The Book of Ashes

Top of the mornin to ya! 9:16PM

(its raining, about 10 degrees and I've just had the best sleep of the whole trip on Brother Tom's corner couch in Dublin)

So back to the Greek Islands, what a difference in temperature. Two things I forgot to mention in my last post, the windows in Greece have three settings, with the handle down is closed (locked), middle is open (hinges on the side) and up is ajar at the top (hinges on the bottom). At first we thought it was a little broken but got the hang of it pretty quickly. The other thing was that the place we were staying had a roof garden bar with a view of the Acropolis, so our first night we sat up there and had an ice-cream and stared at the Acropolis. That was a bonus.

So back to the ferry. It was a 6 hour ferry ride out to Santorini, our first stop. This could probably be likened to the Cook Straight ferry (boring if you've done it heaps before, but interesting the first time). Things of note: There were a lot of ferries in Athens, lots of big boats all going out to the islands. Kinda makes sense, I didn't realise they would be so big tho. There was a lot of smog out over the sea. As we left Athens behind it cleared a bit but even out at Santorini I never saw a clear view of the horizons.

As mentioned the boat trip was cool. There were islands constantly going past us. They were dry and barren looking with few or no trees on them. Occassionally a few white buildings would go by on the hillsides.

Our trip into Santorini was amazing. The steep cliff faces, the white buildings on the top of the cliff edge. It wasn't quite what I thought it would be from seeing pictures in movies but still an amazing place. We got picked up from the port and driven up to our hotel.