at how it’s gone.

Things we learned

Pack light.

Every kilogram counts when you’re carrying it. Apparently, you shouldn’t carry more than 10% of your body weight if you’re doing serious walking. We carried more than that at the beginning but we sent some stuff home after we’d finished camping. We didn’t need anything bigger than a 40-litre rucksack each for the last 4 months of the trip.

4 socks good. 2 socks bad.

We needed 4 pairs of walking socks each. 1 pair of socks wasn’t enough to avoid getting blisters so we always wore 2 pairs at once. We had 2 spare pairs for when the first 2 pairs were dirty or still wet after we’d washed them.

It doesn’t need to cost that much.

We made a budget and we finished just under it. Our cheapest day (excluding staying with friends) cost about €26 (€13 each). That includes accommodation and meals.

Plans change.

Things didn’t always go as we’d planned but we got better at dealing with being thwarted as the trip went along. When we found out something wasn’t possible, we tried not to get too caught up in existential angst about it.

We got out of our bubble.

One of the unintended consequences of our trip was that we met a lot of people who don’t have the same views as us. Sometimes it was fucking annoying but we did surprise ourselves by finding out we could find common ground - and even enjoy spending time - with people who have very different political opinions from us.

Some things stay the same.

Brexit is inescapable whether you’re home or away.

Things we missed

Friends and family.

Obvs.

Good TV.

This was a particular problem for Roz who loves TV so much she uses Trello to keep track of her TV watching.

Different clothes.

We’ve been wearing about 3 outfits each for 6 months. It’s surprisingly wearing. (Sorry.)

Home.

There’s no place like it.

Things we got wrong

We left a bit too late.

As the weather got colder, we added Portugal to our itinerary and had to skip the Balkans. If we were going to do it all again, we’d probably leave in April or May so we could have warm weather for longer and get more hours of daylight.

We took a few more things than we needed.

We used everything we brought but we sent some tops and jumpers home with our camping stuff when we were done with it.

Things we got right

Deciding to go.

We ummed and ahhed about whether we should go on this trip. What about our jobs? Would it affect our careers? Could we afford it? What about ‘The Future’? If we could afford it, shouldn’t we use our privilege in a more useful way?

In the end, we thought “Fuck it!” and we’re glad we did. We got to experience what Europe is like to walk through. How it subtly changes from town to town and country to country. And how the people were different but the same wherever we went.

It’s been a big adventure that’s given us a better idea of what it means to live in Europe. It’s also left us healthier, happier and with a real sense of achievement.

Geometric Greece

2017-12-14T20:50:00+00:00

We’ve seen lots of excellent patterns and shapes since we’ve been in Greece. We think it might have something to do with the fact that Greece has always been so big into Geometry. It even had its own Geometric period between 1100 and 800 BC.

Whatever the origins, curves and corners are definitely the thing.

Tinos and Naxos

2017-12-14T20:40:00+00:00

We’ve done a bit more island hopping since we left Andros.

We’ve been to Tinos, Syros and Naxos. We were only on Syros for a few hours so this post is about what we saw on the other two islands.

Tinos

Our Lady of Tinos

When we got to Tinos, we were told one of the main reasons people visit is to see Our Lady of Tinos, a church in Tinos Town.

Apparently, it’s a destination for pilgrims visiting an icon called “The Icon of the Annunciation”. There’s a red carpet on the road leading up to the church so we decided it must be pretty fancy even though we didn’t see it.

The church is a beautiful building and has a lovely patterned floor outside the entrance made of tons of pebbles.

Stepped fields

Most of the fields on Tinos are on the side of fairly steep hills. Each field has been made into steps of flat ground so people don’t have to struggle their way up the slopes all the time.

Apart from being pretty, it’s very handy for walkers like us.

Tinos Town

Tinos Town (also known as Chora) is the main port for the island and where we stayed. With ferries banished around the corner, the harbour’s delightful. It’s got amazingly clear, blue water, dotted with small local boats.

Naxos

Beautiful beaches

Naxos is another lovely island with some beautiful beaches that are perfect for long walks.

Temple of Apollo

One of the main Naxos landmarks is the marble doorway you see when you get to the port.

It’s part of a temple to the god Apollo from 530 BC. It was started by Lygdamis, who ruled Naxos then, but it was never completed.

Cycladic art

Naxos also has an excellent Museum of Archaeology. It has a lot of the kind of figures and pots we saw in The Museum of Cycladic Art in Athens.

The difference is how much more power they have when you see them in the same place where they were found.

The staff said there were plans to split the current site into three different museums. This would give them the space and facilities to show the whole collection properly. We thought it was great already and it only cost a euro to get in.

Bargain.

A typical walking day

2017-12-13T09:00:00+00:00

We’ve been doing a lot of circular walks since getting to Greece. It’s been a bit of a shock to the system because we’d established a proper routine walking from a to b. Here’s what a typical walking day involved before we got to Greece.

Morning

Getting up

The time we got up depended on:

the type of accommodation we were in
how long the next day’s walk was going to be
the weather

If we were in a shared room in an albergue (a hostel on a pilgrim trail), we were often woken up by everyone else at around 6am so we normally got up then too.

We also got up early if:

the walk we were doing was long
we wanted to finish with enough time to look around our destination
it was a really hot day

Packing and preparing

We packed up everything we had every morning. When we were camping, this sometimes involved drying the tent as much as possible before packing it up.

Early on, we had blisters too so we needed to make time to clean them and put on fresh bandages before setting off.

Breakfast

Breakfast was usually a pastry with coffee or tea. It was a good time to go over the route, plan stops and see what supplies we needed.

If we knew there were going to be places to eat on the way, we sometimes got breakfast a few kilometres in instead. This meant we could sit down to eat, smug in the knowledge that we’d already made progress.

Routes we planned ourselves often didn’t have food stops so making our own lunch beforehand or just bringing snacks was a must.

When we stayed in a bed and breakfast, we sometimes took supplies from the breakfast and made rolls for lunch from it. Cheeky.

The walk

Roads and footpaths

The routes we walked in France, Belgium and Germany followed both roads and footpaths. The footpaths were either set walking routes or paths we found on Guru Maps.

Roads were less fun but easier to plan around because the distances and routes were pretty clear on our maps. There weren’t too many extreme ups and downs but we did spend a lot of time crossing to the other side of the road to make sure we were as visible as possible to oncoming traffic.

We preferred footpaths because they often had interesting landmarks and scenic rest stops, and there was less chance of being run over. They didn’t always match our maps, though, and the terrain and elevation could vary a lot. We had to give up on a few paths in France because they became too hazardous.

Pilgrim trails

We ended up doing pilgrim trails because they solved a lot of these problems. The distance and elevation of each walk were included in the guide books we brought with us, and the walk descriptions warned us about anything else we needed to know.

Stops

There was a fine balance between wanting to make progress and resting enough. We tended to take 3 breaks a day, including lunch.

Loo breaks

We tried to make sure we drank enough water, especially on hot days. But because of all the water we were drinking, needing the loo was always a thing. Luckily as time went by, we found that all we needed was enough foliage and a total lack of shame.

After the walk

Checking in

Checking in was normally pretty easy if we stayed in a hotel but other types of accommodation needed different things.

When we were camping, we tried to find the owner and get a pitch. If the site was big and empty enough and the owner was nowhere to be seen, it was usually OK to just pitch up somewhere and sort it out later.

When we stayed in apartments, we had to arrange to meet the owner. How well that went varied wildly based on:

our ability to predict our arrival time
finding the property
how weird the owner was

Bedbug management

Bedbugs can be a problem in any accommodation but particularly on walking routes that have lots of people passing through. That meant we always followed certain rituals when we got to our room.

We put our rucksacks a good distance away from the bed.

We checked mattresses for bed bugs, especially the seams and underneath. We checked bedframes too.

If we ever thought we were staying in a place with bed bugs, we took all our stuff to a laundrette and put it through a hot drying cycle. This is how the backrest of Tom’s rucksack ended up bent out of shape:

And how Roz’s second rucksack met a sticky end:

Washing clothes

When we had to wash our clothes, we did it almost as soon as we arrived so they had time to dry.

Some Dr Bronners soap and a sink normally did the trick.

If we were really lucky, the town we were in had a self-service laundrette. Tom really geeked out about them.

Other rituals

Each night, we always showered and lay on the bed with our feet up against the wall. Our friend Mary taught us the last trick to help even out the circulation in our legs.

We also looked at the next day’s route and booked the next night’s accommodation.

We sometimes found time to write a blog post or two too.

Phew!

Hidden cutlery

2017-12-11T15:00:00+00:00

We’ve noticed an odd thing that happens whenever we eat out in Greece.

The cutlery is always hidden. Sometimes it’s under the bread. Sometimes it’s covered in napkins. Wherever it is, it’s always out of sight.

We can’t figure out what’s so embarrassing about visible cutlery. It’s definitely a thing though. Weird.

The Williamson Turn

2017-12-05T20:15:00+00:00

When we were in Andros, we saw some instructions for doing a ‘Williamson Turn’.

They explain what to do if you’re driving a boat and someone falls overboard.

Neither of us sail, fish or do any other boat-based activities so we’d never heard of a Williamson Turn before. It seems like pretty sensible advice to us anyway.

Yassas!

2017-12-05T19:45:00+00:00

We’ve been in Greece for over a week now and our Greek language skills are coming on a treat. We’re at least 60 per cent sure we know how to say “hello”. We’ve been going with “yassas”.

Here’s Tom saying “yassas”:

Download this video of Tom saying Yassas.

And here’s Roz saying “yassas”:

Download this video of Roz saying Yassas.

Badass.

Andros

2017-12-05T19:30:00+00:00

After doing a lot of walking from a to b, we’re trying something a bit different now. We’re doing circular walks on some of the Greek islands.

Our first island was Andros, which is a few hours south-east of Athens.

Good paths

Andros has a network of beautiful walking paths that are well-kept and have good markers.

They’re a bit like the coastal paths in Cornwall. There’s lots of climbing and descending with lovely beaches and stunning views.

Pretty buildings

We stayed in a town called Chora on the east of the island. There are lots of lovely little pathways that wind in between the beautiful houses.

Skimming

The local beach was covered in perfect stones for skimming:

Tom was very pleased with his throwing skills:

Download this video of Tom skimming stones on Andros

Swimming

We even managed to swim. The water was a bit cold but it was super clean and clear. Here’s Tom trying it out for the first time.

Yikes.