What a lovely way to spend a Thursday evening enjoying sunset with several glasses of red overlooking the volcano from a terrace in Oia. This adventure involved getting up at 6am in Kokkino Chorio in Crete and driving to Heraklion (2 hours) to catch the Fastcat to Santorini. We had booked accommodation at Nectarious Villa and the lovely Katarina met us at the port with her card for her hotel. It was an enlightening introduction to Santorini as she drove us up ...

Quite a long journey to Crete from Sicily - 3 flights taking all day on Thursday so we were exhausted by the time we arrived in Chania airport and took the taxi 40 mins to our "home" for the next 2 weeks in Kokkina Chorio (red village - so named due to the red roof tiles) which is the house swap that I arranged. This area appears to be "Little England" and almost totally inhabited by retired English people. It is a small village with a mini market for basic sta...

OK it is our last night in Sicily - well now that we are in Mafia country it has lived up to expectations (very low). We eventually found the hotel we had booked based on recommendations on Tripadvisor and unfortunately we tried to check in during siesta time so they were not too happy with us. We got to our room, which is adequate if you do not need to use the toilet (which does not flush) - lucky i have some experience with that and encouraged it to work. We...

Yesterday we left Syracusa stopping to check the ancient remains of the Greek theatre just outside town - another over commercialised operation which we decided to photograph from the outside only so drove around the perimeter stopping at intervals. Today's update is from Taormina - the most spectacular mountainside village where we have just had breakfast on the terrace of our hotel. This has been our "splurge" accommodation and well worth it. Villa Shuler is...

After a reasonable breakfast (Italian of course) we set off from our B&B today to explore Ortigia Island. Beautiful day and we really saw it at it's best. Lovely old sandstone buildings, ruins of Apollo Temple, partly restored fort at the foot of the island (very Moorish in look) . Streets and laneways cleaner than what we have seen before today. Still lots of tourists around but prices are much less than the mainland. Interesting to note that the facult...