Santorini

Today we were "sheeple" aka people on ship tours. We usually get a private tour, but Santorini is a tender port and the only way to make sure you can get to Oia before the crowds is to get a ship tour as they are in the first tenders.

We were up before 6. (Nice sunrise this morning BTW!). Our tour met in the theatre at 6:45 and we were the 2nd group off. We tendered in in a big local tender. It was really rough and very windy. I was so glad I took a bonine! It took ages to unload the tender as it was lurching all over the place and shortly after we got off the tender jolted and a woman was knocked over. Thanks to a week at the buffet she bounced straight back up again.

Our tour was to Oia (pronounced "eeya"), then a winery, Fira, with a cablecar (my second "favourite" thing after tendering) back. We had Adonis (made me laugh as he was far from one!) the driver and Georgia the guide. Adonis wasn't much of a driver either, infact he was a madman at the wheel, but we will excuse him as he managed to overtake bus 1 and get us to Oia first!

The town was just waking up when we got there, with people sweeping and mopping their front stoops and dragging out their tourist tat. We got some great photos of Oia and of the ship from the fort. 

Our next stop was at the Santos winery for a tasting of the local wines. They mainly grow white grapes in Santorini and the vines are grown lower and shrubbier than elsewhere. We tasted a red and two whites, one dry, one sweet. The white was a tad sharp, the red "medicinal" and we passed on the sweet white. We didn't see anyone leaving the winery laden with purchases! They did have a scenic, if incredibly windy terrace to take photos from.

We had lunch in a local restaurant and as it was very windy by now and starting to rain, we decided we had had the best of the weather and would take the cablecar back. It was a hair-raising ride down and our car slammed against the platform at the bottom, it was so windy. We were surprised to see a huge line of people still waiting to go up, and I have a feeling that a lot of them never got to the top as shortly after a very rough boat ride back to the ship, we noticed that the cablecar had stopped running! Chatting to people that night it seemed people had to be bused to another tender port and the lines were so long some of them gave up and walked down the path with the donkey poo!