This Round's On Me

One of the hazards of traveling to Thailand in the off season is heat, humidity, and cloudy raining monsoon days. While traveling in the off-season shouldn’t scare you, there are lots of opportunities to save, my lack of planning ended in a beach vacation monsoon disaster. In Chiang Mai and Bangkok it’s easy enough to make your plans with rain in mind, allowing you to enjoy the vacation cost savings of off-season travel. That being said, Karon Beach is not the place to try off-season travel.

I arrived at Phuket Airport planning to catch one of the many ferries each day to Koh Phi Phi, and another ferry to Krabi Province where my hostel was booked. It was way to expensive to fly directly to Krabi, so this rather convoluted travel plan was meant to save some money. Unfortunately, when I landed at the Phuket Airport, I was greeted with some bad news. The Phuket Airport is full of hotel and tour vendors aggressively seeking your business, and those vendors informed me that the ferry to Koh Phi Phi and Krabi was cancelled that day. Apparently this is common in the off season.

Unsure what to do, I went to my default and booked a hotel room at the closest Hilton hotel with Hilton points. In this case, it was the Hilton Phuket Arcadia resort in Karon Beach. (http://hollandlm.tumblr.com/post/36359749767/hotel-review-hilton-phuket-arcadia-resort-karon) Sadly, it was almost an hour drive from the Phuket Airport, leaving me with not so many options to get back on my original Krabi travel plan.

Arriving in Karon Beach, the town seemed promising. Dozens of stores and restaurants along the beach boardwalk as well as the main street of town. While Chiang Mai had a healthy mix of tourist and local neighborhoods and markets, Karon Beach didn’t have that culture and history. The area was mostly new development built to cater to the tourism industry. The locals clearly don’t spend much time in Karon Beach unless they can satisfy all of their needs with screen printed t-shirts and novelty bikinis. Not even so much as a local produce market anywhere within walking distance of the Hilton resort.  

Most of the restaurants in Karon Beach are hawking burgers and mac and cheese for the unadventurous tourists, so it was a real challenge to find a decent Thai restaurant. The off-season monsoons started to move it, so rather than exploring my options a little further from home, I ducked into the first decent Thai restaurant. Settling for a generic tourist option close to the Hilton, I got to experience a Phuket guitarist covering American classics right on the beach. The Thai food was tasty, but it certainly wasn’t the way they prepare Thai food for their families. Traditional sticky rice was substituted for easy to prepare jasmine. Asking the restaurant about the many traditional Thai dishes missing from the menu they told me that they travel several miles away from Karon Beach to find those traditional dishes.

On the walk back to the Hilton, there was a very popular food truck with a line of both locals from the taxi stand across the street, as well as tourists.  The food truck was a one-women operation which specialized in crepes, giving you the option of dozens of fruits and toppings. I asked for their speciality which turned out to be a banana and nutella crepe. Creamy banana, smooth nutella, and a crepe dripping in cooking oil, it was exactly what I would expect from indulgent late-night snack food.

Final advice, plan ahead. Make sure your ferry tickets are booked ahead of time, and fly as directly to your destination as possible. The off-season doesn’t allow for as much spontaneity, so take the uncertainty out of the off-season to enjoy both everything Thailand has to offer, while saving money. The beach towns are not going to be as much fun during monsoon season since frequent rain showers don’t allow much time for lounging on a beach, and as always, avoid the mega resorts. If you are going to fly around the world for a vacation, go where the locals go and really get to know your destination.

Arriving in Santorini our first day the weather was sunny, warm, and beautiful. Taking advantage of the phenominal weather, we took a sailing expedition to the Santorini Volcano and hot springs. (http://hollandlm.tumblr.com/post/37383678495/day-trip-to-the-santorini-volcano-and-hot-springs-in).

The second and third days of the trip, the tropical rains of the Aegean Sea moved in, and it was time to find some rainy day activities on the island. Don’t underestimate the flooding that comes with these storms. The roads were entirely washed out on our walk home from Fira in the rain, so be prepared for the sewage in the streets. A pair of Wellies would have come in handy.

We had already explored the attractions near our hostel in Karterados near Fira (http://hollandlm.tumblr.com/post/11670036088/hostel-review-caveland-hostel-karterados-santorini), so it was time to pick up a rental car to better explore Santorini. There are plenty of exciting things to explore on the island that are definitely outside of walking distance. The entire island from North to South will take no more than an hour to cross including time for getting lost on winding island streets, so it’s easy to make a list of island attractions you want to visit during a one-day driving trip. Another great island transportation option is renting 4-wheelers to explore, but that wasn’t the best choice for a rainy day. Be prepared for driving a manual transmission automobile, and driving on the right side of the road for you Brits and Aussies.

We started at the South end of the island, at the black beaches of Perissa. We originally went looking for the famous red beaches near the Southwest tip of Santorini, but the roads are poorly marked and after much searching and no finding, we settled for the much easier to find black beaches of Perissa. Perissa is clearly a more tourist-focused town with developed beach resorts and tropical food options along the shore. While the summer season is probably packed with tourists, the beach was all but abandoned on a rainy cold autumn day.

Wanting to make it to Oia before it was too dark for picture-taking, we hopped in the car and headed to the Northern tip of Santorini. Oia is the cliffside town you see in postcards of Santorini. There actually seems to be more Santorini locals living in Oia as there seem to be more churches, community centers, and non-hotel homes. Oia has all of the white buildings with blue doors you dream of on Greek Island vacations so bring your camera to make your own postcards.

The walkways are beautiful smooth marble, which can be a bit of a deathtrip on a rainy day in a cliffside town so take it nice and easy exploring on a rainy day. The top of the cliff is the main walkway with all the tourist shops and art galleries. The entrances to the restaurants and hotels are on the downward slope side of the city, with cramped stairways and small signs that will take you to those private expanses.

Like so much of Eastern Europe and the Mediterranean, stray dogs are everywhere. For a town as beautiful as Oia, even the stray dogs are cuter. Grabbing some sweet Greek treats for walking the streets of Oia, you make many new best friends who will follow you for blocks and blocks begging for a bit of your sweets.

Although we managed to dodge the heavy showers for our afternoon trip to Oia, by late evening the downpours were back. We didn’t travel half way around the globe to stay in at night, so we got a group together from our Caveland hostel, and enjoyed a trip to a local nightclub in Fira. The people at the bar / club were very Mediterranean, despite the resort location. Lots of very forward men moving in for a dance, much more forward than the American bars we were used to. The one uniquely European feature of the nightclub was the stripper dance cage seen above. That’s not exactly new, but the high end Russian prostitutes dancing in it was new to me. There were a few wealthy looking older men in this nightclub, and each of them was accompanied by at least two more young Russian escorts. They kept to themselves and didn’t stay in the club long, but it was definitely the first time I had seen such an obvious pay for services exchange in such a small club.

While the sun was shining and the seas were calm our first day in Santorini, but by the time  we were supposed to be heading off to Mykonos, the seas were ruff and all the express ferries, seen above, had been cancelled for several days. Apparently the ferries are frequently cancelled. According to some of the locals, because Greek workers dislike labor, but also obviously because the Aegean Sea is frequently rough and dangerous to travel.

Rescheduling travel to skip Mykonos, and catch the first flight we could manage back to Athens was a pain. People who frequent Santorini know to rebook travel as soon as the skies get gray, so we were apparently the last people to get the memo. Luckily, with all my business travel, my Star Alliance Gold status allowed me to skip ahead in the line to make a flight back to Athens. We added an extra day to our stay in Santorini, and would arrive in Athens a day early. The last minute flight was not cheap, but was going to save us more money than rebooking our InterContinental flight back to the US.

The Santorini Airport in Thira was everything you would expect from a small island airport. One landing strip / runway / taxi way. No mechanical arms to dock to the aircraft, just four glass doors that allow you to walk out to the runway and hop onboard. Everyone who was supposed to be on the ferries was now packed into the airport waiting for flights. Apparently the pilots are much gutsier about facing the storms than the ferry captains. The good news is you will probably make your flight, though frequently delayed up to 12 hours, the bad news is the flight is incredibly rough and tests your faith in the science of flight.

Arriving back in Athens a day before our connecting flight to Los Angeles, we were unpleasantly surprised to find Greek workers were on strike again. No taxies, no trains, no busses were connecting the Athens Airport to the city. There was no way to make it from the airport to the city without bribing a private car hundreds of dollars to take you. Not wanting to risk the money, or our ability to make it back to the airport, we decided to spend the entire next day in the airport. We ate, we slept, and we explored just about every feature and amenity the airport had to offer. Luckily we were exhausted from our exploration of Santorini and found a way to sleep on airport benches as many of our fellow travelers had also chosen to do.

From almost anywhere on the Western coast of Santorini you can see the Santorini Volcano just offshore. If I was a local resident I might think of challenging the swim. Although we arrived in the middle of the night, we didn’t want to waste a day in Santorini so we caught our hostel’s (http://hollandlm.tumblr.com/post/11670036088/hostel-review-caveland-hostel-karterados-santorini) shuttle into Fira where we could catch a boat to the volcano.

From the clifftop city of Fira, it’s actually a pretty long hike down to the boat docks. There are three options for making it down the hill. 1) The speedy but expensive cable car, that frequently has long lines and long waits to get on. 2) Donkeys which can take you down the precarious winding steps more quickly than you can walk, at a moderate price. 3) Walking down the steps. Slow and arduous, but free and grants you lots of photo ops on the way down.

I took option 2 to get down the hill. Watching out for steep steps caravans of donkeys, and lots and lots of donkey poop we made our way down the hill. Our shuttle driver from the hostel dropped us off with 30 minutes to spare before the boat set sail, and we *barely* made it to the boat, practically jumping from shore as the boat was already untied and setting sail.

When we arrived at the volcano there were already several tour boats weighing anchor in the cove. Not a problem, as there’s plenty of volcano for everyone. The tour boats fit at least 100 people each between the upper and lower decks. Our group had the premo spot on the top deck at the rear of the boat so we had 270 degree views of everything. On a beautiful warm and sunny day, it was absolutely a dream come true.

The left us to our own devices on the volcano for about an hour. We were able to hike up to the very top, and check out the volcano peaks and sunken valleys. Awesome vistas of eroded lava fields as well as of Santorini Island itself.

Although I had the perfect footware for a day at the beach, Rainbow sandals, I really wish I had a little more robust footware for hiking over a mountain of lava rocks. None of the trails were really that challenging, but if you’re going to bring your parent or grandparent to Santorini, I would encourage real sneakers.

(Photo Credit scottsantoro.blogspot.com)

The day tour ends with another brief sail to a hot springs cove. The water was definitely warmer than the Aegean, but smelled pretty strongly of sulfur. A refreshing dip after hiking around on black lava rocks. The real fun was getting to jump off of our sailboat into the sea. A little like walking the plant of a pirate ship.

The tour ends dropping you back off at the bottom of the cliff in Fira. You have the same three choice to make it back up to the top of the cliff. I went with walking so I could stuff myself with a falafel sandwich back in Fira. Totally a rockin trip made even better by our Australian friends from the hostel. Perfect weather, perfect company, and an awesome day trip to a volcano.