We’ve gone lower in population (only 9,000 on this island), but higher in tourism density. So it actually seems much more populated than Naxos. Dang, I’m allergic to tacky souvenier shops. This island makes up for it with the, um, dramatic?, views, though. So hard to find a single word to describe what we are seeing.
The island used to be round, but in 1650 BC the volcano blew and removed the center leaving a round cresent of two islands with a bump of a volcano island in the center. It is probably the origin of the lost city of Atlantis legends, along with the end of the Minoans that were living here at the time. Regardless, it certainly must have been an eruption straight from the depths of Hades.
Okay, how about ’spectacular’? The edges of the island plunge a 1000 feet straight down into the water. “Where is the town?”, you ask. It spills over the top of this cliff and hangs onto the side, and hopefully, keeps hanging.
We’ve never seen so many stairs on our way to our hotel room. And we’ve been stuck on the 4th floor in a number of our hotels. This room has a winding set of stairs that goes down from lip of caldera over 6 stories. The good news is that we are right next to the pool, the bad news is Derrell’s bruised and skinned body is whimpering the entire journey up and down. Down is actually tougher than up with the cobbly slanted steps. Go figure.
I don’t think we can get a more picturesque room than this. We have a small balcony that is outlined by grape vines complete with huge bunches of ripe green grapes. (I thought at first they were plastic renditions. Oh, the jading you get in life by the creators of the tacky.) The balcony has six chairs a small table and a fine unobstructed view of the water a good 700 feet below. The seagulls are sailing around at eye level. The boats are toy sized on the water. It competes with paradise by providing us with the entertainment of the hotel’s mama cat and spunky half-grown kittens. Not a bad showing against paradise.
Now if only we can get over the tourist schlock of the town. The big draw is the nightlife here, but after Ibiza, we aren’t ready to commit to rotating hours around to see dawn and give up pool time. Ibiza was like a double dose of jet lag, getting onto the hours and then recovering to get back onto human hours. Ouch. Guess the Greek pace of life is slowing us down.
I wonder what it takes to move here? Oh, yes, right, this darn Internet connection. Maybe we’ll hold off on declaring the location of paradise for awhile longer.
Time to swim through the throngs of souvenier shopping tourists, climb some stairs, climb some more stairs and find some lunch. Hopefully, no food suprises.
(Derrell wanted me to note, he has now had potato in his gyro. And to recall the past culinary delight of a deep-fried-to-a-crisp (no batter) large artichoke soaked in olive oil that was served to us in Rome that contained no identifiable edible parts. We spotted a second of these monstrosities being served to an Italian on the last island, and noted with curiosity that this must be just an item to play with at the table, since the person didn’t actually eat any of it but instead tore apart and arranged and rearranged the partially burned brown leaves around the plate looking for something to eat.)
