Greek Island Hopping, Santorini, Oia and Thira

“And then the cliffs… where has one ever seen such colours, seen rock twisted up like barley sugar, convoluted and coloured so fancifully?  They remind me of the oil marbling on the endpapers of Victorian ledgers.  Mauve, green, putty, grey, yellow, scarlet, cobalt… every shade of the heat from that of pure molten rock to the tones of metamorphic limestone cooling back into white ash…. Sunset and sunrise here put poets out of work.”  –  Lawrence Durrell

I had a great nights sleep and woke early as usual. I carried out the early morning weather check and satisfied that the sun was shining already I made everyone a cup of tea and I then went to the village to buy some fruit for breakfast.

There was a mini-market with a good selection of  curiously shaped fruits. Although ugly they looked interesting and I bought plums, peaches, grapes and oranges none of which would have made it through fruit police quality control at Tesco. Having selected my breakfast purchases I encountered a problem. It is difficult to buy €5 euros worth of groceries with a €50 note so early in the morning. The till was already almost empty and after scratching around for my change it looking as though Dick Turpin had paid a visit and left his calling card!

The euro is useful because it has simplified travel to Europe but I miss the old pre-euro currencies. To have a wallet full of romantic and exciting sounding notes made you feel like a true international traveller. I liked the French franc and the Spanish peseta and the Greek drachma of course but my absolute favourite was the Italian lira simply because you just got so many. When going on holiday to Italy you were, for just a short time anyway, a real millionaire.

Then on impulse I decided to hire the car. This was another interesting challenge as the woman at the hire desk insisted on trying to deal with three people all at once including a Greek Orthodox Priest who, presumably, because it wasn’t Sunday, had a completely free day on his hands, no apparent sense of urgency and a query on a ferry ticket to Athens next January that needed sorting out immediately.

There was a loud and animated exchange and I could feel my impatience kicking in again so went for a walk to calm down while they sorted things out. When I returned the Priest’s problem had been resolved and he was shuffling off down the street in search of filling his next empty fifteen minutes or so.  She hadn’t processed my transaction at all and it took a while but I eventually got the car and went back for breakfast that we ate on the balcony.

Later we drove straight to Oia and strolled through the town stopping infuriatingly frequently to look in the many shops that lined the narrow route into the town. The place was full of wealthy American tourists off of the cruise ships that were slumbering in the caldera and the shops were stocked to tempt them with expensive souvenirs. The sort of souvenirs that the minute you get home you wonder why on earth you bought them? Sally and Charlotte stopped at most of these shops along the way and I tried to remain interested but the truth is I don’t like shopping so I found myself walking almost continuously one hundred metres ahead of them.

I should have remembered my son Jonathan’s trick for getting me quickly through a museum by always claiming that there was something much more interesting in the room ahead. Once, we did a museum in York in about twenty minutes that way! We bought some bronze statues of Greek Gods and moved on.

I might not care too greatly for shops but on the other hand I do like bars and tavernas and I found a nice friendly place with a good view of the town where we had some drinks and something to eat, I had tomato fritters, a Santorini speciality, which I heartily recommended to all of my fellow diners; I hope they enjoyed them as much as I did.

It was very, very hot in Oia and the wind had dropped completely. We walked right to the end of the town and saw some headland windmills and then we walked all the way back again and the girls took the opportunity to take a second look in every single shop once more as we passed by.

We drove to Thira and in the town we walked aimlessly through the narrow meandering streets and up and down the endlessly winding flights of steps. We had some considerable time to kill because I had it in mind to see another sunset. But this was a good place to kill time. Every viewing location looked out over the wide caldera and an indigo blue sea withholding lavish secrets in the depths below.

Everywhere there were impossibly bright whitewashed buildings, giddy steps raking down to the sea and blue domed churches that you see on every other Greek postcard and calendar. Looking over Thira reminded me of the joy of opening a brand new box of watercolour paints with all the attractive pastel shades that reveal themselves when the lid is opened for the very first time.

We had dinner on a roof top terrace with a good view of the caldera, the town and the mule trains transporting tourists back and forth down a precariously dangerous hairpin track consisting of five hundred and eighty numbered steps to the harbour below. Actually it was the same place that we ate in two years ago and we all recognised the two extravagantly extrovert waiters who served us on that previous occasion and they were flattered by that. We were lucky to get front row seats, which gave the best views, and we watched another fine electric red sunset and left.

The journey back to the apartment was interesting. Once we had got the car going the drive was truly terrifying! Truly terrifying! It was a dark night and the car headlamps had all the power of a failing thirty watt bulb and there was no improvement on full beam, in fact that was worse because the headlight alignment was so out that they shone directly down only about five metres ahead of the car.

I could have worn a blindfold to make it easier! With no white lines to guide me I could hardly see a thing (actually I couldn’t see a thing) and we were flashing past dangerously adjacent stonewalls and oncoming traffic. It was like being on the black-hole roller-coaster ride at Disneyland, the only difference being that on this occasion I was supposed to be in control of the vehicle! And wasn’t!

Boy was I glad to get back home. And I think the girls were too! I settled my shattered nerves with a Mythos. It had been a good day.

Switzerland, Car Hire, Detours and Self Cleaning Toilets

“Switzerland is a small, steep country, much more up and down than sideways, and is all stuck over with large brown hotels built on the cuckoo clock style of architecture.”  – Ernest Hemingway

After a second generous Teutonic breakfast we booked out of the hotel and took a taxi to a car rental office a couple of kilometres out of town.  Our plan was to take the ferry across to Romanshorn again and then drive through Switzerland to Liechtenstein.   At this stage we didn’t have a road map because I tend to consider these to be an unnecessary expense and I was fairly confident that the place would be signposted and not too difficult to find, as it is, after all, an independent European sovereign state.

We had booked the car for ten-thirty but as there was a ferry at ten-forty we arrived early to see if we could pick the vehicle up a little sooner and be sure of making the crossing.  We found the office but there were no cars at all and I was beginning to regret my decision to go for the cheapest option available when I had made the booking.  We sat and waited in the sunshine and Kim was struck with the brilliant idea of purchasing a map from the garage next door so that we could plan our route a little more accurately than my strategy of simply pointing the car in the general direction of Liechtenstein because although it is a European sovereign state it is also rather small.  We thought that we might also be able to make contingencies in case we missed the ferry.

I needn’t have worried about the car hire arrangements because the car turned up about ten minutes before the agreed pick up time and the process was impressively efficient and within minutes we were in our brand new silver Peugeot and heading back to the city with just a few minutes to spare before the ferry disembarked for Switzerland.  I wasn’t sure if I was supposed to be driving down streets that looked as though they may have been pedestrianised, but others were doing it so I followed their example because I was determined to make that ferry.  And we made it with just a couple of minutes to spare.

The lake was flat calm and a little eerie with a spooky blue mist that obscured the far side of the lake and certainly blotted out the Alps beyond so we sat at the front of the boat and watched for Romanshorn to come into view.  We had bought our ticket on the car deck so when the ticket collector came around the passenger deck where we now sat I had to rummage through my trousers to produce a badly disfigured ticket because I had screwed it up and thrust it into the bottom of my pocket immediately after purchase.  It was a good job I hadn’t thrown it away because I suspect that if I had that we would have had to pay a second time for the crossing.

We left the ferry in Romanshorn and with Kim in possession of the map and entrusted with navigation duties we set off out of the town and made it effortlessly to the town of St Gallen, a sort of gateway to the Alps.  Here things became slightly more difficult and Kim’s navigational skills were tested to the limit as she was entrusted with the task of getting us through the town and on the road to Vaduz.  After a couple of wrong directions and slightly fraying nerves she eventually took us through and out the other side.

We selected a minor road and scenic route and were so glad that we did because here the scenery was wonderful with green fields and gently curving meadows that looked like fresh watercolours running  in rain and all bathed under a gentle pastel blue sky.  In the fields adjacent to the roads there were alpine cattle with bulging udders feeding on the lush grass and clanging noisily about on account of the huge cow-bells that they had hanging around their necks.

Eventually the winding road took us to the village of Tregen where we came across a hill top restaurant with good views over the valleys below and we stopped for a drink and to allow Kim to repair her shattered nerves after the minor panic in St Gallen.

This gave us time to examine the map again to find the most suitable route and Kim explained how she had carefully plotted a course to avoid places that the map helpfully pointed out as ‘worth a detour’.  Kim had interpreted this information as ‘worth avoiding’ when of course it actually meant ‘worth going out of your way to take a look’.  Goodness knows how many interesting things we had missed already or might miss later if we hadn’t been able to clear that little misunderstanding up right then.

This was a lovely setting and we sat in the sun and enjoyed our drinks but the best was yet to come because when we decided to use the wash rooms before resuming our journey we were delighted to find what simply has to be the best loo in the world with an impressive mechanical cleaning process that included a 360º scrubbing and disinfection of the toilet seat procedure.  This was really impressive but I was a little concerned about health and safety risks associated with it beginning in advance of the occupier leaving the seat, which could have been especially painful for a man if he was to get caught up in the mechanism.

When it was time to leave we paid for our drinks with what has to be some of the finest bank notes in the world.  Everyone knows that the Swiss are fond of money and they leave no one in any doubt of this with the quality of their notes.  Not only are they brilliantly colourful but they are printed on high quality paper as well.

On the ten-franc note we were interested to see the portrait of Le Corbusier who was a Swiss architect who is famous for his contributions to what now is called Modern Architecture.  He was a pioneer in theoretical studies of modern design and was dedicated to what he saw as providing better living conditions for the residents of crowded and polluted cities and contributed to the design and development of high rise futuristic ‘cities in the sky’.  The sort of places that we enthusiastically constructed in the 1960’s and then rather sheepishly tore down again in the 1990’s.  I am not suggesting that Le Corbusier’s ideas weren’t good but perhaps that we didn’t fully understand the concept when all over the UK we constructed sub-standard buildings that failed to live up to his vision.

These bank notes reminded me of my dad’s insistence on always returning home from foreign holidays with currency for his personal treasure chest.  Even if it was 90˚ in the shade and everyone was desperate for a last drink at the airport dad was determined to bring a souvenir note or coin home and would hang on with a steadfast determination that would deny last minute sustenance to everyone so long as he could get his monetary mementos back home safely.  How glad I am of that because now they belong to me and my left over Swiss bank notes have been added to the collection.