On-the-Road Tales

After a wonderful breakfast overlooking the sea, I headed to Ammoudi Port to join a boat trip. The directions were “at the castle – descend 300 steps”. Since there are hundreds of sets of steps up and down, I was gald I found the right one. I boarded a boat and sailed to the volcano caldera. A couple hundred meters later I was staring at one of the most vicious geological activity centres in the world over. The geography had changed dramaticially over the last 2000 years with every eruption. The last major blow was in 1950 but in 1956 an earthquake destroyed 80% of the houses and everyone rebuilt! Have not felt any tremors yet but they are frequent here.

The rocks on the volcano were interesting since they varied in color depending on the activity they endured. Next we went to the island next door where theere were supposedly hot springs form the activity. I jumped off the deck into the brisk 17 degree sea and front crawled to the muddy section which was supposed to be warm. While there were bubbles rising from some activity underground – nothing felt warm. The sulfur, salt and metallic in the water was none too pleasant though the guide tried to convince us it was “probably medicinal”. Yeah, right. Next off to Thirissa, another islet. Most people on shore for lunch but I decided to huff 200 steps up and do something productive. There was only about 5 of us walking up and I started chatting with a gentlemen who had gotten off another ship. As my strange fate would have it, he works for Jeppeson so we chatted about waypoints and charts and third world navigation issues. Nice surprise. After a climb down the hundreds of steps fighting donkeys carrying lazy people up, I got back on the boat and headed to Santorini.

The famous sunset in Oia would not cooperate with the clouds but I am certain it could not beat some of the ones I have already seen this trip. So I ducked inside a boutique instead and designed myself up some volcanic rock jewelry, what fun.

Tags: Travel

This entry was posted on Friday, May 25th, 2007 at 6:39 am and is filed under Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.