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Santorini

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Three Great Islands: Rhodes, Santorini, and Mykonos

I just wrapped up a shoot for a new show about three Greek islands in the Mediterranean: Rhodes, Santorini, and Mykonos. Here are a few highlights.

St. Paul's Bay on the island of Rhodes

St Paul’s Bay, Lindos

The whitewashed town of Lindos is the top side-trip on Rhodes — and the only place in the world where I’ve sunburned my penis. In the 1970s, it was a desolate hideaway, completely wild, and known as a place where backpackers enjoyed the freedom to do a little nude sunbathing. Today, it’s a sleepy little resort, and no one is risking such an intimate sunburn. (That said, just driving around these islands in an open Jeep at midday was brutal under the fierce sun. At one point, I felt like an Arab sheik, hiding under whatever shelter from the sun I could find.)

Rick hiding from the sun under a towel

Oia is every shutterbug’s favorite village on Santorini. It’s also a huge hit with Asian brides. It’s trendy in Asia for couples to fly to Santorini for romantic wedding portraits…months before their wedding. My crew and I must have seen 20 brides and grooms — none of them married yet — getting iconic, Greek Isles wedding shots done for their big day.

Best Santorini viewpoint

A wedding portrait with a view over Santorini

An engaged couple sweetly bumping heads looking out over Santorini

Paradise Beach, on Mykonos, may be the ultimate party beach of the Greek Isles. I spent time there as a student — and I think it’s been thumping ever since. While very youthful at night (and likely less welcoming), during the day I found it enjoyable for people of all ages.

Paradise Beach on Mykonos

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Treasure Islands: Filming in the Mediterranean

My TV crew and I just spent two busy weeks on a Mediterranean cruise. While our primary goal was to shoot a one-hour documentary about how to cruise smartly, we also used our shore time to shoot a new episode about islands in the Mediterranean.

Our four days on Santorini, Mykonos, Rhodes, and Malta were filled with intensive filming. We were always among the first people off the ship and the last ones back on, 10 hours later. It is amazing how much you can accomplish during one day on shore (whether sightseeing or producing a TV show about that sightseeing) when you’re well organized.

I don’t know these islands very well (and I’d never even been to Malta) — so the filming experience was a bit different than usual. On each island, we would meet our local guide, show them my rough script, do a little scouting, consider the reality of our sail-away time, and then sit down and make a smart schedule to cover the sights. It was like a game: If we were smart, our guide was good, and the weather was clear, we could get what we needed. Fortunately, the weather was always good (they haven’t had rain since May) — and our guides were all excellent and excited about the project.

Reviewing footage on camera

A local guide would meet us at each port. They would bring their car literally onto the pier, in the shadow of our massive ship. (By the way, you can hire your own local guide with a private car for the cost of about four seats on one of the cruise line’s shore excursion bus tours).

Car pickup at cruise ship

At each port, we’d chart out our options, needs, OCs (the “on-camera” bits when I talk directly to the camera), and all the content I wanted to work into the script. With our time limits, this was an exhilarating challenge for me — kind of a speed-chess version of script writing.

Rick's notes on Santorini

My messy scribbling from Santorini.

 

We intended to make a show about all four of the islands we visited, but the shooting went so well — and there was so much we wanted to share — that I decided to feature just the three Aegean Islands (Santorini, Rhodes, and Mykonos) in this show and save Malta for a future project. (It’s always nice to have something new and exciting available for a TV pledge special.) This way, we can do each island justice while still sticking to our limit of 3,000 words for a half-hour script.

On each of the islands, we worked with a local guide who I really enjoyed. All of them make a living off cruise traffic and can be booked directly with ease: Nick Rhodes in Rhodes (request@rhodesprivatetours.com); Antonis Pothitos in Mykonos (info@delosguide.com); Dimitrios Nikolaidis in Santorini (info@oceanwavetours.com); and Amy Pace in Malta (pacee@vol.net.mt). Thanks Nick, Antonis, Dimitrios, and Amy for making us at feel home on each of your islands.

Guide Antonis Pothitos with Rick on Mykonos

Me and my Mykonos guide, Antonis Pothitos.

 

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Video: Public Television at Your Service!

My TV crew and I are on a Mediterranean cruise, filming a special that will air on public television across the country in January 2019. Today, after an exhilarating (but, frankly, brutal) day of shooting on hot and arid Santorini, we caught the last tender back to our ship. When the security guard scanned my ID card, I was literally the last person to check back in out of the 3,000 travel mates I’m sharing this ship with. (You scan in and out of the ship so they know at any moment exactly who is on board and who is on shore. When you scan, they see a mug shot of you on their screen to make positive identification.)

The sun was low and the caldera of Santorini (with the lip of its crater lined with dazzling whitewashed buildings) was injecting my crew with a little more steam — and I had a notion it would be fun to whip out my iPhone and capture the process. Take a moment with this clip to see my producer Simon Griffith and cameraman Karel Bauer at work. I’ve worked with these two for 20 years now. (I must have spent 800 days filming with Simon, as he’s been with me for every moment of shooting in Europe.)

Also, take a moment to appreciate how public television works. There is no big advertiser shaping our content. This will be the only piece of travel journalism you’ll ever see that shows cruising in a frank, honest, and consumer-oriented way (with no agenda pro or con…simply driven by a passion for helping our viewers know their options and travel smarter, more economically, and with more meaning).

Forgive my little pledge pitch here, but this can only happen with your support. There are so many ways public television helps us live more open and enriching lives, with a positive and outward-looking spirit rather than a fearful and inward-looking one. If you recognize that, you know it’s more important than ever to keep public broadcasting alive and well in our community.

(To see more of me, Simon, and Karel at work, watch The Making of Rick Steves’ Europe.)

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Sunsets on the Road: My Top Ten

I love sunsets. They can be a vivid and romantic capper for a beautiful day on the road. Here are a few dramatic and memorable sunsets that come to mind:

1. On the Greek isle of Santorini, nursing a drink with a single flower in a vase on my table, as I sit on the lip of the crater high above the glittering Aegean Sea.

2. On the Nile, just across from Luxor, as the sun sets, the temperature drops, and villages come alive. As I’m poled along the shore in a classic felucca boat, children frolic, long-legged birds strike a pose, and I glide like a silent voyeur through the reeds.

3. On Denmark’s Aerø Island, warming myself by a beach fire while children splash in the shallow waters of the bay, and parents sit peacefully on the porches of tiny beach cabins.

Ærøskøbing homes

The sun sets on Denmark’s Aerø Island. (Photo: Dominic Arizona Bonuccelli)

4. In Granada, Spain, joining the “Gypsies and hippies” at the St. Nicholas viewpoint as the setting sun makes the Alhambra glow red, evoking the tumult of its violent history.

5. On a ferry charging across the Greek sea, with dolphins — who seem to come out for the sunset — playfully loping ahead of the ship’s bow.

6. In England’s Cumbrian Lake District, sitting pensively on a stone at the Castlerigg Stone Circle just outside of Keswick, savoring a moment which inspires anyone to poetry…especially as sheep stir up the fragrance of the wild grass and the scent comes with a whiff of mystical druids, who once used these stones for their worship, dancing in the long shadows.

7. In Paris, sitting on the steps of the Sacré-Cœur atop Montmartre, surrounded by backpackers, buskers, and local lovers as Paris spreads out before me and slowly the sky grows dark and the City of Light is turned on.

8. On a Norwegian fjord, taking my dessert of ice cream and fresh berries out of my hotel’s dining room and sitting along at the end of the pier. The water is glassy and frightfully deep, black rock cliffs rocket into the sky above me, and the sun dips too early behind the peaks.

9. In Assisi, on the rampart of a ruined castle, with olive groves at my feet leading to a vast and lush Umbrian vista; imagining the age when each town was its own little state, and enjoying the same birdsong that inspired St. Francis.

10. And my favorite sunset: from my deck back home, on the Puget Sound just north of Seattle, as a golden path of sparkles leads across the bay to snowcapped Olympics. The sun settles behind the latest in a series of chosen peaks, and the ferries ply silently across as the water begins to glow like floating lanterns.

What is your favorite sunset far from home?

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Santorini Delights the Masses

The problem built in with cruising is that you hit port with literally thousands of people at the same time. Many of these people are into shopping and gambling as much as they are into travel. In fact, for many, travel is just a way to clean your consuming palate between more rounds of shopping and gambling.

In two weeks of cruising across most of the Mediterranean, congestion wasn’t as big a problem as I expected. But still, the sightseeing focus is on the clichés; everyone seems to do and get excited about the same things at roughly the same time.

The Greek island of Santorini is spectacular and seems to live off of the cruise industry. Its main town of Fira is high above the port. To avoid the long line for the gondola back down to the port, we just hiked half an hour of donkey-pie-strewn switchbacks.

If you can’t see the video below, watch it on YouTube.