Days 72-73: Suffering and Indulgence

The original plan yesterday was to walk along the south coast of Santorini and visit the black sand beach, red sand beach and white sand beach. At first things went fairly well, but there became more and more tricky sections of scrambling over rocks or detouring inland to avoid cliffs - although some of the cliffs along the way had pretty fascinating geology.


I burnt my feet on the black sand, scraped my legs on rocks, and was getting further away from civilization and not even knowing if I was on public or private land. Eventually I gave up my mission and worked my way inland through a stretch of farms and eventuall back to my hotel. Despite liberal use of sunblock I also got a pretty wicked sunburn on my back, which is making wearing my backpack pretty agonizing for now. Once back at the hotel I just sat by the pool for the evening and talked with people. One of the people was an Englishman named Pratik who very generously offered to drive me around the next day while he checked things out and then drop me off at the airport for my ferry.

Our cruising around the island was made a bit more difficult (and hilarious) by the vehicle he had been convinced to rent. It was marketed to him as a "convertible", but there was no converting to be done. It had no roof, no windshield and no doors. It was basically driving a golfcart at highway speeds.

Pimpin', right? Even the locals looked at us funny, so it's not like this car is just strange for me.

We went to Fira first to look around and do some shopping. I caved and bought a few more things - some nice cotton shirts. I need to experiment to fit them in with everything else, but I'm sure I'll fit it all in. Next we went to the red beach I missed yesterday. The sand itself wasn't all that red, but the cliffs were. The difference in colours of all the eroding rock is pretty striking.



Finally, before going to the port we stopped by the archaeological site for Akrotiri. It was pretty big, but there wasn't a lot of information there so we didn't really know what we were looking at often. It was still interesting to see such a complete site though.
The next few days will be busy and I'm hoping my ailments don't get in the way too much. I'm just sitting at a cafe by the port waiting for my ferry now, but wanted to get the post out of the way since I missed one yesterday.