8/31/09 to 9/12/09: Various Locations, Greece
Decided to make one of the island destinations our first trip. To get anywhere in Greece you have to fly in through Athens. So after a long flight to Athens we boarded a very small plane for Milos.
We flew Alitalia for the first and last time. Their hub is in FCO airport and it was the most innefficient airport I have ever been in. In summary, Alitalia lost our luggage when getting there and back, and both losses occurred in Italy at FCO. Due to the plane changes it took one cool 24 hours from the time we left our home to the time we reached our first hotel in Milos.
The hotel we stayed at in Milos is called Provatas Beach Hotel. Since Milos is a fairly small island, it has a few towns and a lot of beaches around the island. Our hotel was located right off the Provatas beach in the south center of the island. Since we did not stay in the town (no beaches in the town, just a port) we needed transportation to get around. We rented a small automatic car, for which we ended up paying cash since their processing machine was broken. The rental was expensive compared to similar cars in the US. We were charged a premium for requesting an automatic.
Provatas Beach Hotel:
With our rental we were able to drive around the whole island and check out the different towns and beaches. The main harbor town is Adamas. We spent almost every evening there as there were lots of restaurants with outdoor terraces to choose from. Lots of grilled meats and seafood on the menu. Many items fried. Salads are served with most meals and mineral water. All the restaurants we tried the food was good, but nothing out of the ordinary. I enjoyed the smelt fried fish which brought back childhood memories.
We soon realized the beach right outside our hotel was the nicest beach since it had golden fine sand. All other beaches we checked out had rocky dark sands. Overall we were very pleased with the Provatas Beach Hotel for its proximity to a great beach and the included daily breakfast.
The two highlights of Milos (besides lounging on the beach) are: Plaka and day boat trips around the island. Plaka is a historic city on one of the highest points on the island. It has the white washed houses and a great view of the surrounding islands and waters. It's an ideal place for sunset watching. However, we realized early on that we are not sunset people. So every sunset we went to watch we walked away in the middle of it, never saw it to the end. We like sunsets when they are combined with other activities like: reading, dinner, shopping, but never just sitting there and waiting for the sunset to happen.
Images from Plaka:
The other highlight of Milos was our day long boat trip around the island. You just shop around the Adamas harbor for touring boats for the next day ( and there are lots) and you embark on a day long excursion with various stops around the island. This was a wonderful way of meeting people who were also on vacation. On our boat we ended up being ten tourists and two locals. The countries represented on the boat were: Hungary, Greece, Spain, South Africa, and the US. Talk about a multinational crowd. Everybody had in common English so we had no problems with communication. By the way, when you travel to Greece, everyone involved in the tourist industry knows or understands English, so language was never an issue.
Images from Boat Day Trip:
Breakfast, lunch, and various snacks were provided on the boat trip. The day trip had various stops for snorkeling, cave exploring, and beach lounging.
Milos was a great destination, but coming from the US we would advise to stop in Athens as the first destination to rest and then travel further to the islands. We stayed in Milos a couple of days so we fully recovered by the end.
Next we took an interconnecting water taxi from Adamas, Milos to Santorini. The water taxi was big and accommodating, it had TVs and a restaurant for small refreshments. We bought breakfast from the port before leaving and ate it on the boat. The trip was a luxurious ~2hr in which we read up on our next destination.
Embarking the water taxi in Milos:
