July 21, 2000

The Greek islands spread throughout the agean sea are broken down into various island groups that we decided to improvise though to get over to turkey, we left the swelter of athens after spending 3 days visiting the acropolis, hanging in the flea market bargining for a cheap tent and eating great gyro pittas, we decided to head out to the islands of naxos via paros, which are in the Cyclades islands, the way to get there is through the lovely pit of a town called pireaus!, this is the place that i sat around, sipping a frappe watch this old greek guy chasing some poor guy down with a broken pipe under the mid-day sun screaming and yelling, as we waited to be the first ones on the ferry, basically one giant 6th street (for you SF ones).

The ferry run out to the island of sifnos (we could't wait for the later one to Naxos) which was a long sundrench deck classe trip to one of the smaller islands in the cyclades. in Sifnos we camped out in an olive orchard on the other side of the island, very hot but the people there were great, and it was very peaceful! Sifnos is known for it's pottery and we picked up a couple of lamps that they make out of clay, with various shapes and holes cut out of them, where the light shines trough, they were lit up all over the island like halloween pumpkins.

After 2 nights of unbelievably hot weather there we took the ferry to Naxos (via a night on Paros, where we had to stay in what Davi called a camp hostel!) Naxos was a complete joy to hang in after the crass commercialism of Paros. in Naxos we stayed in a campsite that was overrun with French school kids who had refridgerators in their camp!, we camped near the beach where we met this very cool waiter named"Agnisilos" who worked at the local beach reataurant. he was very funny and always spotted us walking by his place, it was there that we tried "raki" a Greek liquor that is somewhat like cointrue (sic) that trench liquor you know? any way on Naxos they may very good tasting wine and this other drink called "citron" which is made from a mutant form of lemons, this drink could only be found on Naxos and it was quite tasty, over the next several days we explored the island on a scooter, riding over to the less visited east side where we took in the sea, hiked up to the 500bc "kuoros" (a unfinished collosos statue)and got lost in the back allys of Filito and Haliki. We overall spent a week on Naxos and we found it somewhat hard to leave, after much persuasion I talked Davi into going to Santorini for a few days before we would head back up northeast to Ikaria and Samos.

Santorini was only suppose to be a short detour as I really wanted to see the volcano and caldera formed by its collapse, i knew santorini was going to be expensive and full of poseurs but hey we were so close, after the first sleepless night trying to camp (also overrun with trench kids acting like rappers) we decided to make a run over to the other side to Perissa, which is this quite beach town (only at day time as we discovered) and stayed in this dr. jekle and mr.hyde campsite that was 10' (Smeters) from this bar that played torn jones"sexbomb" allnight (greece is defiently 24 hours!) we stayed there because there was a dive club next to it on the beach and we both wanted to get PADI certified to dive before hitting the red sea. we had a total of 6 dives and several tests to get certified and it was a blast diving (saw a baby octopus!) this was a good feeling to get this as we had wanted to dive since trying it on maui a few years back, and the our instructor "Georgios" was very cool.