Postcard from Santorini and Athens

Halfway through our holiday, we hit our first major stress point. After an hour’s drive through Zakynthos and back to the ferryport, plus an hour on the ferry itself, plus five more hours driving up the Bay of Corinth to Athens, neither me nor my trusty Samwise Gamgee surrogate John were feeling very awake. Complicating the situation was the fact that instead of heading straight to our Athens apartment, we had to circumvent the city to go to the airport and pick up my little brother Ryan, who would be joining us for the second half of the trip.

Ryan is a fully-functioning adult with 23 years and a Master’s degree under his belt, but remains my little brother and so in my eyes remains eternally eight years old. Me and him have often noticed how we act differently on holiday depending on who’s organising things: if we’re holidaying with friends we tend to be alert and aware of what’s happening, but if our parents are around, we settle straight back into childhood mode, barely paying any attention to where we’re going, what time we need to catch our flight, or how much the starters we’re ordering cost. Also, me and Ryan had never been on holiday without our parents before, so I wasn’t sure what the dynamic would be like. But with this holiday, I had very much organised things and invited him along, so it seemed a matter of courtesy not to leave him stranded outside the arrivals gate in a foreign city, perhaps begging in the dust for spare change or wrestling rats for the last remaining crumb of feta.

Then we missed the turning to the airport. Here’s a fun travel tip: depending on the direction you drive towards it from, the airport in Athens is either called Athens International, Attica Eleftherios Venizelos or Marcopaolo Airport. Why? Because it’s fucking Greece, that’s why! This is the country where smashing hundreds of plates and then dancing over them is considered an enjoyable night out! Maybe they don’t want to make sense — why should they? If you don’t like it, you can take your heavily-lacerated feet and fuck off!

So, after a lengthy detour across some of Athens’s most charming overpasses, we made it to the airport to find Ryan looking entirely unphased by our late arrival. Our duo became a trio, and we moved on.

Dropping off the hire car was easier than expected. We didn’t even need to go inside. A woman met us in the carpark, gave the car a cursory glance (it was dark) and said we were good to go. “Fantastic,” I said, having expected this to take hours.

“Ahh, fantastic,” she grinned, clearly mocking me, though for what, I wasn’t entirely sure. As in all these situations, I assumed it was the quiff and went on my way. It wasn’t until the next day that we learnt the Greeks have more than a few reasons to be resentful of the Brits, as we read about all the priceless statues the Victorians looted from the Acropolis.

Central Athens was a delight and, to be honest, a complete surprise. A few people I knew had visited, and their feedback had been distinctly underwhelming. The modern buildings are not as aesthetically pleasing as the centres of most European cities, for sure, but the flip side of that coin is that Athens feels like an authentic, lived-in city, as opposed to the likes of Venice, which is essentially a museum frozen in time for the sake of tourists. Athens is teeming with little bars and restaurants, packed with buskers, had a thriving nightlife and felt clean and safe. It didn’t seem to have that rich dickhead quarter that most European cities have, where all the shops are Gucci and they won’t let you in unless you can show them the scalps of three homeless people or whatever.

Our first morning started brightly, as we stopped at what seemed to be a standard café for breakfast. Athens is cheaper than either of the islands we visited by an order of magnitude, and soon we were sipping freshly squeezed orange juice and tucking into club sandwiches for the price of a toothpick on Santorini. Halfway through the meal, John spied a chessboard atop a barrel in the corner. John is something of a chess aficionado — the kind who plays chess against computers for fun. It was him who taught me to play (although I find it immensely frustrating, to the point of anxiety). We got up to look at the board and John began talking me through the game. The bar owner noticed us.

“Hey!” he called over. “Are you good?”

John was too modest to reply but I said, “Yeah, he’s good.”

“You play him,” the bar owner said, pointing into the corner. “Russia versus England, eh?”

From the corner, a tall, nondescript man stood up. He was probably three or four years older than us, and had an oddly blank expression on his face. But his eyes lit up when he saw us by the chessboard. I quickly sat down. He walked over to John, shook his hand and got out his phone, which had a specialist chess clock app. That app was the first warning.

To be fair to John, he put up a good fight. Their game lasted most of the three-minute blitz time limit they’d set themselves, and I think John ran out of time before he could be checkmated. The whole game, while John did the umms and hmms and facial ticks that are completely natural when playing a game of logic, the Russian stared at the board with a calm complacency on his face, utterly reactionless. I find that there’s a certain calm demeanour which comes with having an extremely logical brain. I’ve met several people like this. It’s as if they view excess emotion as inefficient, and therefore unnecessary. The whole time, he didn’t say a word — at the time I assumed he didn’t speak English, but it seems equally likely that social interaction was inessential to the task his brain was programmed to perform: winning at chess.

By this point, the bar owner had abandoned his duties and wanted in on the action. John stepped back and the bar owner stepped in. Perhaps 50, he was wiry and animated during the game, but the Russian got him as well, probably even quicker. The Russian asked for a rematch, but this time, he’d take the black and sacrifice going first. A chess hound can never pass up another game, and they were on. Within seconds, the Russian had him again.

Then, something strange happened. The bar owner made a good move (I expect it was called something like Humperdink’s Reverse Gambit) and suddenly, the Russian had something to think about. Sat behind him, I watched the guy’s shoulders tense up; watched him get distracted by passers-by out the window. And it struck me: maybe logical thought is a mindset, a mood like any other?

The match ended in a draw. His day made, the owner gave us some bottles of water on the house and waved us off as we left. I watched the Russian walk off with the slightly sad, slightly indulgent thought that in any ordinary café in any city in the world, there are probably people who are eons smarter than me.

Of course, the real attractions of Athens are historical, and we had a perfect day to see them all. It was about 25 degrees, with a vivid blue sky. While the different ruins — the Acropolis, the Roman agora, the ancient agora (to rub in that the Greek one came first), the Temple of the Winds, the Temple of Zeus, Hadrian’s Arch — are fairly similar to the un-classically-trained eye, the best way to see them is against that backdrop of azure.

We had a night and a day in Athens, and honestly, it did feel like enough time to see the city. If there was one drawback, it was that sense that our experience would’ve been essentially the same if we’d stayed four or five days.

But the next four or five days would be spent in Santorini. Ever since I first made one of the greatest mistakes of my life and started following all those travel accounts on Instagram, I had longed to see Santorini. I’ve always had a thing for dense, warren-like towns which are perched somewhere infeasible — I have a strong memory of going to Mont Saint-Michel on a Year 6 French trip and falling absolutely in love with the maze of alleys and walkways; houses stacked on top of one another and disappearing into the rock.

Santorini was a little different. Firstly, the towns themselves have essentially no history at all: the island is a dormant volcano which was largely abandoned until the 70s. This became clear as it swept into view at the end of an epic five-hour ferry journey; the whole island is a semicircle of deep red-black rock, the remains of an immense supervolcano eruption which probably wiped out the Minoan civilization in nearby Crete 4,000 years ago. From a geography nerd’s point of view, it was very cool to see a caldera which is so clearly demarcated:

That’s the volcano in the middle, and there’s the old fallen debris around the outside. You can also tell from that picture just how sparse and arid most of the island is: aside from Thera, Oia and a few small towns, the land is empty, dark, rocky and sprinkled with red, spiky plants. It’s a little like having an idyllic holiday resort slap bang in the middle of Mordor.

When we first stepped off the ferry, idyllic it was not. All us passengers were descended upon by a small army of short Greek men. “Hotel?” they demanded. “You want a car? You need a drink?” They must’ve all been fresh graduates of Mike Tyson’s Customer Service school, because it bordered on assault. I’m aware that sounds hysterical, but it was an absolute free-for-all, and with the cavernous cliffs looming above us, we were trapped. It was my first experience of an entirely literal tourist trap.

In the moment, I got so bothered that I came close to looking up from our map and full on shouting “GO AWAY.” Writing this weeks later, I’m glad I didn’t, because at the end of the day these guys are just doing their jobs, trying to outmanoeuvre each other — if they don’t grab enough tourists by the scruffs of their necks and chuck them into shuttle buses, they’ll be fired and their bosses will find other five-foot men who’ll do it instead. But for anyone interested in a Santorini trip, I would recommend arriving with a car.

We solved the problem by walking right to the end of the row of buildings and finding the least interested five-footer there. He was a lovely old gentleman who did us a pretty decent deal for a taxi ride across the island to our hotel. After staying in discount places throughout the trip, we’d broken the bank for our last stay — but this was Santorini, where the best hotels can set you back £1,000 a night, and although our room was a cut above what we were used to, we were unfortunately pretty far from the action. This was made better for us by Sergio, the cheery man only a few years older than me and John who seemed to run the place single-handedly. Our first night, seeing we hadn’t realised you really needed a car to get around the island, he gave us a lift into town on his way home from work.

The towns really were magical, though. Overpriced, maybe a little busy, but Oia and Thera were unforgettable places. Whereas Zakynthos, Corfu and Crete were all run down and melting into the earth, Santorini’s towns were immaculate, a bright, gleaming white, stones polished smooth like the heyday of Ancient Greece, only the architecture is more reminiscent of Northern Africa (or, if you’re like me and have never been to Northern Africa, the houses look a bit like Mos Eisley). But this wasn’t any wretched hive of scum and villainy; this was a labyrinth paradise of sunset views and tiny hot tubs perched on the edge of cliffs. Finally, I saw what all the fuss was about.

In the end, we hired another car. Fortunately, this one was way better than the last: we called it Trojan, after I’d found a toy horse and we’d attached it to the dashboard as a mascot. Armed with more cc’s than I’d ever had before, we careered around the island over the next few days. We did see an old Venetian castle and look round Akrotiri, some incredibly ancient ruins which may have inspired the tale of Atlantis (see here if anyone is interested), but mostly we stuck to the classic tourist stuff.

The main beaches on Santorini are named with a distinctly German flair: they are called Red Beach, White Beach and Black Beach. And, since our travel patters are wholly determined by Instagram, this is where the tourists flock to. We went to red beach, and it was beautiful and red as promised. Yet there is another, much longer, much nicer beach. This is true: we discovered it because Ryan picked out an old map of Santorini from a tourist shop in Oia. Knowing that I’m a bigger fan of old maps than any 26 year old should be, he showed it to me. Then we noticed a large area to the south-east of the island which looked suspiciously like a beach. Checking it on our Lord and saviour Google, we found that it hadn’t moved in the last 100 years: there was still a beach there. We went, and it was lovely. Mostly deserted, and stretching in either direction as far as the eye could see.

Santorini left a mixed impression on me. Though it is as beautiful as anywhere in Greece (that I’ve been, anyway), I kept getting the impression that had we gone in peak season, I would’ve hated it. Our trip all happened in October, by the way, in the dying embers of the tourist season, as the weather started to cool and the restaurant owners had marked out the dishes which they still had left on their menus. But the towns and the roads still felt busy, packed with obnoxious Americans on quadbikes screaming “YO WHY AREN’T WE STOPPING? THIS BEACH IS FIRE” at every sand dune they passed (we genuinely witnessed this). Add five times the guests, with less time spent chatting to the locals, and 40 degree heat making everyone grumpy, and I think Santorini would’ve been a lesser experience.

Off-season travel is a luxury that not everyone is privileged enough to have. But if you get the chance, especially as the pandemic lingers on, you should grab it. Going abroad is something that I didn’t realise how much I missed until I got back on a plane. (Incidentally, flights are something I didn’t realise how little I missed until the first bout of turbulence sent a jolt of adrenaline tingling down my spine.) I do think that if you’re reading this and worrying about the risks of travelling during Covid, you should take the plunge and go. Restrictions are minimal, as are your chances of catching the ‘rona. The good holidays you’ll remember for years afterwards, and the bad ones you’ll remember for ever, so why wait?