We were super excited to start our 10 day trip to Greece - the land of Greek god, goddesses and good food. Exploring ancient city of Athens and then heading towards the chic modern Greek Island of Santorini was on our agenda. In this post we will explore one of the most beautiful islands of Greece- Santorini.
Hotel- Oia Mare Villas
We reached Santorini around 5 and it took almost 40-50 mins to reach our boutique hotel- Oia Mare Villas, which was at tip of the Oia town. Perched of the caldera cliffs, Oia Mare Villas overlook the deep blue of Aegean Sea, the amazing Caldera and Thirasia island. The hotel's location provides excellent view of the famous Oia's sunset.
Each suite is renovated traditional old style greek caves. So staying here gives the unique experience of enjoying cave house in modern settings.Each morning you can enjoy breakfast buffet with mesmerizing view of Caldera. Hotel location is also perfect to explore Oia on foot as well as Amoundi Bay.
On very first evening we saw the famous, postcard perfect Santorini sunset. It really beams at night. Best spot to view sunset is from Oia castle i.e Byzantine Castle Ruins. It gets super crowded here so definitely reach at least 30 mins before sunset to get a good spot.
Oia
The next day we woke up pretty early and went around to check out places in Oia town. The town gets really busy after 10am with 1 day tours coming from Athens. So its better to cover spots in Oia before 10am or after sunset. It gets pretty crowded throughout the day, specially during sunset hour. Again evenings are really calm and nice once the day tour crowd is gone.
Amoudi Bay
We went to Amoudi Bay in the afternoon for some cliff jumping. Its some 200 steps down the hill and can get really tiring, specially while coming back up. I am pretty sure you can take car ride till down there from outer side of Oia town, but I didn't see any taxis, looked mostly private cars only. The good thing about Amoudi Bay is there are some quite good sea-food restaurants down there. And the road to the cliff jumping place is a bit difficult, rocky and shaky, but once you make past it there is good place for a nice swim or a quick dip. You will find lot of people hanging out there for long time. P.S the cliff jump looks tempting from far, but it was quite a height for the cliff and can be scary. But worth a try :) One more fun thing was donkey rides up from bay to the Oia town.
Santo Wines & Perissa beach
The next day we had planned to explore rest of the island. We took a quad bike to roam around the island. Its a fantastic thing and I would definitely suggest to ride one of those as they are very comfortable for a day`s ride. We headed straight to black sand beach - Perissa. Its a nice beach and good place to spend a couple of hours. We went to Santo wines next. The vinery tour was closed that day so we only did the tasting of local wines. The view of the Caldera mountains from the Santo Wines was very pretty, I would definitely suggest to visit even if you are not a wine person.
Fira town
Last day we visited Fira town which is also a busy tourist town. There are frequent public buses from Fira to other parts of the island so if you prefer to stay away from Oia, Fira is definitely good for using public transport to all places on the island. And buses are very cheap and comfortable too, can get a bit crowded at peak hours. One more town you can consider for stay if you are taking your own car is Imerovigli town. This is similar to Oia but much less crowded and less commercialized.Â
Hope this helps. Greece is a wonderful place, specially Santorini :) (Bit biased towards island life).We can't wait to get back to Greek Islands.
Hope you have a great trip to Greece!
Note-
There are very limited taxis out here at the Santorini airport and usually they try to do carpool for multiple customers, but officially in Greece taxis are not allowed to do carpool with multiple customers. So if you like your privacy, you can ask taxi drivers to not take any other customers in your ride. Also, try to come out quickly after picking up the baggage else you might end up with empty taxi stand and will have to wait for next one to arrive. I didn't see any public buses around from airport.Â
We stayed at Oia Mare Villas, and I would like to suggest to check the location of the hotel and how to reach there, with the hotel staff while planning. The taxi dropped us to the post office center of Oia town and our villa was significant distance from that location. We had heavy bags and the roads in Oia town aren't like regular ones where we can just drag our bags, so that was a problem. But then our villa staff sent someone to help us with our bags. Just check this before hand, we were caught off-guard by this.