Hi all, so Johnnie covered our stay in Santorini which was fabulous and now I’ll write about our short stop in Athens and the epic ferry journey’s it took to get from there to Croatia!
We caught a ferry from Santorini to Athens at 4.00pm last Thursday and arrived in Athens at midnight. The ferry was quite nice and it wasn’t too packed but bah humbug to a group of French students! Was I really like that as a teenager??? Anyway, we had already booked our hostel near where the ferry drops you off because we didn’t want to worry about figuring out where we had to go so late at night and it was fantastic to just get off the boat and there was our hostel! But the area it was in was a bit dodgy! Anyway, the next morning we headed into Athens proper where we checked out the Acropolis and it was every bit as inspiring as I thought it would be. Athens city itself is hot and dusty but the Acropolis is on a hill that has quite a lot of trees on it and gets a bit of a breeze so it was way nicer than down in the town. The whole area is paved in marble which is amazing! It really must have been some sight back in the day!
So then we had a cunning plan to get a travel agent to figure out how to get from Athens to Dubrovnik in Croatia because our efforts on the internet were useless! It seemed really hard and my goodness, it was! As soon as we asked about transport to Croatia the travel agent said (while thoughtfully pushing his cigar to one side of his mouth and blowing the smoke in our faces) ‘you can’t’. So, not surprisingly we went to a different travel agent! This one also seemed to think that it was going to be difficult as did the next one and the next one! So we decided to sort it out ourselves by going to the main train station in town thinking that the trains would be no problem... well, it wouldn’t have been if you don’t mind catching different trains and ending up in Serbia. Which would have been an adventure in itself but... we ended up going the option of a ferry from Patra in Greece (a 3 hour bus ride away) to Bari in Italy then another ferry from Bari to Dubrovnik, Croatia.
So that’s what we did! We didn’t spend much time in Athens which was OK because apart from the very cool Acropolis we didn’t really connect with the very hot and dusty city of Athens. So at 10am Saturday morning we left Athens for Patra then at 4.30pm that day we climbed aboard the ferry to Bari, Italy arriving there at 11am the next day and then we had a very boring wait at the port until the ferry to Dubrovnik arrived at 10pm that night. I tried to take some pics of ‘the epic journey’ but by the end of it, I was waaaayy too over it to take photos of a grumpy, dirty and smelly Johnnie and Shazza so you’ll have to be satisfied with pics of just Athens!
Random thoughts on Athens and ferry travel...
- Eat Gyros’ to save money, they are really cheap and yummy! (Not so sure how healthy they are though!)
- Take toilet paper with you for the ferry toilets, oh and you’re not allowed to put the paper into the toilet, use the bins provided... gross gross gross!
- OK, this is important, get to the front of the line to board the ferry! If you didn’t pay for a cabin onboard (very expensive) then you need to stake out your territory on deck as ruthlessly as you can otherwise you’re sleeping upright! (Oh and make sure the Italians don’t push in front of you!!!)
- Make sure you take heaps of water, snacks, a blow up pillow, a towel or even a compact sleeping bag if you can because the deck gets cold in the middle of the night and it ain’t so comfortable!
OK, that’s all! Keep tuned for the Dubrovnik Blavel from Johnnie!
