Day 19: Hiking to the next town

Trip

Greece 2022

Location

Santorini 🇬🇷

Date

September 14, 2022

Christians name a lot of things. Not happy with the precious name of Thera? They started referring to the island by the church that Saint Irene had built on. Santa Irini, over time, became one word and gave us Santorini. On the other hand, Thera was named after the king Theras from Sparta in the 12th century BCE. The transformation from Sant Irene to Santorini does seem a little more creative than simply removing a letter from the king’s name. Perhaps if someone had considered importing cats to the island, they would have spent more time sitting with a cat on their lap, unable to move, and forced to give more thought to their island’s name. I’m not saying cats are required for deep thoughts, I’m just saying, what else are you going to do when a 5-kilo furball is purring on your lap? You’re not going to get up for sure. You’ll sit there, pet the cute thing and think about stuff while you wait for the cat to be done. Anyway, the lesson here is that there are very few cats on the island, and they are scared of humans.

Contrary to yesterday, we got up late and went for breakfast at Volkan on the Rocks, where we enjoyed a pricey but good meal with the always beautiful view of the caldera. We knew we were paying for the view, and it’s fine.

We stopped by the Museum of Prehistoric Thera. The eruption that changed the face of the island and buried an entire city occurred around 1600 BCE. In contrast to Pompeii, which occurred around 79, we would expect a significant difference in the recovered material. Surprisingly, it’s not that different for the 1700-year gap. While the museum is small, there’s just enough description and representative samples to make it enjoyable without being overwhelming.

After visiting the museum, we headed home to load up and then went on a hike to Oia. From our home to the outside edge of the island, it’s around 13km, with most of that along the inner edge of the caldera. The first five kilometres are paved and through small streets with resorts on each side.

The views along the trail are essentially constant, mostly looking out on the caldera with some opportunities to look to the outside. The trail itself is a bit of a roller coaster. The first few kilometres are inside the city and paved. Outside of the town of Fira, the trail gets a mix of dust and rocks. As the trail keeps going up, it gets progressively worse. Just enough to make me wonder why I’m not stopping to change shoes, but it keeps me hoping that it’ll get better and I won’t need to. The last descent ends in Oia on what looks like a marble-tiled road.

Oia itself is very similar to Fira, with more private pools and fewer cruise ship crowds. Other than that, it’s pretty much Fira but elsewhere. We didn’t spend much time there, so we took the bus back.

We got hungry getting home. It’s getting close to 18:00 and we only had breakfast. We opted for an Apéro at home, but we stopped at Lucky's Souvlakis for the best Gyros around.

Dinner was at Aktaion Restaurant. A traditional Greek restaurant that’s in the middle of more sunset-oriented restaurants. We had an experience more in line with other Greek restaurants we’ve encountered. We went for their anniversary menu. They made a seafood version and a meat version, so we had to have both. We ended up with a bunch of mezze to share, along with two different mains that we also shared. Like the army, we travel on our stomachs, and they were well served.