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April 2000

The Cyclades

David Aaronson
2005-09-24 21:43:04

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Before we had come to Greece we had spent some time studying the various Greek isles and their attractions. We had devised four potential routes based on the posted ferry schedules and of course we could do them in reverse giving us a pretty healthy eight options out of Piraeus. So it was maybe a tad disappointing when all of them were defunct by the end of the first day. Oh well. We choose a ferry office at random (okay, they advertised in English) and asked for the boat to Santorini. It was 8 AM and we figured we were in time to catch any ferry we wanted. "It left an hour ago", the lady at the ticket counter told us. We were prepared for this though and only slightly disconcerted. Mykonos, our second choice was due to depart any minute. We were given tickets and hustled off to the boat. I might point out that we didn't really want to go to Mykonos itself, but it was the departure point for Delos which we did want to see. 15 minutes later we were heading out of the Saronic Gulf towards the Aegean Sea. The first of the islands came maybe an hour later. We passed the barren southern coast of Kea, shown here (1). It's also the background for this page. On the other side of the boat was the equally barren north coast of Kythnos.

It was a five hour trip to Mykonos. The first three hours were fairly uneventful. The deck of the ship was uncrowded and had a good view but it was a bit chilly. We had inside tickets which gave us admission to a variety of lounges with couches and such that had been claimed by expansive families carrying all of their worldly goods with them on the ship. We settled instead in a long room filled with widely spaced airline seats and nice windows overlooking the passing rocks. When we came into port, we went up on deck to see the sights. Our first scheduled stop was the island of Syros, and the capital city of the Cycladic Islands: Ermoupolis (2).

Perhaps the most interesting thing about Ermoupolis ...

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