Month: July 2017

Some Further Santorinan Thoughts

On July 23, 2017

On Explosions

“Tis laid all these Islands role from the bottom of the Sea. What a rather frightful sight to see he teeming Earth bring forth such unwieldy dens! What prodigious force must there needs be, to move ’em, displace ’em, and lift ’em above the Water! No wonder the Port of Santorin has no bottom: the Hollow whence that Island issued, must by mechanical Necessity at the same time be occupy’d by a like Bulk of Water. What Shocks, what Concussions must have been excited in the Neighbourhood of it, when this Abyss all of a sudden fill’d it self up again!”

-Joseph Pitton de Tournefort, A Voyage Into the Levant…3v., 1741. From Travels in the Southern Cyclades, ed. John L. Tomkinson, 2013.

Hey our man Pitton de Tournefort may have been a bit overexcited but there is no question that Santorini’s history is marked by some fairly incredible geological incidents. The Minoan Eruption of Thera of approximately 1600 BC was one of the largest volcanic events in history. The Theran volcano produced four times as much ash as the Krakatoa eruption of the 19th century and caused a tsunami that may have been as high as 150 meters, devastating the eastern half of Crete; the 2011 tsunami that led to the Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan, which was caused by the largest earthquake ever recorded in that country, led to waves of only 40 meters. The explosion blew Earth off of its axis and is theorized by some academics to have led to or contributed to the downfall of Minoan civilization. The effect on the atmosphere was enormous; tree rings from as far as California register a significant climatic event from 1628 BC. The explosion ripped the island into pieces, creating a horseshoe-shaped main island, Santorini (or Thira) and a smaller second island, Thirasia. Subsequent volcanic events created the islands of Palea (Old) and Nea (New) Kameni; the former appearing as if a rocky, greenish lump of western Ireland had been dropped in the Aegean, its younger brother naught more than a barren lump of black stones. Pitton De Tournfort describes the eruption leading to the formation of Nea Kameni thus: “a prodigious quantity of Pumice-Stones was seen to arise from the Port of Santorin; that they ascended from the bottom of the Sea with such noise and impetuosity, tha one would have thought ’em to be the Bursts of Cannon. At Scio, above 200 miles from the place, they fancy’d the Venetian Army was fighting the Turks.”

The “Black Island,” Nea Kameni

The Honeymoon – Santorini

By Grace

On July 21, 2017

In Uncategorized

As Chris has said, we arrived in Santorini on Wednesday 12 July 2017. What he did not say was that I was the first person through passport control. It was great, it felt like one of those days in London when you are the first person off the tube right by the exit and therefore the first person from your train onto the central line/the street. Except better, because you’re on holiday, rather than on your way to work.

We then left Santorini for Athens on Sunday 16 July. My key observations from Santorini are (in no particular order):

• Sunsets: fantastic, never seen any better. We had a 160 degree view of the sea from our balcony and scheduled our evenings around being home for sunset, save for one night when we watched it from a catamaran (thanks to Chris’s brother Rob for that beautiful and memorable wedding present). This is us, on the boat, at sunset, by the Red Beach (no prizes for guessing why it’s called the Red Beach):

• Food: delicious. Whatever vitamins there are in tomatoes, we have exceeded our recommended daily allowance. According to a fellow tourist we overheard at a restaurant, this is because American tomatoes are picked under-ripe and injected with nitrogen…The feta was also delicious, which I cannot explain as the marvel of the EU means that feta in Greece should be the same as feta in England…

• Animals: everywhere. It is impossible to eat a meal out in Santorini without some dog or cat trying to badger you. I saw some idiots feeding the animals from their plate and glared at them. We also saw a donkey making its way up Pyrgos at a fair pace. It would have overtaken us had we not gone a different way.

• Beach: not worth it if you have your own cave jacuzzi. Seriously, get a cave jacuzzi, it will be your best ever holiday decision.

• Culture: we were very pleasantly surprised by how much there is to do in Santorini and how much of it has yet to be tainted by mass tourism. We stayed in the medieval capital of the island, Pyrgos. There are clearly tourists there, but we also saw plenty of local people, including our neighbour. He enjoyed the sunset with us on the first night, whilst blasting out Greek folk music, but on other nights clearly determined early on that this wouldn’t be a perfect sunset and simply gave us a wave and listened to his tunes down in his house (still loud enough for us to hear – don’t you worry). Following a recommendation from the captain of our catamaran, we also had a great time exploring the extremely narrow “streets” of the village of Emporio. We also visited the ancient city of Akrotiri, destroyed by an earthquake in c. 1613 BC and the two museums in Thira which include artifacts from the site.

Doorsteps in Emporio (you’d better like your neighbours):

A storage room or an ancient “bank” in Akrotiri, the experts can’t decide:

So for all of the above, and many more, reasons, we had a wonderful fun, relaxing and eye-opening time in Santorini. After that R&R we were ready to start our backpacking adventure…

We Did It!

By Chris

On July 19, 2017

In Uncategorized

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Soundtrack for this post: Kid Astray, “Roads”

We’ve well and truly done it now kids! Saturday, 8 July 2017 will go down as our happiest and most special day (thus far). We were so glad to share our wedding ceremony with so many of our friends and family and I think this consensus view is that our reception was a pretty excellent party, thanks to the beautiful setting, great weather, good food, awesome band and of course all the party people.

We are so grateful to everyone who helped make it such a special day, especially our parents. A special thanks goes to Grace’s parents who, at a time when they should have been putting their feet up and relaxing after the wedding were helping us disgorge the contents of our apartment across their living room and dining room. We would not have been able to make our great escape on Wednesday morning had it not been for them allowing us to basically dump our stuff and ditch.

Ditch- that’s basically what we’ve done. We have only what can fit in 94 total liters across two backpacks, and the rest will have to wait. But, if you have to start a backpacking trip, you can do worse than a business-class flight to a cliffside house with a cave jacuzzi on an incredible volcanic island in the Mediterranean.

Bright and early on the morning of Wednesday, 12 July, we arrived at Heathrow Terminal 5. Jim, Grace’s dad, had already purchased us an upgrade to business class on our flight to Santorini, we then witnessed him sweet talk various BA staff first into letting us check in at the First Class Desk, and then into using the First Class lounge, a den of aeronautical opulence the likes of which neither of us had ever witnessed. Suffice to say that such an auspicious beginning to our journey was both blessing and curse- though the most relaxing, pleasant way to wait for a plane, it represented a high point of luxury we are unlikely to summit again any time soon. Well-plied with champagne and eggs benedict, we rolled towards the boarding gate.

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The flight was quickly away and we were well treated by the staff up front, particularly by Andrew, an attendant whose travels had seemingly taken him on duty to virtually every place we would soon be visiting. His recommendations bespoke someone who had spent short periods of time in various cities all over the world- he recommended what was interesting in most city centres across the Caucasus and Central Asia, but had not had time to explore outside the areas nearest the international airport. It offered an interesting contrast to the type of travel we are hoping to pursue.

We landed at Santorini’s small airport and collected our rental car, a tiny VW Up! (I am not excited about the Up!, or at least not to that degree. The exclamation point is in its full name. It seems unfair to those of us of a more sober mindset that we must feign excitement for a German microcar in order to maintain nominal accuracy.) The man behind the rental car counter espoused some interesting views. He was a supporter of Brexit (which, perhaps given Greece’s recent experiences with the EU at its most overbearing and economically violent, is not so surprising) and claimed that Chinese tourists pretend that they speak worse English than they do. We allowed his commentary to pass largely unchallenged; he seemed uninterested in our views and was otherwise pleasant. We then set out in the Up! for our home for the next several days, a hillside apartment in the hilltop village of Pyrgos.

The rest of our adventures in Santorini will have to wait, but we will leave you with the view from our little house on the hill here: