For my history course, we were prompted to write a brief travel piece inspired by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's Italian Journey. We were to write about a time when we felt struck by our surroundings and it wasn't enough to simply read about a place- we had to experience it for ourselves. I thought I'd share about my visit to Santorini, Greece in 2012.
The seats in the Athens International Airport were not designed for
eleven-hour layovers. We sat in the blue leather seats playing card games,
building card castles and reading through the cheap guidebook we’d picked up in
a tourist shop downstairs. We sunk farther into our seats as we watched the
light fade from the brown, barren, foreign mountains through the airport’s
giant windows and wondered silently what Athens was like. When all sunlight
completely disappeared, lights from unknown buildings began to dot the
blackness in the distance. We made every attempt to convince ourselves that our
backpacks were pillows and that the constant instrumental music playing over
the loudspeakers was a lullaby. It’s hard to sleep under the fluorescent lights
of a Sbarro restaurant when your back is twisted into a ninety-degree angle. We
did laps around the strongly-perfumed terminal in search of mental stimulation
and found refuge in French magazines to read which made us feel sentimental for
Paris. Every half an hour passed felt like a small victory and eventually the
sunlight returned and it was time for our flight to Santorini.
Out of our tiny, plastic, airplane window, light
reflected off the water of the Aegean Sea; in combination with passing through
clouds, it was like a great, blank expanse of whiteness. We watched as strange
pieces of brown, uninhabited islands appeared within this whiteness: the
Cyclades. Almost as soon as we reached our maximum ascent, we began to descend
into the isolation of Santorini. We stepped down the stairs of the airplane and
walked across the tarmac into the tiny white building of the Thíra Airport.
We boarded the island’s only form of public
transportation, a lonely coach bus that follows the island’s only highway and
felt the bus sway as we climbed over the craggy landscape and through villages
of small, white, stone houses. A grumpy, elderly man stalked the aisles, taking
passengers’ coins and putting them into his money belt in exchange for an
unmarked bus ticket. Our delirium from not having slept since the previous day
in Rome coupled with ongoing heartburn from a slice of old train station pizza
in Naples made us go in and out of consciousness as we passed through the
rocky, sundrenched landscape. On the southwest end of the crescent-shaped
island, we hauled ourselves and our bags off the bus. In one direction, there
were brown mountains that looked close enough to reach out and touch, and in
the other direction, the ocean stretched out before with no end in sight.
After spending the past week in the cold and the rain of
April in Italy, we found ourselves baking in the dry heat and peeled off our
leather jackets as we started dragging our suitcases through the black sand of
Perissa. We passed small wooden boardwalks with restaurants and bars where
locals called out to us in English, all the while straining our necks in search
of any type of sign to indicate if we were, in fact, in Perissa. The sand gave
way to pavement and squat white houses and scattered trees. Dogs ran freely
through the streets and scooters zipped by along the highway. We found our hostel
in a quiet, forgotten area of town and knocked on the office door. The building
looked like an old 1950s-style motel in the U.S. with the doors to the rooms accessible
from the sidewalk. A woman with bright red hair answered the door and smiled
before telling us that there were no available rooms despite our reservation.
She made a few phone calls in Greek and all of a sudden we found ourselves in a
cramped, blue car driven by an older man who spoke no English speeding down the
highway to a lonely stone villa where there was an available room for eight
euros a night. We dropped our bags onto the floor in the corner and spent our
first few hours in Santorini asleep in real beds that put those blue leather
seats to shame.
I had often wondered what it would be like to see the
island’s most famous and picturesque village, Oía, with my own eyes instead of
through the lens of someone else’s camera. When we drove our rental car up the
one-lane, two-direction highway past the cliffs and the surrounding houses, it
was as if were entering a painting. To stand atop the sprawling cluster of
white buildings with their deep blue doors and to be able to see the entire
island—everything that is living and breathing for as far as can be seen—within
one slight turn of the head is a rare experience. I had never before been able
to turn completely around and see only quiet, dark blue water in every
direction. We watched as the sun sunk in the sky, turning it bright orange
before fading to black behind the silhouette of the volcano Nea Kameni. I have
never seen a landscape so beautiful and unique since.
