Our last day in Santorini was free for us to do whatever we chose. Since we had a rental car at our disposal, we were prepared to look for sightseeing spots far from where we were located in Fira. The first thing we wanted to do is actually visit the town of Oia and see what it has to offer. Oia is, by far, the most famous of towns on Santorini, well known for its white houses with blue domes. When we reached Oia on our Fira-to-Oia 10km walk a couple of days ago, we didn't really enter the town to look around. We just caught the bus to return to Fira. Today, we wanted to walk through the town of Oia and see what it had to offer. We were very lucky to find a spot in a public parking lot. After parking the car, we walked through (yes, you guessed it) narrow, charming and winding lanes. Unlike Pyrgos and Emporio though, these lanes were highly commercial like the ones in Fira with retail stores lining both sides selling clothes, souvenirs, tours/excursion, rental cars/bikes, food, etc. Apparently, four cruise ships had arrived in Santorini that day, so the lanes were jampacked with tourists from the cruise ships. They completely blocked progress because they would be in huge groups of 50-60 people and some of them would be old and move slowly or the guide would stop and explain something, so the whole group would be stationary for a while. We wanted to visit the ruins of the Old Castle of Oia, so we made our way there. From here, we could see the classic views of the houses that often see in advertisements of Santorini and/or Greece. The white houses on the hillside with blue domes. Although the blue domes are far fewer than what you see in pictures and in advertisements, it's still a very pretty sight. There was also a guy playing traditional Greek music (the song from Zorba the Greek) on a bouzouki, which was beautiful to hear. The dance of Zorba the Greek (called Sirtaki) is extremely fascinating and I was hoping that there would be a Greek native that would also do the dance but that didn't happen! We did some souvenir shopping before heading back to the parking lot.
We drove back to the Ethos Vegan Suites and checked out of our room. We told our host that we would like to leave our luggage in the hotel while we did a bit of sightseeing to which he readily agreed.
The next spot we decided to visit was something that Ashwin had suggested. It's a place called Heart of Santorini. It's basically a naturally formed hole in the limestone rock that form the wall of the caldera. Some people say that it looks like the shape of a heart (not a biological heart but the "love" heart). The Heart of Santorini is again on the south side of the island, close to the Akrotiri Lighthouse that we had visited the previous day. The route was essentially the same and it took us about 25 min to get there. Fortunately, there were some parking spots available when we reached so we parked the car and set off to find the Heart of Santorini. It involved a descent down a rough path and then a few steps. It was easy to find and it wasn't very crowded. After a short wait, we were able to get a good view and another visitor even offered to take a pic of the two of us standing "in" the heart.
With that mission accomplished, we walked down further to a small (what else?) church. It was actually open but we didn't go inside. Instead, we took in the gorgeous views on all sides with the Aegean Sea, the caldera rim/walls, and the islands of Nea Kameni, Palaia Kameni and Thirassia in the distance. We never got tired of these views, no matter how many times we saw them.
We walked back up to the parking lot and noticed something that I'd forgotten about. Santorini is famous for old, abandoned windmills from a long time ago. These windmills aren't like the regular ones we've read and heard about like from Don Quixote or something. They are shorter/smaller buildings and the shape of the windmill vanes is different. Anyway, we saw one in the distance, so we walked up to it to take a few pics and then headed back to our car.
The final stop for the day was to go for lunch to a restaurant called Tranquilo Bar. This restaurant is on the beach in a place called Perissa. Perissa is famous for its black sand beaches and Tranquilo is almost on the beach. There's only a small road that separates it from the beach. It's a very hip, multicultural place with a cool vibe. Lots of posters of different countries and famous personalities from those countries are posted all over the walls. The soft background music is usually from different genres and different locales. The servers walk around in bare feet! We were in a bit of a hurry because we had to return the car before 3:30pm and we had a long-ish way to drive back and we also had to refill the gas tank before returning the car. So, we quickly placed our order and waited impatiently for it. We didn't really get to enjoy the ambience and the environment. We gobbled down our food quickly, paid up and left as soon as we could. We headed back to the gas station, filled the gas tank and made our way back to the parking lot that we had been instructed to leave the car in. The guy that had dropped off the car the previous day (a Pakistani in Greece!) had told us about this parking lot and told us to leave the keys in the car under the driver's side mat and just leave the car there, unlocked! He said that it was perfectly safe to do that and that we shouldn't worry. Anyway, we drove to that parking lot, I took a video all around the car to show that it was still in good shape, left the keys under the mat as instructed, and then sent a message to the car rental company with the video saying that we that we had returned the car. After a while, I got the acknowledgement from the car rental company, so we were good to go.
We headed back to Ethos Vegan Suites to pick up our luggage. I checked with our travel agent about the location that we need to be at to be picked up by our driver for the ride to the airport. After a little bit of confusion, the location was agreed upon and we picked up our luggage from the hotel and went to the place to wait for our car. The car came a bit later than expected but the drive to the airport was quite short. We reached the airport well in time for our flight back to Athens. We dropped off our suitcases at the counter and went to our gate. The flight was on time and this time, it wasn't a turboprop. The flight was shorter though, just 50 min gate to gate and about 30 min of flying time!
We reached Athens on time but Athens airport has a bad reputation for being mismanaged, so we ended up waiting for our suitcases for an hour, more than twice the amount of time that our flight took. It was very frustrating and painful to wait at the carousel with no updates or information about when we could expect our suitcases to arrive. Finally, we got our suitcases and had to go and look for the hotel shuttle that would take us to our hotel. We were staying in a Holiday Inn very near to the hotel (about 15 min drive). The instructions said that we were supposed to turn right after exiting the terminal and look for some kind of parking but we (or I) didn't follow the instructions and instead, we ended up going to the wrong place to wait for the bus. Then, I went hunting around in various places and when that didn't work, I called the hotel for more clarity. They repeated what was mentioned in the instructions and after a bit more searching around, we found the place to wait in. The next shuttle was only at 9pm, so we had to wait for it. It was about 9:30pm by the time we got into our room. Initially, we signed up for the 2:30am shuttle to be dropped off at the airport but after talking about it, we decided that we could risk taking the 3:30am shuttle and reaching the airport by 3:45am which is technically less than the recommended 3 hours before our 6:30am flight. We had initially planned to have something to eat before sleeping but we couldn't find anything or any good restaurant nearby that had a decent vegan menu, so we decided to have a quick shower, eat a protein bar and go to sleep, since we had to wake up at 3am for our shuttle back to the airport.
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