Jumping back

We had a pretty great last day on Crete, but let's save that and finish up on Santorini.

If by any chance you've been in some kind of beach resorty town where there really isn't much else around, that's what Santorini is like. It looks like a great place to spend a relaxing week at the beach. The island overall is pleasantly scruffy, a little bedraggled here and there, but nice. And the towns, packed with tourist shops as they are, were fine. The people in Greece, as far as we've experienced, are wonderful. There's no attitude or insecurity about them and they seem genuinely nice. We've seen numerous examples along the way, one of them being our guide on the day we did our tour of the ruins of Akrotiri and wineries. 

The first thing we did was go to the ruins of the ancient Minoan city of Akrotiri. It's kind of like Pompeii in that the city was destroyed and buried by a volcanic eruption. The big differences are that (1) most of Akrotiri still remains to be excavated and (2) there were no human remains found in Akrotiri. Apparently, the people in Akrotiri, unlike those in Pompeii, decided not to sit and hang out and watch the volcano erupt because it looked cool. Not only weren't there any human remains, there were no valuables or much of anything else of value. 

I mean, there was lots of nice stuff left behind but big things like pots and wall frescoes. They found one gold ibex figure, which we saw as a replica in the car when out guide’s husband, who was an integral part of the trip and a real jokester in at least two languages, had each of us hold it briefly before reporting that the genuine one had been stolen from the museum the night before and we were now prime suspects.

The visit to Akritori was great, even though most of the settlement still hasn’t been excavated, mostly because we had a fantastic guide, Evi, specifically for that part of the tour.  She was clear and knowledgeable and gave thoughtful answers, a marked contrast to the guide we later had at Knossos, who had her patter and would not substantially answer anything. The Minoans were a very advanced civilization, with multistory buildings and indoor plumbing/sewer system. Given that Western Europe didn't get indoor plumbing for a couple thousand years hence, pretty spohisticated I'd say.

We spent nearly 3 hours on the site and apparently, our doing this blew the timing of the rest of the tour. It was the main thing we were interested in seeing so we didn’t care, and I have to give major credit to Amani, our guide for the day, for continuing on with the remainder of the tour, apparently not minding that we went two hours over time. 

The next place we went was a village called Megalochori where we sampled wines at a small, family owned and run winery. Have you ever been on a tour where the guide seems to know everyone at every place you go? Amani and her husband were like that, smiling and chatting with everyone and as far as we could tell, enjoying the day as much as we were. The wines were interesting and one dessert wine was particularly delicious and we bought a bottle.

We then went to a larger, more corporate-looking winery. Much bigger, though still family owned. One thing with wine growing on Santorini that’s unique is the way they train the vines to form a basket rather than stringing them along in rows. Amani’s husband Akis explained that because Santorini is a very dry island there isn’t enough rain or water for irrigation the grow grapes the normal western European way. The basket shape allows the leaves to shade the grapes from the sun and to trap moisture from the morning mists, which waters the plant and (allegedly) inject a bit of sea air into the grapes’ terroir. It’s not a way of doing things that would work for mass production, because it takes much more labor to train the vines and harvest the grapes.

Anyway there are patches of grape vines that look like this everywhere. After the second winery, we returned to our hotel. I have nothing but good things to say about Amani and her husband/driver/guide Akis, who is an architect by trade and has a deep understanding of how and why things on Santorini are built as they are. This was also the tour where we picked up guidespeak, which divides each statement into three parts:

1. In WXYZ year, the people of someplace did something
2. Why?
3. Because of something that happened.

This gets entertaining after a while and it does impart all of the information, even if not in an efficient way. When not guiding, of course, Amani never spoke like that and she and Akis were excellent guides and great company. The five hour tour lasted seven hours, not only with no complaints but with restaurant recommendations and in one case, making us a reservation for Easter Sunday lunch the next day. And she later checked up on how we liked the restaurant.

Back at the room, we had pizza for dinner. On long, busy trips like this, eating at restaurants devolves from a fun novelty to an every day necessity, and sitting at a table, reading a menu, waiting for the food eating generally more than you would otherwise and waiting to pay gets old. So ordering a pizza to go from a nearby restaurant was a relief. We found some TV in English and called it a night.