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Day 24
Sadly the time had come for us to leave Santorini. We checked out of Dimitri’s and called him to arrange a lift back to the port, but he refused, despite having promised it when we checked in.Walking to the centre of town we decided that we’d had enough of scooters, and should get a car. There was some debate about which one we should have, but we ended up in a Hyundai Ascent, which had plenty of space for the luggage, automatic gearbox and air conditioning too. Since I was the only one with a driver’s licence with me who was reasonably experienced behind the wheel, I officially hired the car, which was quite a challenge in the travel agency seemed to doubt that I was 21. She pored over my licence carefully.
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Day 23
Santorini is composed of four islands, the largest of which is the one we had been exploring for the last two days. The others are a smaller inhabited island to the north, and the volcano itself, which comprises two land masses. Today’s tour was to the volcano and surrounding hot springs. We had to get up early to ensure that everyone got to use the bathroom before we left.I was out first and had time to have breakfast in town and check my email before we left. A big, modern coach picked us up and took us to the new port, where a boat was waiting to take us to the volcano. The guide on the boat was very good, multilingual with good pronunciation in both Greek and English, and according to Nathalia she was pretty good at Spanish as well.
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Day 22
We slept very late, having had such a poor night’s sleep on the boat the previous night. We got two scooters, using Sunil’s driving licence and mine. Ironically, Sunil has a licence but doesn’t drive. In fact I think the last time I saw him drive a car was shortly after he passed his test, so Chris and I did the driving, with Nathalia on the back of mine, and Sunil riding with Chris. This meant that we had at least one licence holder per bike.The first stop was Fira, the capital of Santorini and the location of the old port. Parking the scooters in the main square, we went looking for the cable car. Fira may be right on the coast, but it is actually built on the top of a cliff, so to get to water level you either have to climb down a very long and winding staircase or take the cable car, which we did. The town was very nice – unlike Perissa or Kamari it had more of a working sense about it. Dozens of narrow back alleys wound their way through jewellery shops, ice cream cafes, clothes shops, and restaurants, while the main streets were full of traffic and had businesses of all sorts. All the buildings were painted white, and the town appeared to be spotlessly clean.
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Day 21
It was about 12:30am when I first woke up, to find that Sunil and Nathalia had disappeared. A note was on the table explaining that my bag had been hidden under my chair. Curious, I picked up my bag and went to look for them.I found them on deck, right at the back of the boat, asleep in their own little windstorm. No-one was sleeping nearby, probably because they had at least half a brain and didn’t want to wake up with frostbite. This must have been Sunil’s idea, I thought, and with that I went back to the Saloon. I moved to the other side of the room, where a sizable area of sofa had been vacated, but a plastic bag clearly marked territory. I decided that the person didn’t need quite that much room, so I used the last few inches of the sofa as a pillow, which at least meant I didn’t have to sleep with my neck bent.