Santorini

Although there are many dining choices for dinner and several for lunch, for breakfast there is just the Horizon Buffet, or the 24-hour complimentary room service. We chose Horizon Buffet.

 

The ship was scheduled to arrive at the Santorini Archipelago at 7am, so we were in the Buffet at 6am, which is when the Horizon Buffet was scheduled to open. But when we got there it obviously had opened early, because a lot of people were already seated with their meals around the windows.

 

It seemed as if everyone on the ship was going to disembark in Santorini, so Horizon Buffet was experiencing peak demand, but there were no problems. Lines were non-existent, crowds were minimal, and there was no trouble getting a window seat.

 

Horizon Buffet uses a couple sleights-of-hand to make everything work out well even during peak periods, like when everyone wants breakfast before an early tender.  First, because it is always open, people are able to, and tend to, space themselves across time.  Second, they can open up to three Horizon Buffets, one on each of the port and starboard sides, plus one straight back at the stern.  And there are four Horizon dining areas covering the entire aft of the ship, and beyond the dining areas are more dining areas outdoors above and around the various pools, so Horizon diners never run out of space.  And wherever you sit, someone will show up to offer you coffee, orange juice, or water, again and again.

 

Tendering to Santorini

The word “tender” is very confusing.  It is another archaic nautical term, and not a customer-centric one, either.  At a typical cruise port, the ship pulls up alongside the dock, and cruisers pour off the boat by walking down ramps or gangways.

 

At a tender port, the ship cannot get close enough to the dock to extend a ramp, typically because the water is not deep enough next to the dock (the Crown Princess requires water 30 feet deep to avoid running aground), but sometimes because the dock is already full of other ships and there is no more room.

 

When that happens, the ship “tenders” the passengers to the port, instead of letting the passengers present themselves, by ferrying them from the ship to the port in small boats.

 

Tender ports are an annoyance because you can’t just get off the ship, you have to wait for the little tender boats to arrive, and then you have to travel by boat whatever distance the ship is from the dock, and then disembark the tender boat, which is just time and trouble.

 

However, I was surprised in Santorini how fast, simple, and easy the tender process was.  For example, the tender boats are “little” compared to the Crown Princess, but they aren’t “little” in any other sense.  Santorini’s port provided a fleet of double-decker tender boats that each held 180 passengers. The tender boats were continuously loading, so even if thousands of people left the ship, this could be accomplished with a dozen or so trips.

 

In Santorini, Aaron and Toni planned to leave the ship on their own, rent a motor scooter, and see how much of Santorini they could take in during our twelve-hour stop. So when the Crown Princess entered the caldera of the active sea volcano that is the Santorini Islands, Aaron and Toni were already up in the Horizon Buffet watching the sail in through the big windows while enjoying a shitty or nothing-special kind of breakfast. And if they tried an eggs benedict, it was the worst one they ever had, mass produced, and plopped on a plate without T, L, or C.

 

Then Toni and Aaron were first in line to tender.  To accomplish this, they waited outside the Michelangelo Dining Hall on Deck 5 until a line started to form at 6:45am.  Then they joined the line and were assigned tickets numbers 5 & 6, meaning they were the 5th and 6th passengers to leave the ship, and they were invited to lounge until the tender boats were ready. The first tender took 60 passengers, and they called numbers 1-60 all at once. So being 5th and 6th got them onto the first boat, but did not give them a privileged position within the boat.

 

However, being in the first boat was a lot of privilege in itself, because when they got to the cable car, which is the best way to get up from the old port up to the city of Fira (as opposed to walking up a hundred stories, which they were prepared to do, or riding a donkey up a hundred stories, which really are the only two other options), there was no cable car line, when there might have been an hours-long line, so they shot up the hill and went searching for their motor scooter rental outfit.

 

Later, the cable car line would become a burden, as thousands of cruisers converged on the old port, not only from the Crown Princess, but also from the P&O Oceana, which was also launching a tender-boat assault on the port.

 

It turns out that the presence of just two cruise ships meant a relatively quiet day in Santorini. The record, according to our guide, was 14 ships in one day. A third cruise ship did show up late in the day, the Celestyal Olympia, although we had already returned to the Crown Princess by then. The Crown Princess was again the largest of the three, which was true in every port we visited. There were always one or two other ships, and ours was always the largest, which means we never encountered one of Royal Caribbean's Oasis-class behemoths.

 

Chiara, Sam, Gianna, and I were on a slightly different schedule from Toni and Aaron, since we had booked a bus tour. The dozens of tour groups were staged in the Princess Theater at 7am, where everyone was invited to comfortably cool their jets and watch a marketing video while the logistics proceeded invisibly behind the scenes. Each group was assigned a color based on their tour type, and a number based on their assigned bus.  So we each wore a PINK 21 sticker on our shirts, which meant that we were on the 21st bus, and we would be seeing the ruins of Akroitiri with free time in the city of Fira (Pink).  Pink 20 and Pink 22 had the same tour as we did, but different guides and drivers.

 

Princess indirectly employs so many local tour guides at each port that it is imaginable that not every tour guide is the best tour guide – that maybe on any given day the lot you drew was the 21st best tour guide out of 21, or the worst of a motley crew.

 

We were called when our tender boat was ready. Princess Cruise security scanned our blue cards, so they knew who was leaving the ship, but we did not have to show our passports.

 

Our tender boat did not go to the old port, like Toni and Aaron’s, but instead went to the new port, which was accessible by any bus daring enough to attempt treacherous switchbacks on narrow cliffside roads, with other buses doing the same thing but in the opposite direction.

 

It was harrowing.

 

But no more harrowing than all the rest of the bus ride around Santorini. If you look at an aerial photo of the island, it’s obvious that you don’t want to be on a big tour bus – at all times you are either nearly plummeting from a cliff-side, or you are barely scraping through narrow, ancient streets. 

 

But there we were on the bus anyway, and soon we came to the ancient ruins of Akrotiri.

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Akrotiri

 

Akrotiri was an advanced, Mycenean-era town that was destroyed by Santorini’s cataclysmic eruption around 1,600 BCE. Whether all of Mycenea was destroyed by the volcano may be debated, but there is no doubt about Akrotiri.  Volcanic ash buried the city, which means it was substantially preserved, and even today is not close to being fully excavated.

 

The part of the city that HAS been excavated, however, is located inside a giant building that protects the ruins from people and from the elements. Around the perimeter of the building are walkways, maps, photographs, and drawings that explain what is in the center.

 

Akotiri’s ruins show streets, stores, houses, a bakery, and a drainage/sewage system, as well as many types of pots and tools.

 

Half way through our tour, Aaron and Toni appeared – our itineraries had serendipitiously crossed, so they joined our tour for a while, much to the consternation of our tour guide, who was whispering profound insights into our ear pieces.

 

As a legal matter, those profound whisperings were not “fixed in a tangible medium of expression,” and therefore not subject to American copyright law. So the tour guide had little or no legal recourse had I chosen to simply repeat aloud for the benefit of Aaron and Toni each pearl of wisdom as it entered my ear.

 

But Aaron and Toni are too sensitive to willingly consternate anybody, so they kept their distance from the tour, took in what they could, then hopped on their scooter and disappeared again.

 

There was free Wifi inside the Akrotiri building – our first contact with the outside world since Athens – but checking our messages and emails revealed nothing more than that the world had not deteriorated in any unexpected ways since we last checked. Chiara got some work requests that she was not willing to act on while vacationing in the Greek caldera-islands of Santorini.

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Fira

 

Next, we re-boarded the bus and the driver took us to the highest point on Santorini, so we could take photographs. The roads up were worse than anything we had previously seen, especially when two giant buses passed each other on what in the United States we would consider a one-lane road.

 

But nobody died, and from the top we could see that Santorini has an airport, and we could see the active part of the Santorini volcano that is, across the centuries, gradually emerging from the sea in the center of the great caldera. There were photos of smoke and ash coming from that center island, but it was quiet for us.

 

We also caught up with Toni and Aaron, who had left their motor scooter unattended while they hiked on foot to a point that really WAS the highest point on Santorini, where no bus could go.  So we posed for photos on their scooter.  When they returned, they said Hi, reclaimed their scooter, then whizzed down the hill before our tour bus could even turn around.

 

Next, our bus drove to the town of Fira, and we were each given a ticket to take the cable car down the hill back to the ship any time, but we were encouraged to linger in Fira and enjoy the clifftop delights of Santorini’s most famous town.

 

It was at the very least Santorini’s most touristy town. The main street is very narrow, and lined with the kinds of shops that you would expect to find in a tourist town.

 

There was also a dramatic domed-church. An angry representative of God enforced the “no hats and no shorts” rule with no weapon other than the sheer force of conviction evident in her voice, but it was a fool’s mission, since on a boiling hot day in Santorini 100% of the people were wearing hats and shorts, and although a majority could be coaxed out of their hats, none was willing to remove their shorts for her.

 

I took off my had and stood in defiance in the entryway, my nine-inch shorts a blasphemy in the house of worship. But I was dying from the heat and needed shade at least, if not air conditioning, and I asked myself what Jesus would do. And God spoke to me and said that Jesus would not have found himself on either a cruise in the Mediterranean or a tour bus in Santorini, but that God would forgive my attire because he had bigger things to worry about. That seemed good enough for me, and it was going to have to do for God’s angry representative on earth, also.

 

We ate at a restaurant that purported to have free wifi but did not in fact have free wifi, and I was bitter about that for most of a day.

 

Then Sam and Chiara visited Santorini’s archeological museum, while I sat in the shade outside and meditated. For a few moments I fell asleep; the rest of the time I contemplated whether or not I was in fact melting in the heat, and, if so, what would that mean for the rest of the trip?

 

Next we passed all the touristy shops in Santorini without stopping, which also made me bitter, because my brain was sufficiently addled that I was in the mood to buy something – anything – for no particular reason.

 

The line for the cable cars down the hill was 40 minutes long, but we still thought it was better than dodging donkey poop down a hundred flights of steps for twenty minutes.  Others calculated differently, and at the bottom of the hill, waiting in line to tender back into the ship, we compared our experiences.  Those who chose to walk got down a faster, but they paid for it with aching shins and exposure – they were truly sun-baked.

 

My first moment of real affection for Princess Cruises occurred in the tender line. A Princess representative came down the line handing out not only ice water, but also ice-cold refrigerated wet towels. What a life saver! 

 

And the line for the tender didn’t take any time at all.

 

We had dinner at Michelangelo instead of Da Vinci for a change -- although not much of a change, but it was delicious and delightful.