Eastern Mediterranean: sailing "Italian Style" to the Greek Isles and beyond with Costa Cruise Lines

Cruise Travel, July-August, 2005 by Jim Kerr

After leaving Bari (and soon the Adriatic) and cruising into the Ionian Sea, rough waters made our second scheduled stop at Katakolon too precarious. This also aborted plans to visit Olympia, site of the original Olympic games started in AD 776. But for those whose equilibrium was still stable, there were plenty of other games available onboard, as well as other pastimes. The spacious Monte Carlo Casino, in an attempt to tempt all ages, not only offered an ample supply of slots and gaming tables, but also an arcade with a dozen video games. More important for many others, opportunities to keep fit while the ship was underway included a gym, spa, morning walks, volleyball tournaments, ping pong, dancing, swimming, and enough organized aerobics to make anyone's muscles cry out for a nice massage, or at least a frosty drink in the Bar Capriccio or the Tavernetta Lounge on Deck Twelve.

We would also get more exercise hiking around ruins and towns in the Greek Isles over the next two days. At 7 a.m. on Thursday, our third full day out of Venice. we found ourselves anchored off Santorini. The island, which covers only 72 square kilometers, has a population of 10,000 in 13 villages. Wine is the island's main agricultural product, but tourism is by fir the major industry. The best and worst example of it is the village of Oia (pronounced "Iya"). Rebuilt after a devastating 1956 earthquake, Oia embodies what most of us think of as the quintessential Greek island village. A picturesque collection of blindingly white houses with blue dome-shaped roofs perches on a cliff at the island's north end, with a breathtaking view of the blue sea below. We arrived at 8 a.m., one of only two buses in the parking lot below the village. Shops were just opening, as women washed the stone steps and tended to flower boxes along the very narrow cobblestone streets. With 15 minutes to go before our bus was to leave, however, the enchanting scene turned to one of near panic. I took a parting photo of a cliffside church and headed back down the street only to be met by a flood of tourists headed up from the opposite direction. I was like a swimmer floundering upstream against a human downstream wave. Several different groups, each lead by a tour leader carrying a numbered sign, converged along the narrow streets, and I battled against time to reach the parking lot. As I descended into the open, I saw that the two buses had multiplied into 20. Cathy caught up with me--flushed and out of breath from her own retreat--and we climbed aboard the bus as it headed back toward Thera, Santorini's largest town.

Here we found more space as we wandered about and sipped coffee in a cafe that hung over more blue domes and houses clinging to the sides of the cliff below. A crush of passengers waited at the cable car, one of three options for getting back to the ship, so we opted for the 550 stairs. A wiser choice, in retrospect, would have been one of the dozens of mules used for this purpose, whose operators, with their Greek caps and bushy mustaches, presented excellent photo ops. Back aboard the Costa Victoria, there was little time to spare before the 1:30 p.m. departure, because this was Thursday afternoon and time for Mykonos, 60 miles away and our second isle du jour.