Santorini

Of Greece’s 11 million population, 20,000 live on Santorini.

Soft-edged whitewashed buildings with colourful contrasting timberwork cling to vertiginous cliffs that plunge to a turquoise sea hundreds of metres below (get the picture). The strangely modern architecture is borne of one of Europe’s earliest civilizations, the Minoans, predating Greek civiIisation and the Egyptians. Historians still cannot interpret the Minoan language. The Minoans are also credited with having the first indoor toilets!

This stunning vista is what remains of an enormous volcanic explosion and consequent tsunami, in 1600 BC, destroying the Bronze Age settlements on the island and mainland of Greece and Crete.

Today, Santorini is famous for its many donkey trails traversing the cliff tops and its black volcanic sand beaches. On the trails are hundreds of unpleasantly odorous donkeys that are uncooperative on a good day and very nasty (bite you) on a bad day. Traversing the trails was fun but the tour operators really made things hard by pushing herds of donkeys along the trails, for rent. Several tourists were hurt by the hoof-clattering herds of donkeys but I was ready for it having queued for dinner in the ships cafeteria many times.

There are now narrow roads along the tops of the island so we hired a car and hooned around at 40kph for a few hours. We drove through Oia, Finikia, Fira, visited the Santos Winery and ended up at the south-eastern tip of the island, due to a wrong turn, so had a beer and a swim at Perissa beach.