Santorini, you have my heart! One of our ports of call took us to Santorini, Greece. Royal Caribbean includes Santorini on most of their Mediterranean sailings that visit Greece. Santorini sits high up on top of a mountain, so there is not a dock for ships. You will have to tender to the island. Royal Caribbean issued a ticket system so that you could get off the ship in a timely and orderly manner. We woke up extremely early to go and pick up our tickets. Tickets are given on a first-come, first-serve basis, so the earlier you go to the ticket pick-up, the lower your number is and the faster you will get to the island. The tenders are called based on a number system and start with all shore excursions. If you have booked an excursion with Royal Caribbean, you get off the ship first. From there, they started calling tender numbers in order. I HIGHLY recommend getting a low number so that you can get off the ship first. When you take the tender to the island, you have to then dock and take a cable car up to the top. Cable car lines can get extremely long, so if you are on the island first, your wait times will be short. These cable cars don’t hold a lot of people which is why the lines can get long. You can also walk your way up the pathway, which I don’t recommend. I’ll explain more about that later 😉

We tendered to the island and were off the ship extremely early. Our main goal when visiting Santorini was to visit Oia. Oia is what you see all over Instagram, Facebook, etc. with the beautiful white buildings and blue rooftops. If you are not doing a shore excursion through your cruise ship company, you can easily get to Oia on your own. If you take the cable car up the cliff, you will exit the building turn left, and walk to the end of a short lane. Turn right until you come to a short flight of steps on the left down to another lane. This will lead out to the main road. Oia is about 7 miles to the left. You might be able to flag down a taxi around this area, but if not, keep walking on the main road and turn right. There is a taxi office downhill which is just past the main square where all the outdoor cafes are located side by side. The bus square is also just past the taxi office on the left down the next side street. These public buses are 1.80 Euros and run from Fira to Oia and are the same price to go back. They usually run every 40 to 45 minutes.

We went to the taxi stand and took a taxi to get to Oia. It was still so early, so the traffic was not bad. We got to Oia pretty quickly and spent the hour walking around seeing the beautiful buildings, taking in the breathtaking views, and enjoying every moment. I would have loved to have spent more time here and definitely plan to go back and actually stay in Santorini. I definitely feel this is a special place that deserves more than just one day to visit! Once we finished in Oia, we made our way in our taxi back to Fira (the main area where you come up to on the cable car) Since it was still so early, we had the rest of the day to explore and just enjoy the views. We were lucky enough to get a great seat at a café right on the water overlooking our cruise ship. Kastro in Fira had great views, drinks, and service. Free wifi and a nice bathroom was also a great thing to have as well! We spent a lot of time drinking Mythos, taking in the sights, and enjoying our day in Santorini. Most cruise lines offer shore excursions all over the island, but if you are looking for a more low key and cost-effective way to explore Santorini, this was a great way to do that.

After we finished up our drinks and lunch at Kastro, we decided to walk around the shops of Fira and spent time wandering around. Our ship actually had an early onboard time, so we knew we had to begin to make the trek down to the bottom of Santorini in order to make sure we didn’t miss the last tender. This is where things got interesting. There are 2 ways to the bottom of Santorini: The cable car or the long winding pathway with (supposedly) only 600 steps down the 800-foot cliff. We were not the only ship anchored in Santorini that day. There were 2 other ships, all leaving around the same time, which means all of those people had to get down somehow. We had originally planned to take the cable car down, but the line was almost 2 HOURS LONG TO GO DOWN TO THE BOTTOM. WHAT?! Let’s also talk about the fact of how HOT it is in Santorini in July, so thinking about having to walk down the entire way doesn’t seem very fun. At this point, we didn’t really have a choice because we didn’t want to wait 2 hours to take a cable car down. We decided to make the trek (and boy was it a trek) down to the bottom of Santorini. The only good thing about the beginning of the walk down is the number of shops and cafes you can stop in on and have a drink or a rest if you want in order to break up the walk. This helped a little bit (Santorini is lucky it’s beautiful) and we continued to climb down. The entire climb down probably took a good 30 to 45 minutes because of how much we had to stop and how hot it was. It was better than waiting 2 hours in the sun to take the cable car!

Once we thanked our lucky stars that we had made it to the bottom, we stopped at a little café on the water before getting back on our tender because we all needed a beer at that point ha! I definitely recommend doing this just because it gives you a different view of being actually on the water as opposed to on top of Santorini! The lines for the tenders started to get long, so we knew it was time to get back on the ship. Like I always say, it is better to be back on board early than to miss the ship entirely :)

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Love and Travel Dust,

Molly