Greece: The odd at sea, part II: Ios

Our next adventure was Ios, a similarly sized but less interesting island that’s almost completely dependent on the heavy-drinking 18- 24-year-old demographic who embrace the bars on the island like Orthodox Jews embrace the Western Wall. I saw a late-night ferry pull up and drop its draw-bridge-like door to reveal a bison-load hoard of college kids hustling to be first into the smokey gin joints. It was surreal and made even more so after a comment by a fellow cruisegoer, who said she stayed out until 6 a.m. one night and swears that the heaviest drinking was just getting started. Surreal.

Anyway, back to our adventure. Since drinking wasn’t our thing, our gameplan was to hop on a ferry to Santorini and shop, eat, and photo ourselves crazy. Unfortunately, we were quickly informed that the ferries weren’t as regular or frequent as was posted online. So, Plan B was to soak up as much of the rays that continuously heat up this thin-soiled dot of land as we could. And in that, we succeeded.

But first, we had to get some spanikopita!

The desired locale was the rock and isolated Tsamaria beach, where we spent a couple hours sleeping, snorkeling, and talking about how many women prefer to tan topless. Here's the snorkeling part of that.I’d say about 1/8 of all women go sans top, with about 2/3 of them being old, large, or both. This left about 1/24 of all the women on the Greek beaches to by decent-looking and breeding-aged. Not bad.

After the beach we found our boat closed due to repositioning, so we took a bus up to the main town above the port (always called the “Hora”) where we saw a glowing sun set into the Aegean behind our previous island. Beautiful.
After that, we walked down the smoothed walkway, which attractively but deceptively outlined briefcase-sized stones, past the whitewashed buildings and simple which churches, through the narrow streets all the way to the port. A quick shower and change later, we were sitting at a nearby family-run restaurant recommended by our guide book, enjoying what Antonio called “the best calamari ever.” Indeed, it was delish. I had mine with ouzo!