The Adventures of Doug and Bec

After our two hour ferry ride we arrived on the island of Ios and were once again met by our hotel owner and transported for free to the hotel about 10 minutes drive from the port. Our hotel was not really a hotel at all but in fact some rooms on top of the big family house of the owners. Despite this the rooms were large and had amazing views of the beach where we were staying.

We were still a little tired from the hot day we had spend out on the volcano and boat the day before, so on the first afternoon we had a relax around the room before heading by bus back into the centre of Ios town to meet up for a night out with some friends from back home. We started the night by heading to the cafe/restaurant run by our hotel owners son called Pleasure and we had one of the best meals we had on the whole trip. For about 5 Euro we got a place of Gyros (kebab meal) with salad bread and taziki. From here we met our friends at their hostel bar called Francescos which was exceptionally hard to find despite the fact that we had found it on google maps! Francescos would have been a great place to stay as the atmosphere was good and the people very nice, but once again it had worked our cheaper for us to get a double room rather than be in a bunk room.

At around midnight (when the night rally starts in Ios) we headed from the hostel bar to a number of clubs, all of whom had different details such as 5 Euro entry and 2 free cocktails, or free entry and 5 Euro for 2 cocktails and 2 shots.... Definitely a cheap place to go out and drink and it was packed full of Australians. After a few drinks and some dancing we headed to a famous bar where you buy a drink and they put a crash helmet on you and hit you over the head with something like a fire extinguishers, milk crate, baseball bat etc... It does not hurt in the slightest but makes for a funny photo! From here we headed back to the 24 hour Pleasure for some more food and got back to our hotel around 3:30am.. one of our latest nights out on the trip by far.

On our first full day in Ios we headed down to the beach for the day and hired a umbrella and deck chairs for a few dollars and relaxed reading books for a few hours before heading to one of the water sport stalls and paying to go out on a tube chair behind one of their speed boats. We only went out for 10 minutes but it was a excellent way to spend a day (and not very expensive).

The final full day in Ios and we basically repeated the previous day by heading down to the beach for most of the day with our books. Ios is an excellent place to relax to to go out at night... pretty much the only two things to do there! It was a good chance for us to have a relaxing time before we had to do some more hard core travelling to Athens and eventually Croatia.

The beach where we stayed on Ios

Our umbrella

Out on the tube

tubing

and again

View of the port of Ios

View from our hotel room

Crash helmet photo - Adam

Another photo from our hotel room

Bec and I out at a club

Me getting hit with a milk crate

Night view from our room

Adam at the club

More drinks

Fire extinguisher this time..

After a few hours on the ferry we arrived at Santorini and were picked up straight away by our hotel called Vila Voula and taken by van to Perissa Beach on the opposite side of the island.The hotel we were staying at was a small complex of perhaps 12 rooms with a pool and we ended up with a very nice unit with two balconies, bathroom, kitchen and lounge area for about $36 per night. The hotel was only a few hundred metres from the beach.

On our first afternoon there we found a laundry and a 24 hour bakery which sold amazing food and home made mini ice creams similar to the magnum minis we can get back home, but in every flavour imaginable and sold for 14 Euro per kilo. We ended up buying two of most flavours for about $10. We headed for dinner to the closest restaurant we could find and were very happy once again with out Souvlaki and Lamp Chops. We also visited the hire shop and tourist agency near our hotel and booked a quad bike for the following day (20 Euro) and a boat tour for our last full day in Santorini after some recommendations from other travelers who had been to Santorini before us.

Our first full day on Santorini and we spent most of the day touring around on our little 50cc quad bike. In hindsight we should have spent 30 Euro and got the 200cc bike as the little one definitely struggled up some of the steep hills on the island! We soon discovered why everyone had recommended hiring a quad bike as it is by far the best and cheapest way to see the island. There were hundreds of tourists on on the road with us touring around the island and the roads were generally better than we have in Australia. Our first stop on the quad bike tour was an area to the south of the island called Red Beach, aptly named because the beach itself is red and surrounded by red cliffs. Here we found hundreds of other people swimming and sun baking, a beautiful but busy place.

Our second destination on the quad bike was the lookout on the highest mountain on the island. This took us about half an hour of hard uphill work and I thought the bike would end up overheating! We were rewarded with excelled views over the island and would have only been even better on a clearer day (while in Santorini there were a lot of fires around Italy, Greece and Bulgaria which made it a bit smokey)

After a bit of time at the top of the mountain we headed north to town of Fira, on of the biggest towns on Santorini, where we had an excelled lunch which included some incredible grilled feta (see photo). This town is well knows for the white buildings with blue roofs, and we spent a fair while along the coast taking photos of the buildings and ocean.

Our day tour the following day was to take us to the northern most part of the island called Oia, which is particularly famous for its sunset, so at the suggestion of the quad bike hire place we headed to the southern most part of the island to watch the sunset instead of the same place twice. At this point on the island we found a nice lighthouse with perhaps fifty people sitting around on the large hill, some with champagne and picnic. All together an excellent spot, and we settled in for about an hour to watch the sun go down. The sunset on Santorini is very famous and marketed to tourists as the best sunset in the world..... I'm not sure if this is the case but it was definitely spectacular.

On our second day in Santorini we were picked up by a tour bus at around 10:o00am and taken back to the marina where we boarded a big 'junk' type boat for most of the day. Once again we managed to get our favourite spot up the front of the boat and were not surprised to find the whole front open section of the boat was full of all the Aussies on the ship... I think we definitely love the sun! Our first stop on the boat was the Volcano in the centre of the Santorini islands where we walked to the edge of the caldera in the scorching heat but got a very good geology lesson from our tour guide as a reward for the climb. We were shown holes in the ground where the gasses still came to the surface and got to touch them to see how hot they were and learned a great deal about the creation of the island in the area.

Once back at the boat we headed off the another close by island where there were hot springs in a little bay area that feeds into the ocean. The boat moored up about a hundred metres off the island and we jumped overboard to swim to the the springs. Here we found a warm area, not really hot... perhaps 35 degrees whereas the ocean was about 30 degrees. The water in the spring area was a red colour and the ground was a very fine red/brown mud which is meant to be good for your skin... so of course the girls got in there and started putting it all over their bodies!

From the springs we all headed to another island township where we stopped to have lunch followed by a swim for about an hours in some of the clearest water I have ever swum in. Our tour guide told us that it is the clearest water in all of Greece which was easy to believe! We spent about an hour swimming with some other Australians off the wharf where our boat had dropped us off.

In the afternoon we headed back towards the port where we got back onto the bus and headed north to Oia to watch the sunset from the village. It was quite different here than in the south in that you watched the sunset from the village rather than a hill and were a bit higher on the island. It was very very busy in Oia and very hard to find a spot to watch the sunset. Overall we agreed that the sunset, however less well knows, was better in the south of the island.

The following day we headed back to the post to catch the 11:00am ferry from Santorini to the small island if Ios in the north. A trip that would take us around 2 hours.

Our ferry on the right had side

Villa Voula

The beach where we were staying in Perissa

Horses Bec found... the foul looks like it has a huge head!

Red Beach

Me and Red Beach

Down on the beach... very busy

These are actually grape vines.... They plant them and they grow in a circle and the grapes are protected in the middle like a basket...

Up the top of the mountain... looking north towards Oia

Bec up the top.

Us on the quad bike... wearing helmets of course!

The grilled Feta with capsicum, tomato, basil and olive oil

Fira

Little door at Fira

Hotel that looked amazing in Fira

Looking south at Fira

Looking north at Fira

Bec in Fira

The sunset location with lighthouse

Bec being an egyptian!

Us...

going

going...

going still...

...and still going

nearly gone

One the boat

Fira from the boat

Not our boat but pretty much the same

The stairs up from the old port where you ride donkeys up

On the Volcano..

Climbing the Volcano.. was so hot!

One of the smaller Calderas

Most recent caldera... 1980's

Bec and the volcano that erupted in the 80's

The hot hole..

Overboard...

The hot springs

Randoms who got me to take their photo and put it on Fb for them... they were meant to give me their names back on the boat but we ended up working out they were from a different boat!