Greek Island Trip

Today we took a volcano day cruise aboard the traditional Greek schooner, M/S Pegasus. From the new port we motored to the island of Nea Kameni and walked up to the active volcano. Our tour guide, Maggie, pointed out numerous places where you could feel hot steam escaping from the ground and another area where sulfur was being expelled. We hiked all the way to the highest point where we had a great view of the entire caldera.

We then headed to the island of Palaia Kameni where you could swim from the boat to a sulfur hot spring. We swam to the edge of the spring, but didn't go in since we were warned that the sulfur would ruin our bathing suits, and having worn new swim suits we had bought for the trip, we decided it wasn't worth experiencing the sulfur spring. We did swim close enough to the spring where we could feel a drastic temperature change in the water. Unfortunately I slipped while standing on submerged rocks and stubbed a tow. It didn't hurt much, but it turned a nice shade of purple.

The next stop on the cruise was the island of Therasia. This island was once part of the larger island of Santorini but was separated during a catastrophic eruption. Once on the island we took a donkey ride up to the small town at the top. The town is what much of Santorini was like before it became a popular tourist destination. To us it was more like a ghost town. There was only one restaurant, but it had a small selection that we didn't care for and the rest of the town was dead. Rather than take the donkeys down, we decided to walk, not that we had much choice since the donkeys had already returned down on their own. This was OK other than the fact that I slipped toward the bottom and therefore my foot landed at a weird angle so my ankle was a little tender for a while after. After finally reaching the bottom we went to a pita restaurant where there were some others from our cruise and got a big bottle of water and two veggie pitas with french fries that were quite good. Overall the trip up to the top of Therasia wasn't really worth it and we should have just relaxed and stayed with the rest of the group.

On the ride back the boat went north toward Oia and along the coast, stopping at the old port to drop off anyone who wanted and then continued on to the new port. Since we had already been to the old port we decided to stay aboard and take the bus back to the hotel from the new port. Once back at the hotel we took part in our usual afternoon activity, swimming.

For dinner we decided to try the restaurant we originally were going to try on our first evening in Santorini named Daphne Restaurant. While it wasn't as fancy as the previous restaurants and didn't have as good a view of the caldera, the food was good, the prices where a little lower, and they gave us complimentary wine and lemon cello. I think the reviews on Trip Advisor were a little too generous to make this the top pick, but it definitely was worth going. (*Looks like Daphne shut down sometime around 2013) Following dinner we did a little shopping before catching the sunset. Since we were further North than we were the previous nights we decided to stay north to try and get a different view, which was well worth it.