Home » Travel Blog » Arrival in Greece and Mykonos

So, having had a few days to recoup from the epic adventure that was my Greek Island tour, I suppose it’s about time to start recaping what exactly went down in the Aegean. I’ll break this up into different posts based on the islands we visited and what we saw there but first a recap of the trip overall.

I travelled to Greece to meet up with the Busabout Adventures Greek Island Hopper group. Busabout is another tour group under the umbrella of Radical Travel so this now marks my third trip with them (previously I travelled to Ireland with Shamrocker and Wales with Haggis Adventures). I met up with the group and guide to get all of our transportation details and itinerary for the trip at the port in Athens at 6:30am, approximately seven hours after I had arrived the night before so I wasn’t exactly bright eyed and bushy tailed. Because we were one of the last tours, and just squeezing into the end of the off-season, there were only nine of us in the group but the people on my trip ended up being so much fun that it was hard to imagine that an increase in group size would have done anything except make our transports more crowded.

The ten of us, including our guide, got to know each other on the first boat – a five and a half hour ferry ride to Mykonos, our first port of call. Along the way, the ferry stopped off at Syros and Tinos. Anyone who had been napping was given a forceful wakeup call at Syros where local vendors selling the island specialty, homemade nougat, boarded to sell their wares – a process that involved shouting in Greek at the top of their lungs about the quality of their goods, the price, the nougatiness of the nougat and possibly a wide variety of other things we couldn’t understand.

Upon our arrival at Mykonos, we got some of the local history and mythology from Dax, our Busabout guide. With the most interesting mythology of any of the islands we visited, Mykonos is famous for being the battleground of the Olympians and the Titans (the precursors and parents of the Olympian gods including Zeus, Apollo, Athena and all the rest) where they fought for control of the world. Mythologically speaking, this explains the barren, rocky, wind-swept landscape of Mykonos; supposedly it is still scarred from the epic, godly battle. Mykonos is also the point of departure for any tours of Delos, one of the most sacred places in Greek mythology and the birth place of the twin gods Apollo and Artemis. In more recent and verifiable history, Mykonos was also subject to repeated pirate attacks which explains the maze-like streets and impossible-to-navigate city centre.

I was disappointed to learn that Monday, the only full day we’d spend on the island, was the one day tours didn’t run to Delos so I would miss out on the chance to visit that particular historical site but my disappointment was quickly driven from my mind when I saw the beach where we would be staying. In a set up highly reminiscent of my trip to Cancun, beach chairs, a nearby bar, clear waters and sunny skies characterised the landscape and although our basic sleeping conditions certainly weren’t any five star accommodations, the beach more than made up for it.

After getting settled, Dax took our group into the town of Mykonos for a brief tour. We started out at the famous windmills which previously covered the island, working quite effectively in the high island winds, but now remain just for tourist photos; then followed Dax into the maze of the town. A particularly beautiful part of the city was known as Little Venice for it’s seaside dining and beautiful buildings. After a traditional Greek dinner and some cocktails in a bar overlooking the Aegean, I turned in early to catch up on my sleep and prepare for my own tour of Mykonos the next day.

As Delos was unavailable, myself, a the other girls on my trip, decided to head back into town for exploration, shopping and lunch before relaxing on the beach the next afternoon. We had an amazing morning wandering through the streets, getting entirely lost and, to our amazement, beginning to figure out how to navigate the maze by the time we were ready to return to the beach.

It seemed like far too short a time on Mykonos before we were loading our bags onto the less than affectionately named “vomit comet” or high speed ferry that would take us to Paros, the second island in our tour, but we had a fantastic first island experience and were all looking forward to part two!

3 thoughts on “Arrival in Greece and Mykonos

  1. […] See the rest here:  Arrival in Greece and Mykonos […]

  2. Graeme says:

    Hi there,

    I have published this link on the Busabout Community and http://www.facebook.com/busabouteurope.

    Good work!

    Graeme

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