After three flights I arrive at night in a buffeting wind that makes the 35 minute flight from Athens fifteen minutes early. It is a bit freaky landing in the complete dark, with the plane getting lower and lower,  with no island lights to get your bearings until the last few minutes.

It has been a wishful playful dream of mine to one day be picked up from the airport by a driver bearing a sign with my name, preferably in a limo. My wish partly comes true in Santorini because, due to the lateness of the flight, I arrange with the hotel to collect me instead of working out buses which is what I would normally do. €20 saves me that stress. I am met by a driver with a sign bearing my name, but it is not a limo only a small van, and instead of a smiling sweet driver I have a grumpy impatient man named Yannis who takes the 7-8 km trip from the airport less than 5 minutes, with me holding on for dear life in the back stunned into silence. His intolerance bubbles up in his explanations to me about using the swipe card and breakfast etc once we arrive and are short and delivered in a tone of voice as if it annoys him just speaking to me.  I admit that I am still suffering from being unwell even though the antibiotics I started myself on are working, tired from not sleeping the night before due to my coughing plus an early departure from Mallorca, so I may have questioned him twice on something to raise his irritation. I secretly hope I will have not much to do with him for the rest of my stay. (The next morning when I see him sitting at the reception desk my heart drops; he is less grumpy but still a grump. No matter.)

It’s not my own wheezing lungs that wake me but a soft peachy pink light that steals across the room and suffuses it, gently prodding me as if to say, “Wake up now, you are in Greece!”It is coming through a small high window. I stand on tiptoe to peek out and am greeted with an enormous reddish gold ball flaming just above the horizon of flat endless ocean. This vast expanse of sea – flat, rippled, shimmering, breathtaking – is only broken occasionally by sheer-cliffed islands strewn nearby as if in a game of marbles.

After my buffet breakfast (olives, feta, tomatoes, ham, along with cereals, bread, tea, and coffee), I am waved in the direction of town (‘up’) by my irritable host on my query as to where the centre of Fira is. So, up it is. I walk through narrow streets filled with car hire and quad bike rental. I cannot hire a scooter here without an appropriate licence (I thought I would only need a car licence) so that deflates my hopes of scootering around. However, it works out cheaper, far scarier, and more authentic, to catch the bus.

The tiny central square is fronted by restaurants and souvenir shops, many with the azure blue and white flags or colouring in their shopfronts. I follow an elderly couple up blue tinted stairs and emerge a little puffed at the top, and I realise I am on a level path. To my right, through gaps in the buildings,  I glimpse islands and snatches of blue ocean. I gasp and realise that I am on the other side of ‘up’, the water side. Following the flat paved pathway that runs along the ridge, I round the corner and stop, standing and staring mouth agape, astonished at the beauty I am witnessing. I am teetering on the rim of a volcano’s crater.

First, the blue. From ocean to heavens: azure blue to sky blue to cornflower blue and every hue in between.

Second, the view. I am up high, 300 metres above sea level, and standing among whitewashed cubic-shaped buildings that overlook the lagoon of the volcano’s caldera, now submerged and forming a channel deep enough for cruise liners to anchor. The island is shaped like a backwards facing C – with the main town of Fira in the middle of its curve – with a dot in the centre of the C representing the remnant volcano,  whose explosion and subsequent disintegration spawned the legend of Atlantis. From Fira I can see around the curve of the island to the old town of Oia (pronounced Eeaah) on my right, and others to my left dotting the distant hills down the the sea. The townships appear scattered down the hillsides as if a giant pile of white Lego has been swept up against the steep slopes.

Even though I have faced my fear of heights somewhat during this trip, it is dizzying to look down and over the parapets lining the stairs that seem to descend downwards at a 45 degree angle or sharper. Because the cliffs are so steep, terraces of buildings appear to jut out into nothingness, with people sitting and having lunch or drinking seeming oblivious to the fact that they are suspended over air. I thought that the Italians in Cinque Terre had this cliff-clinging abodes thing down to an art, but I was wrong. The Greeks in Santorini take the prize.

I wander up and down the steps of Fira with no purpose or direction, just to explore, all the while the eye is drawn to the vista before you and the bright sunlight in a blue cloudless sky is a perfect backdrop. I see many tourists. There are two cruise liners parked in the bay below, and many people struggle up the 300 metres of steps to town. Or there is a cable car. Or donkeys. I decide to try the donkey option before I leave.

I knew that the old town of Oia was the place to watch the sunset so a few minutes later I am sitting in a coach bus that travels at speed (do all Greeks drive fast?) and leans dangerously over low walls on the precipitous side of the road (sometimes there is no wall at all, just a drop off!) on the road north. I wonder what the trip would have been like before the introduction of modern buses. After walking through town I decide to have a late lunch of Greek souvlaki then head to the best spot for sunset. Oia was the capital at one time and it is filled with ancient homes and tiny alleys, and the usual restaurants and tourist shops, but its perspective gives any photos immediate kudos – from old windmills to pinky sunset shots to pretty lit-up-at-night shots, it is a photographers dream.

I return home feeling as light as a cloud, having witnessed the special sunset spectacle in this beautiful place. And that was just my first day.

The next day I am woken again by the sunrise light stealing into the room. It is time for some history today, so I head down to breakfast. I feel emboldened by having already caught my first scary Greek bus the day before, so I am prepared.

I am advised to not drink the water in Santorini but there is a plentiful supply of bottled filtered water to buy. Another point of interest – no paper is allowed in the toilet, and that is not just a Santorini thing but a Greece thing I am told. I have trouble remembering sometimes to put my toilet paper after use into a bin provided and not into the loo, and chastise myself when I accidentally flush it, visualising a whole city of tourists doing the same thing at the same time and stuffing up the system.

I am frustrated with myself that I haven’t mastered ‘good morning’ or ‘hello’ in Greek yet, being day one. I have to keep reminding myself that this is just a taste tour, and I shouldn’t expect of myself to know basic words or detailed geography or the political status of everywhere I travel. Plus I purposely don’t research much prior to arriving in pursuit of ‘discovery’, so that as much as possible what I discover has freshness to it and is untainted by Google. Maybe authenticity is the reason behind it and is why I use a phone camera with no filter on my photos for example, taking it back to basics if you like, which to me feels a more real experience.

My aim today is a visit to Red Beach and Akrotiri, an ancient Minoan city buried under volcanic ash after one of the eruptions. It is a similarly crazy bus ride out there. I choose to start with the ruins.

Akrotiri city is nowadays housed within a wood and concrete building to protect it from the elements while there are ongoing archaeological digs. It is an enormous structure and it surprises me how much of the  city is left despite being covered in mud and ash, and therefore how much is still being  uncovered. I enter to a hushed atmosphere that smells of dirt and dust. Huge concrete pylons support the roof over the city and small framed explanations map out distinct areas of public buildings, agricultural buildings housing pottery remnants for food storage, homes, and business meeting places – a lot of them multi-storey –  as well as a public square. It is fascinating to think that people used to walk those actual streets and live life in the city, going about their every day business with children playing, all of which was brought to a halt by an eruption and subsequent ash cloud. There are no bodies left here like in Pompeii in Italy but there are still beds, stone sinks, and amphorae. All around the site I can see modern footprints in the dirt, as this is a working dig.

Red Beach is is about a kilometre nearby named after the impressive iron rich rock of the area. As I clamber up the rocks near it I pass a sign warning of rock falls in the area. I pause at the sign wondering if it may be too dangerous, while others ignore it and pass me by. The beach is close so I choose to venture past far enough to glimpse it and return.

It is another vertiginous bus ride back to town, where I decide to loiter and watch the sunset from this vantage point, the opposite side of the bay from where I sat last night. It is so pretty and picturesque in the afternoon sun, watching people oblivious to heights sitting and enjoying their evening drinks. As the shops close I hear a strange sqwarking noise accompanied by clip clop and I realise that donkeys are emerging nearby to head home after a day’s work ferrying tourists up and down. I buy an icecream and find a bench and people watch while waiting for the sunset, with the white buildings of Oia shining in the distance.

Overnight it rains and my coughing is still keeping me awake, so I sleep a fitful sleep for my last night in Santorini. Plus I keep getting woken by a couple in the room nearby having noisy sex – at least that is what it sounds like. I cannot hear him, I can only hear her. And I can hear their bed squeaking. I find myself scanning the couples at breakfast the next morning to see if I can work out who it is by the high pitch of the female voice whose muffled moaning into a pillow (or that’s what it seemed) woke me. But of course sex noises sound nothing like people conversing at a regular pitch at breakfast, though I watch for couples giving sideways glances and sly grins but, nothing. I wish I could find them and stare them down, as if to tell them “I know it’s you. Can you keep it down.” Of course, there is no way I can work out who it is. And what would they care anyway. I think this ongoing lack of proper sleep is making me delusional.

My last day is donkey day. I don’t set out until after lunch and walk straight to the cable car, buy a ticket down, line up,and get into one of the small cabins that will be held by a thin thread of wire for the journey before my brain has a chance to protest and say, “what the hell are you thinking?”Others get in with me and the tiny cabin rocks with the weight distribution. I can feel those butterflies causing chaos again. But suddenly we are moving and I distract myself with taking random photos – of what exactly I am not sure because I am not even looking at where we are going but I am examining the strength of the metal holding up the cable car – and suddenly it is over and I survived. I exit the building and head to the donkey area where a few old Greek men are sitting around clicking their worry beads waiting for a fare. I pay my money but it is a slow afternoon as many tourists are not ascending but descending to return to their ship. I was unsure about even doing this as I don’t like to exploit animals but I figure that one donkey taking me up a few flights of steps for €5 is not going to damage their muscles and it gives these men some small income in a world where they will eventually be superseded I’m sure.

After a while one old fellow who calls me madam gets off his chair, chooses a white donkey and lines he or she up for me to get on. It is a weird feeling, to be sitting on a smelly hairy animal that does not pay any attention to you at all but only obeys its master making yah noises behind me on his own donkey, and even then sometimes not and doing its own thing anyway. It starts climbing the stairs, with the master following us. All I can do really is hang on. I cannot steer. I cannot stop. I hope he/she will not go fast but he goes at a steady pace of which I am relieved. However, as we get higher and the bluffs over which we are climbing get more sheer and precipitous, he starts to zigzag up the steps going dangerously close to the edge and making my foot in that stirrup scrape the low concrete wall. It is freaking me out and I cannot look but tell him, “go left, go left” which of course he ignores and does his own thing eventually zigzagging back the other way. For what purpose? Descending tourists take photos or smile encouragingly giving me the thumbs up and placating with “you’re doing well” which makes me think that the terror I am feeling is actually evident all over my face. Why? Why am I doing this?

Finally we reach the end point. I  only know this because my donkey gets there and stops, refusing to budge. His master helps me off and the donkey is very accommodating in allowing me to pat him and get a selfie. I am stoked. I survived!

I walk up the last few steps to where I can pick up my action shot, taken when I was concentrating on not falling off the donkey, and I get caught in a donkey-jam of donkeys blocking the street. Another man appears and yahs them out of the way and I make my escape through town rewarding my effort with some souvenirs then a stop at a taverna for some taramsalata dip with fried garlic bread and a beer. What a day. What a stay.