Buffet breakfast by the hotel's swimming pool
I know this picture is beautiful, but no, this is not the world's best view from a restaurant I was referring to. This was just where we had breakfast on this day.
Requested by Albert, this day was our "riding ATV (4-wheel motorcycle) around the entire island" day. Sitting behind Albert, I was worried about our safety for the entire day; and from 10 am to 3pm, I was particularly concerned about my arms and face being exposed to the strong UV light, without any SPF protection. Oh well, now you know how much I sacrificed to make him happy.
Map of the island and a small picture of the ATV we rode
Our first stop was an ancient ruin site called Akritori. This place is known as one of the big well preserved ancient sites in Greece. We parked the ATV and followed some random signs and climbed up and down the hills for about 30 minutes to come to the conclusion that this site was closed to the public that day.
My frustration over this closed ancient ruin site
That night, I visited Akritori's wikipedia page and learned that the site was closed in 2005 when the roof collapsed and injured many tourists and killed one. It is still being rebuilt.
A couple of hours later, we came to the south east corner of the island, attempting to visit another ancient city called Thira (or Thera). This time we also failed to see the site in person, mainly because we were not prepared with water (and sunscreen!) to spend one hour climbing across the mountains under the heating sun. Here is one very important lesson -- the Greek ancient cities were all built in places that are hard to find, on purpose!
According to Dalai Lama, "Happiness is when what you want and what you can get are not too far away." When we heard from a returning visitor the site entrance was super far away, we quickly adjusted "what we want" to something reachable -- the destination then became a small white church located half way up in the mountains that was at least visible from the ground.
In the red circle is the little church we managed to visit by climbing along the side of the mountain.
Little church in the middle of that stone mountain -- I felt like a Kung Fu novel character resting at my secret temple!
By the time we got back on the ground, we were both starving and exhausted. This is also when we found "World's Best View From A Restaurant"!
View from our dining table
Napkin
The food was surprisingly delicious, too. We both ate like pigs, so those pictures shall not be shown here. However, you have to visit Senor Zorba's website to see the panorama view from their dining room.
We arrived Oia hoping to see the so-called "most romantic sunset of the world". We found a perfect little table at a crepe restaurant waiting for the sun to set. However, due to the heavy clouds, the sky just turned dark and nobody saw the sun. Good thing we saw the sunset the day before from Fira already, so we weren't too disappointed.
Me at Oia, before sunset
More pictures taken from Oia can be found in this previous post.
Fira's city life sparkling in the dark, taken after we returned the ATV and ended this adventure
The nice thing about Santorini is that even if you don't get to see what you want to see, everywhere around is fresh air, blue sky and some kind of ocean or mountain view. Looking back at what happened, we didn't find most of the things we planned to see, but we enjoyed the journey along the way.
PS: Thanks to Ancient Thera's wikipedia page, I was able to see what we missed in the end.
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