EXPLORING SANTORINI GREECE

Santorini has been on my dream destination list for many years now. The Instagrammable white and blue buildings have always attracted me, so when I manifested a bargain first holiday with Mr C to Santorini I couldn’t help but get excited.

We decided to go not only to celebrate my 24th birthday but for our first holiday together. We booked through Langley Travel once again as Angela always comes up with great deals! Our hotel was the Alia hotel, in Kamari. The hotel was nothing special, very basic if anything but perfect if you’re not one for wanting a fancy hotel. By booking this hotel we saved £500 each so it really was worth it for us. The flight took three hours much to my delight, which was much quicker than when I went to Crete in June. When you land you honestly think you’re going to land on the beach it’s that close, the island is very small and takes about twenty-five minutes by car to cover.

We went for seven days which was just about right, we spent most of our days sunbathing, reading books and relaxing. The beach at Kamari is one of the best on the island supposedly, but it is black pebbles which get very hot in the sun so do take some sea shoes as it was very painful to walk on. The sea again was painful to walk in, so I wouldn’t say the beaches are the best on Santorini, I much preferred Crete’s sandy beaches. The locals are all really lovely and in Kamari, you have a long strip of great restaurants and shops so we were never stuck for food choices. The prices of food in Santorini we’re expensive we spent about €35 a night for an evening meal. So we do regret not going all inclusive at a hotel and spending that bit extra, as we ended up spending a lot on food. There isn’t that much to do in the evening in Kamari, one night there was some live music at one of the bars. Apart from that, it was just sitting in a bar drinking cocktails over looking the beach which I didn’t really mind anyway.

On the Saturday, we decided to rent a car and explore the island. It’s much cheaper to rent one through your hotel rather than booking through your travel rep. We were with Olympic Holidays and they wanted €60+ for the day on a basic car, we only ended up paying €40 for quite a nice car. Santorini was easy to navigate around, I couldn’t get over how small the island was! It took no time at all to get to our destinations. Parking was really easy and all free. Our first stop was Imerovigli a beautiful village with some amazing views across the island, as you can see in my Youtube video. I’m glad we stopped off here as it was a great view and it had some gorgeous buildings. There wasn’t much to do there apart from taking photos and stop off for a drink, we must have spent about half an hour there.

It was so hot every single day of our holiday, not a single cloud in the sky! It must have averaged around 30 degrees each day, meaning walking around these places I became a very hot mess! I honestly don’t know how bloggers stay looking so glamorous. Next, we drove on to Oia the famous landscape you see on Instagram constantly. It took about twenty minutes by car and you did have to pay for parking there. It was very easy to find and you did have about a ten-minute walk from the car park. Oia was really stunning, everywhere you looked was an Instagram opportunity although it was extremely hard to find the church you see in all the photos (my main picture). We must have searched for this for about half an hour after asking the locals. It’s certainly not as big as Instagram makes out, really the photo I took was the best part of Oia. It really is deceiving on photos, but we still had a great day.

We did all of this in an afternoon really and that was it Santorini covered. I did look at visiting red beach as that’s another famous beach but it didn’t look as pretty as Kamari so we didn’t bother. You can also do helicopter tours of Santorini and catch a boat to the neighbouring volcanic island and climb it. All of this didn’t really appeal to us simply because it was so hot every day we much preferred sunbathing by the beach and by our hotel’s pool.

Santorini was an incredible first holiday for us, I really did enjoy it. I wouldn’t say there was tons to do on the island but I’m glad we stayed in Kamari as it was cheaper, prettier and the were quite a few things to do there in the day. I don’t think I’d visit Santorini again as we’ve done it now but it was a great experiance which I’ll never forget! Next stop is Budapest at the end of this month, so I can’t wait to share with you what we get up to. I hope you all have a great week!