ocean-pilgrim

My first visit to Santorini was a month or so after my 21^st birthday.  I have a blurred montage of memories, of pieces, images and a felt sense of the baked earth, the summer sun and the impossibility of the place. The deep, dark blue of it. The other worldliness of it.  Of dancing to the lyrical bouzouki under the stars at a taverna where the Yiayia insisted all the women dance in circle whirling faster and faster as the barriers of language broke apart in laughter and the joy of celebration at the end of the summer evening.  Perhaps this is where Greece wove itself under my skin.  I also remembered following the aroma of baking bread to the wood fired community oven, the tomatoes and olive oil, the wild thyme and the yoghurt and honey. I remember the absolute goodness of the people.

 Now over 40 years later I have returned and have had the strange sensation of that past bleeding into this current experience.  I think Rick got sick of me saying ‘Maybe this was the church I walked to’ or ‘I think it was this village I stayed in or this was the beach with the taverna I walked to under the moon’. Because, of course, Santorini has changed and grown, expanded, and the borders between villages have been erased as the building kept pace with the influx of tourists. The same ones that have both supported it and damned it in equal measure. With mass tourism comes cruise ships and all they bring and the little they return to local communities with their air pollution pouring out of funnels day and night plus a demanding tourism market that cares little for how the millions of plastic water bottles are disposed of and has no thought at booking a room with its own private pool or hot tub.  We must have seen hundreds and hundreds of pools on an island that gets 270 mls of rain a year. They may have looked beautiful but they really come at a cost and I get that from the rim of the caldera it’s a long way to get into the ocean for a swim. But still…..

Instead of arriving on a ferry from the north we approached it on Intention from the East after deciding not to have a night in Anafi, it’s tiny but windy and barren neighbour due to the wind conditions in the harbour.  We anchored on the outside edge of the island just off a village called Akrotiri which has been inhabited for over 5000 years. 

The land is flatter here and made up of volcanic ash and pumice and edged by rusty red and brilliant white coloured beaches and cliffs.  There’s a museum built around the excavation of a Minoan village just beyond the anchorage where 4000 years ago the ash from the explosion of Santorini’s volcano rained down and destroyed not just this island but many around it with tsumanis and apocalyptic weather wiping out much of the coastal Minoan civilisation on Crete and other nearby islands.  The ash has been found in the deep ice in Antarctica.  Different to Pompei as the villagers had warning and were able to abandon it before it was covered over. In spite of this a complex multi storey village with plumbing and spectacular mosaics and all the evidence of daily life was left behind…and when we arrived it was closed.  Damn. Rick was probably quietly saying Hooray to himself. That said it had been a really long day getting to the anchorage in Akrotiri from Astypalaia taking over 9 hours of some pretty boisterous sailing.  Being in charge of the Santorini activities schedule I didn’t want to wear us out on day one so had planned a trip that I considered to be both relaxing and excellent in equal measure.

After a late lunch and not going to the museum we caught the 2 euro local bus up to Santo Winery on the top of the cliff overlooking the caldera.  The bus to our delight stopped right outside of it. And indeed, it was a stunning spot. Clearly we must have arrived at precisely the right minute as the waiter found us a front row table overlooking the rest of the venue that was tiered in levels and layers to take advantage of the spectacular sunset view.

Now last time I visited Santorini I have no idea if I even had a glass of wine (a bad experience with retsina on my 21^st birthday hot off the plane from Bangladesh probably saw to that!) but this island has every square centimetre that isn’t accommodation, a church or roads turned over to the cultivation of Santorini wine grapes. This creates a conflict in the community when the existing small winemakers lose their plots of land to development and hastens the disappearance of a protected region for unique wine grapes.  And this local production is pretty much like nowhere else.  The vines are not trellised they are grown in individual bushes that look like and are often mistaken for  ground cover shrubs.  They look a bit dehydrated and scraggly to be honest. The bunches of grapes are then protected by wicker baskets that are woven into the plant protecting the grapes from the ground as they ripen, whilst the leaves provide much needed shade. Being close to the ground means the grapes are still growing and ripening overnight as the earth releases its stored heat making sweet grapes and ones higher in alcohol too. It’s hard to imagine there’s enough nutrients or water in the soil to grow anything but the drought hardy species have been grown here for 1000’s of years and prove that looks can be totally deceiving. I could go on, but I won’t. 

Suffice to say as we watched the lambent sun sink slowly behind the volcanic plug in the middle of the caldera slowly sipping on our wine flights we both felt we were in some sort of beautiful waking dreamscape. You see, sailing, for us is a pretty solitary experience. We are a group of 2 living together for 24 hours a day for months on end with few visitors.  In Astypalaia we exchanged hello’s and how are you’s with the guy in the minimarket and with the 15 year old serving us an aperitivo on the beach one night. We’d hardly seen a person for a week and then here we were looking out at one of the world’s iconic views, learning about grape varieties and food pairing, eating cheese and olives with mainly young people from all over the world dressed up to the nines taking photos for their Instagram feeds. We popped out of our usual reality and got dropped into a fever dream!  

The minute the sun dropped below the horizon and the temperature dropped we headed back down to the local taverna just by our boat. There’s a bit of a loose rule that in Greece a beachside taverna may provide a dinghy dock for those of us on anchor to use to tie up our dinghies safely and in return for their hospitality you take a meal or coffees or a beer with them.  We went back to do this in a place that was a complete polar opposite experience to the winery on the caldera.  The Yiayia and Papou (grandparents) watch over the restaurant that’s filled with things like an aquarium with no water filled with rocks and dried starfish and dusty bits of nets. Old black and white photos with curling edges of Papou as a young fisherman on the walls indicate it’s a world away and more akin to the Santorini I experienced in the ‘80’s than the one that exists now just a few kilometres away. We loved every minute of all of it, however.  That’s why you travel right?

A change of the forecast weather the next day meant this anchorage would deteriorate in the late afternoon so the entertainment committee talked with the weather committee and we hatched a new plan. This is a great anchorage as its good for shelter but it’s also connected with the local bus network making it a really easy place to visit the island from.  So we caught the first bus of the day up to Fira (Thira) which is the main town on the caldera’s rim. Arriving there before the heat and the crowds we walked along the coastal path that takes in the best views and leads all the way around to Oia on the north western tip of the main island.  It was gorgeous. 

Up and down stairs we went past the cable car from the cruise ship terminal far below us all, past shops and bars and spruikers and cleaners.  Past people with roller luggage clattering their way over the cobbles, fruit sellers sitting under fig trees, windmills, churches, private pools, stunning hotels and onto the bare coastal pathway between the main villages.

It would be a long half day walk all the way to Oia and we really couldn’t afford to be away from the boat for that long so we stopped for a drink at a stunning cliff edge bar where girls in gold satin jumpsuits wearing earpieces served us our very expensive drinks with chit chat and smiles and not a hint of judgement at us in joggers and hats looking more like grotty yachties than influencers (duh). 

We really were on another planet but it was a super cool one with a great soundtrack!  We caught the bus back to the beach where the boat was waiting feeling like we’d definitely had enough intensity/people/sights and sounds for one day.

The weather always comes first as paying attention carefully to this means the safety of the boat.  With a variable wind and a changing direction combined with an increase in forecast wind speed it was time to go. We loaded dinghy onto the deck and headed around and into the caldera.  There are only a few protected anchorages on the whole of Santorini and with an increasing north westerly wind we only had a few options. Sailing around into the crater of a volcano that was last active in the 15^th Century was pretty awesome especially when you’re in your tiny boat and get to look up and experience the sheer scale of it.  With a volcano on top it must have been huge! All that remains after this big bang 4000 years ago is a small volcanic plug in the middle of it.  Stacks of lava contorted into crazy shapes and the odd whiff of sulphur coming from a single small hot spring tell of its genesis and what still lies below.  Gates of hell indeed.

Inside the caldera no anchoring is allowed but there are numerous buoys jealously guarded by the day tripper boats. They don’t own them but pretend they do and their livelihood depends on them so I get it and don’t resent them at all for their protectiveness.  All meaning we knew they’d be busy during the day but also knew that the tripper boats had to get their guests back for the evening ahead and as the anchorage faced east it was not a place to see the sunset.  One by one they left as the light turned golden and then we had our pick of about 12 mooring balls arrayed around the bay.  We attached a line to the biggest one and had the mirror image of the night before as we looked east up at the same Winery’s windows glow orange whilst we sat in the shadow of the lava plug.  The cliffs turned a russet red and my eye was caught by what looked like an old mining operation plunging down the cliffside, the rusty machinery blending in perfectly.  A little research told me that the Santorini Earth had been mined through the 18^th and 19^th centuries as the mix of volcanic ash and pumice made a water repellent additive to cement and was used in building both the Suez and Corinth Canal but had closed down as tourism had emerged as the island’s biggest industry. Every island in the Aegean, even Santorini was poor and just subsisted on the land and seas what they could grow or mine or fish for before tourism claimed them and gave them a whole different lease of life.

We had a good sleep and very strange dreams sitting in the middle of the caldera on the still burbling and not really extinct volcano.  What an experience!

The next morning we knew we’d need to be away early before the tripper boats started arriving however we got a reprieve as it was really blowing and the endless day tripper catamarans had to make other plans for the day.  So we waited for the first ones to arrive then headed across to our third anchorage in 3 days.  We knew this wind was forecast and Rick had booked a buoy in a very protected bay on the other side of the volcanic rim on an island called Thirasia.  This was also the land time forgot.  What a contrast to the main Island. We had help to tie up to the buoy which cost us 50 euro for the night but it was definitely worth it as it enabled us to get off the boat to explore. It was tucked in close to land and very safe and mostly out of the wind which just came and went in gusts.  A lot of tripper boats joined us in this bay over the day as it was easy drop anchor and let everyone have a swim off the boat which would have been impossible nearly anywhere else. We decided to walk the many, many steps up the steep cliffside to the town above and puffed and sweated our way up in the summer sun walking through streets of unpolished cave houses, cute churches and some excellent vehicles reminiscent of a whole other era.  Everything but the tavernas were closed as it was lunchtime/siesta and the hatches felt battened with only a few silly tourists wandering about in the heat. We went to a spot overlooking the edge on the bay and sat down to an incredible meal that was well beyond our expectations looking down at the tavernas on the seaside filled to overflowing with people on day tripper boats feeling pretty glad we were all alone up the hill. 

We had a quiet night on the boat taking in this other aspect of Santorini and as the wind howled outside we reflected on how it felt as if we had packed a week or more’s worth of experiences into these 3 days. It really had an other worldly quality to it and we felt both philosophical and immensely grateful to have had this opportunity, made to measure by us, for us, on our own boat. The past and the present are inextricably woven together here and it can seem almost jarring how quickly one can flip from being in the modern global economy to a place filled with tradition and without artifice or into a landscape eons old. My internal landscape mirrored the outer experience as my past and present came together as well.  There’s a tendency for people who have been somewhere before it became popular to wax lyrical about how great it used to be and how now it is ruined.  Not so for me.  It’s certainly different but the echoes of the past are still there for me to see and its beauty is still incredible and the people are still kind and welcoming and the place is still a world of its own.

The next morning we popped out of this dreamscape and headed out towards Sikinos and back into the Cyclades to more wind, more fun and more adventures….but none quite like this.