05/10/2009

Beautiful Santorini








We took a day out to visit Santorini, an island which was formed by volcanoes and still is active today. The last eruption was in 1950. You can take a boat to visit the interior of the volcano. Santorini enjoys year round sunshine and is a beautiful place to photograph.
When we went there it was lovely and hot, but very windy. The villages are extremely picturesque, especially Oia.
Oia is nestled into the cliff face and has beautiful views, the volcano included. We took a lot of pictures here! Some of the houses and hotels had swimming pools right on the edge overlooking the sea. We learnt from our guide that the blue colour used on the buildings is partly to keep mosquitoes away as apparently they don't like blue!
We visited 2 villages, Megalochori and Oia, the capital, Fira and enjoyed a drive around the island.

We took a ferry from Heraklion to Santorini and joined a guided tour. As we were only going for the day, we thought the best way to see the island would be a guided tour, but if you have more time, then do it yourself with a guidebook as unfortunately on our tour there were some visitors who had no courtesy for others. They didn't keep to time scales and as a result no one had much time to spend in Fira before they had to catch the ferry. The guide didn't seem very helpful, the driver on the other hand did voice his annoyance. As we found out, it would have been ever so easy to tour the island on our own.
We didn't let them spoil it for us and made the most of the time we had.
The island is full of beautiful domed churches and littered with these quaint little windmills, with the windows and doors painted in different colours. Megalochori was made up of winding paths with houses and little courtyards.
Fira was very much the capital, very busy and lots of souvenir shops. Steph reckons she had the best strawberry ice cream ever in Fira!

No comments: