The idea of spending five hours cruising on a ferry through the Greek islands to Mykonos sounded EXACTLY like my kind of thing. I imagined watching the sun turning the surface of the water into a thousand diamonds and rendering the infamous white buildings in stark contrast to the blue sky whilst my hair playfully obscures my vision.
Unfortunately for us, reality was a little different.
We awoke to the sound of my iPhone’s foghorn at a little before 5am in order to catch the metro to the Port of Piraeus which all went rather smoothly. We found our ferry and dropped our bags off in the cargo hold then climbed the stairs to the lounge bar to search for some breakfast. One thing I will never understand is why food in a situation like this is so terrible. ‘Terrible’ doesn’t really sum it up, I would prefer to use an expletive, in fact it’s not really worth writing about…
Our designated area was within the middle of the boat and lacking windows… After an hour or two whilst the sun started to come up we tried to catch up on a couple of hours of sleep. Not really being satisfied that the quality of my sleep was worth it, I decided to take a tour of the ferry trying to find a spot in the sun to reenact my fantasy. All I managed to find was a second lounge bar.
Passing through the stages of boredom, I began to near the cusp of delirium at which point I start to feel like I have nothing to loose if I do something radical like sneak into first class. I stood up, brushing my pile of broken toothpicks aside and did just this. Here we had a great view of the sea, albeit through a window and obscured by a patina of salt. Since many hours had now passed since breakfast we decided to play our last card and eat at Greece’s version of McDonald’s, namely Goodys. As I mentioned in another post, I’m intolerant when it comes to eating gluten so I just ordered hot chips and a coke, my friend on the other hand got a cheese burger. Realising that the burger was barely luke warm, suspicions arose and she opted to just eat the bun.
We amused ourselves by watching Greek daytime TV, it turns out that exercises for stay-at-home mothers is a universal language. Startled out of our TV induced stupor by the ferry’s engines being whacked into reverse, we pulled into the port of an island where we were transfixed, for a second time, by some men who boarded the ferry with giant white baskets of baked goods and proceeded to leap masterfully over and through the rows of seats like ants over sugar crystals.
Another 45 minutes and a couple more ports later we were finally deployed like soldiers. Thankfully on the other side of the door we didn’t face the possibility of our deaths, but in fact the promise of a Greek island holiday. Convinced that all our luck must have been used up in Athens, we had one more bend in the road before finding our Mykonos heaven. All our research for this ferry amounted to the fact that we had chosen well the location of our hotel. It was supposed to be a quick five minute walk from the port. It turns out, unfortunately for us, that THIS ferry went to the other port a few bays around. I was up for a coastal walk but my friend decided (thankfully with hindsight) we should taxi and so five minutes later by the leather seats of a Mercedes-Benz we arrived at Porto Mykonos Hotel.
