SANTORINI – What you should KNOW before going

SANTORINI – What you should KNOW before going

So, hi guys. Welcome back to the channel. Now, this video is actually about our trip to Santorini, a roundup of what happened, how much we spent, uh what are the pros and cons of Santorini, and of course, uh there will be a bonus tip at the end. Yeah. So, uh stick with us and here we go. All right. So, the first thing I want to say about is the uh transportation. So, when you land from uh usually you have to take a plane from Athens. That’s what we did. And then it landed in Santorini. It’s smalish airport. Yeah. And uh you can actually uh take a bus or take Uber or a taxi even. Yeah. So the cheapest mode of transport from the airport which uh you can take is the bus. Uh it goes all the way to FRA. It takes about maybe about 20 minutes to about half an hour and it’s only €2. Yeah. But the problem is with the bus, you have to wait for about an hour at the airport if you’re unlucky because you only comes every hour and uh maybe the easiest method is to go via uh taxi, especially when you have a lot of luggages and uh family members of course. Yeah. So the the price of a taxi or Uber, it’s about €20 to €30 for just a 10 15 minute ride. So that’s pretty expensive in my eyes. Yeah. But we took the Uber because we want the most convenient way. We had two big luggages and of course it took us about it took about 15 minutes uh to reach FRA where our hotel is and if you want a cheaper method then take the bus. Okay. Something you need to know uh about Santorini is that there are few locations where you can stay. Um majority of the tourists would either stay in IA which is this uh what you see in the postcards the Instagram uh shots usually these are taken from u IA o I A and the other one is FRA okay FRA is sort of like a small town center so you got shopping centers restaurants uh it’s more casual there are pups there and the bus station is right there okay for any part of the island which you want to transfer or you want to you want to you want to move from and to to and from. Okay. Uh you need to take a bus and the bus terminal the station is at FRA and it takes you to places like Parisa Kamari where the beaches are and also to IA. Yeah. But the the the the bus would not go directly to IA from Parisa or it would not go directly from Kamari to maybe another place called uh Tira. Yeah. So there’s different locations. It has to navigate to a point and the main point is FRA and then you take another bus to another place. So that’s usually how it works. And the bus can range from about about about €250 per trip. Yeah. One way. And uh what will happen is that when you want to go to that place, if you’re at FRA at the bus station, the main bus terminal, uh the the conductor or the driver will actually shout out the the destination just before the bus leaves. So you got to keep your ears peeled and then when you hear your destination, just head on to the bus and just board it. You pay on the bus in cash, of course. Yeah. Um it everywhere around the island because it’s a smallish island it will take about maybe 15 20 minutes the most the travel time will be about 30 minutes. Yeah. So if you want convenience then probably stay in FRA the main town center and you can travel everywhere around the island uh using the bus. Where did we stay? Our hotel was in FRA. We chose FRA because it’s the most happening area. Like I was saying earlier, you got your restaurants, your pubs, your shopping areas, and the bus terminal that makes it so convenient. Fir is actually somewhere near close to the center of Santorini. Uh it it is along the cliff side as well. It’s just near where the cliff side is, the caldera they call it, and it faces the volcano and the views are still excellent. So I’ve got no issues with FRA. It’s I heard cheaper than I because I is the place where it’s more romantic, more mild. Uh if you want to have alone time, private time, yeah, you can go there. The restaurants a bit more expensive. The shopping options is not so much. The problem with uh IA is that that is where the crowds actually go to. So if it’s a tourist season uh during the summer, IA will be the most I will say packed place in Santorini. So for us it was FRA. Yeah, we love the hotel there. It was called Villa Renos. I’ll put the amount we spent there per night. It was an awesome place. The views, you can see the caldera views, the sunset, the volcano. In my opinion, equally as good as I. And the best thing is it’s only like 5 minutes walk to the bus station and you got all your food and restaurants and shopping there. Yeah. So consider it. So about food and drinks, this is very important because uh food is our life and uh if you don’t enjoy your food, you won’t enjoy your travel. We didn’t eat in uh we didn’t eat in Parisa where the black sand beach is, but we ate mainly in FRA area. Yeah. So there there’s restaurant dining that’s facing the the agency. Yeah. And the volcano. uh this kind of uh dining experience will cost you maybe about €30 uh per meal. Yeah. But if you go a bit back, maybe about 2 minutes, 3 minutes walk away from uh the cliffside, uh it’s inland a bit, just a few minutes, and then you can get a meal for about €12, €13. Yeah. You can have meals like the uh sulaki that we had. Yeah. And burgers. You can get your girros. Yeah. Giros are something like this. Yeah. Um, also uh they are sort of like uh street food. They are so not so expensive. You can get a kebab maybe for about €6 €7. Okay. If you buy beer or wine at a restaurant, then it’s going to set you back perhaps about €10, €12. But there’s a lot of convenience stores around the area, a lot of mini muts. You can get your beers for only €2, €250. excellent deals. So, pack them up, bring them to your hotel, drink them. You go to the mini mart, you can get a wine bottle of wine for maybe about 12 to€20. You don’t have to spend much. So, Santorini uh is an expensive place on the whole, but if you maybe do a bit of research and look around, open your eyes, you will find deals and it can be cheaper. Here, welcome, boy. Okay. So, the next thing is the attractions. Unfortunately, we are a bit old, so we don’t like to be too adventurous in what we do. Some people say we’re a bit boring. Yeah. But that’s us. Yeah. Maybe you guys might be different. Okay. Santorini has a lot of island hopping you can do. Yeah. You can actually visit the volcano as well. There’s ATV that you can uh rent about 40 to 60 depend on the type of ATVs and you can drive around all over the island. Um and enjoy the island at your free time of course. Yeah, there are restaurants as mentioned and IA of course as mentioned is the place that everybody flocks to just to take a nice picture but in my view if you just take a walk from FRA and then I can’t remember the places in between from FRA to IA. I’ll put it just up here. Okay. So from Vera to Ia when you take a walk it takes about two hours to walk. Mind you we didn’t do that. Yeah. But what we did was that we took like a maybe a 45 minutes walk. The views were excellent. There was so many things that you can actually enjoy as restaurants, shops and you really have a a good feel of how Santorini is. So I is not the only place that you can enjoy. Fra in my opinion equally as good. As you can see the scenes that we took from our walks from FRA to a bit maybe about 30 minutes out towards IA. Apart from that you can go to the black sand beach, the red sand beach and the white sand beach. For the white sand beach, it can only be accessible using a boat. So we didn’t do that. So you have to take a boat from the red sand beach and and then of course stop at the white sand beach. We didn’t do that. We saw pictures of it. Um not to our liking. Maybe to yours, but not to our liking. Okay. For the red sand beach, it looks nice. It looks excellent. But the problem with the red sand beach is you need to actually uh hike down a bit. So, where the bus stops, you still need to go down, I think quite a steep cliff. Of course, there’s stairs. It’s safe, but you just got to be careful. You got to walk down take it probably takes time for you. Wear good shoes and then you got to walk up. That’s the thing. That’s the worst part of it for me. So, for us, so that’s why we didn’t do it. We did black sand beach. Of course, we took a bus to Parisa and the black sand beach is the easiest and most accessible place to be. So from Parisa, you just take a 7 five 7 minutes walk and you reach the black sand beach and you see the beauty of the beach. Of course affected by the volcano, the lava and I think there’s some scientific reason why it is black. It is not sandy. It’s more pebbly. Yeah. But on the whole it was an experience. There are places to drink and eat there just by the back black sand beach and yeah, you just enjoy it and take a fresh breath of the air. Yeah. Okay. So, next in terms of safety, Santorini is a very safe place. It’s for tourists. Yeah. There’s a police area around. You did see a few policemen, but not not that many. I don’t think so. They need it. So, when we were there, we were walking at night, 11:00 p.m. 10:00 p.m. 11:00 p.m. around that period. And it was fine. It was fine. So no issues on any safety. You didn’t felt threatened at all. Yeah. But of course be logical and be reasonable in what you do and you should be fine. In terms of the language, no worries. If you are English speaking, you will have absolutely no problem because English is spoken everywhere. And the best part is the Greeks are so nice. Yeah. There sometimes that we were lost. We couldn’t find the bus stop uh at IA. So we just asked around. So we ask the the Greek uh drivers or maybe you get people passerby walking just ask them they’ll just point out to you and they are all very nice very helpful and sometimes you can have small talk with them and understand them more. Yeah. So no issues in on the language. Yeah. As long as you speak English and Greek of course. Yeah. The payment methods. Okay. When you’re there we use predominantly credit cards and of course cash. But when you go to the restaurants, they have this tradition whereby on the spot they when you’re sitting down, they will ask you, so are you using cash or credit? So straight away they will ask you up front. So you got to make a decision there. And um yeah, you can use both. No issues on that. Even at the mini marts, even at the uh snack areas, the small street side food stores. Yeah, they use cards as well. So quite convenient. So now this is where the bonus tips based on our experience. Yeah, I hope it works for you as well. Firstly, first and foremost, because if you’re getting a hotel where the cliff side is, the caldera is, it can be pretty steep and a lot of walking that you have to do downhill and uphill. So try if you can not to actually carry heavy luggages like we did. It can be pretty sore on your legs and yeah, travel light if you can. If you’re coming from Athens, perhaps leave your heavy luggages at a hotel there if you’re coming back, of course, and then stay in Fra for a few days or and go back to Athens and pick up your heavy luggages. Yeah, that will help. Okay. So, no heavy luggages, wear good shoes because in Santorini, it’s practically a cliffside. So the area where you stay is uh the cliff side the caldera is facing the egg sea and then inland is where the locals stay and then further up that’s the airport. These are flattish. Yeah. So this is the part where it is a bit of hiking to do when you’re moving up and down. Yeah. So no heavy luggage. Okay. The next thing is especially in IA when you’re walking maybe due to the tourism there there are a lot of donkeys that will walk along the path where the humans are also walking and they do poo so keep your eyes open look down you don’t want to be stepping on pool and spoiling your holiday especially in uh fe I didn’t we didn’t experience that so take care on that part if you’re booking a hotel I mean I would say and what we did was we boo a nicer hotel of course you pay a bit more for the nicer hotel. You will have a nice balcony patio area. Maybe sometimes if you’re lucky, you can have a jacuzzi uh and a sitting area facing the agency, the volcano, the caldera area, the sunset views. Beautiful. If you have a meal in a similar restaurant having all these beauty in front of you, you’re going to pay a lot more for your dinner, for your lunch. Yeah, it can be €20, €30, €40 and up. The glass of wine as as I said earlier would also cost you quite a lot maybe 10 to 15. So if you want to do a savings what you need to do is get a bottle of wine either from duty-free before you come or from the mini mats you can get easily get a bottle of wine €20 you can actually pack your food to your room and have the equally brilliant experience. Pro tip also, there’s a lot of restaurants in Santorini that actually deliver food to you at your hotel. Yeah. So, if you do that, you’re going to have a lot of savings. And that’s what we did for a night and was really wonderful and the experience was marvelous. Really recommend it. So, the last tip is regarding transportation to and from Santorini. So, we came actually from Athens. Yeah. So it was transited from to uh Athens and Athens to Santorini. So we actually took a flight a propellant plane. Beautiful. Yeah. About €50 to€60 per person. It’s one way. It took an hour. It was fast. It was convenient. And we reached Centtorini. We took the taxi. Uh we were impatient. So we took a taxi and then straight to our hotel. All in all from Athens to our hotel, it took maybe about an hour and a half. So very good. It was very good. Yeah. However, if you want to see the beauty of Santorini and the islands, when you’re coming from Athens to Santorini and you see a lot of islands, you enjoy the agency, then you take the Blue Star Ferry. Uh these are huge fairies. They have lounges. They can actually, I think, park cars there, bring the cars along. And then, of course, you have your uh lodging rooms where you can stay. It takes about 8 hours, 9 hours to get from Athens to Santorini. So you can have actually a small little room where you have your beds, your cabin, your own personal washroom. Yeah. So that is a choice that you can do if you have the time. I can’t remember what the price will put it up here. The price of the blue star ferry. If you have the time, do it. But please we experience the other ferry which was the skyjet ferry. Okay. The skyjet ferry is a smaller ferry. very typical ferry where they can house maybe about 100 passengers. I would say 150 maybe. Yeah. Uh a small little area for you to buy your food and drinks. Nothing much. And then you just sit down there for 5 and 1/2 hours because the ferry is so small. So it it moves, it tilts and it’s fast. So it goes like you can be hopping around. So take the anti-nausea pill if you have. we didn’t take it. So, we had to really have to talk to each other to ensure that we don’t focus on the bouncing of the fairies and it was more expensive than the flight. Maybe it’s because of the circumstances that we took the ferry because the airports were closed during that period. There was a strike in Greece. So, airports no flights. So, we had to take that one ferry from Santorini to Athens. It took 5 and 1/2 hours. We endured it. Wasn’t good experience. I wouldn’t recommend it. It cost about €110 each person. Yeah, I would always recommend uh taking the flight because I’m rather impatient. We are rather impatient and if you have the time then the blue star ferry. Try not to go for the sky jet ferry. That’s what they call it. It’s fast but it’s trippy. Yeah. So these are bonus tips that hopefully may benefit you if you’re going to Santorini. Yeah. We enjoyed our stay there. The weather there was a bit cold because we went wasn’t at a peak season of tourism. it was sometime in April. Whereas the tourists, I think the period starts from maybe June, July, August around that range. April is a bit cold. It ranges maybe from 13° to 19°. So if you can take the call, but what you do, you will enjoy the time there because there’s not many people there. Maybe one of the reasons because of the earthquake scares that they had in January and February. So people are apprehensive to go there. Yep. But we enjoyed it and we loved it. So, if you guys going to Santorini and you got any questions, put it in the comments. We’ll be happy to look at it and respond to you if we have the answers. Yeah. And hope you enjoy your trip there. Take care.

Are you planning a trip to Santorini?
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