The kids and I spent the day in the countryside with my father and his wife. Walked and talked and made sushi.

My father is struggling with a bad back so he couldn’t join us for any of the activities any longer, so here’s us walking with my brother instead. I swear I definitely didn’t line them up this time, it just happened!

This year there’s peas growing in several of the fields closest to their house, which makes for good snacking.

As usual, the trip to Estonia wouldn’t feel complete without a visit to the adventure park at Otepää.

Thanks to Ingrid, I have some photos of me climbing as well.

The last trail is challenging for all of us. Now that Adrian is as tall as the rest of us, we’re on an equal footing.

That trail ends with the so-called Tarzan leap – hold on to a thick rope and leap off a platform to swing across a twenty-metre gap to a net on the other side. After a few attempts it no longer feels scary – as long as I don’t stop to think about it.

Of course we’re all harnessed and clipped into things so there’s no real risk.

The trails all end with zipline rides, which is like the cherry on top.

Finally the two long zipline rides across the valley and back cap off the entire day.

The Hansapäevad festival has shrunken and simplified into a Hansalaat market. Gone is most of the medieval feel and all the cultural activities; we’re left with just a market. Which is still fun but not the same thing.

We had vaguely planned for a picnic but then the kids ended up just eating market food instead. Bubble waffles. If I’d had more energy, I’d maybe have tried to argue for a picnic but I didn’t. Perhaps that was a good thing, because we got hit by several surprise rain showers later in the day.

After browsing the market we went to Toomemägi and climbed the cathedral ruins there.

Dogs and kids with bad knees stayed down below.

My friends are all dog owners now, and the dogs are on the large and energetic side. The easiest way for us all to meet up is to go out for a walk with the dogs.

I ran ahead a bit to get some distance for the photo. I suspect Ingrid lined them all up in the meantime.

Today is leaving and flying home day, so we’re not doing anything exciting. Here are some photos of our lovely hotel instead. Hotel Andreas in Kamari. Great location, wonderful environment and ambience, good beds, great service, decent breakfast.



I think we had the best room in the whole place, with a balcony facing the beautiful, lush front garden with bougainvilleas and lemon trees and cactuses and umbrella trees.

Breakfast in the garden was a very pleasant start for every day.

We are sort of running out of hikes on this island. I can understand why many hiking holidays combine half a week on Santorini with half a week on Naxos. I did find one more promising walk near Kamari, though. Not to any place special – just from one village to another.

Small cobbled streets, ordinary small houses, no crowds. Nice.

I made a serious tactical miscalculation, though. The walk was less than 5 km, which is far less than we usually walk, so I thought we could do it there and back again. Start in Kamari, walk to the other village, turn around and walk back home again.

What I didn’t take into account was the heat, firstly, and secondly the altitude gain. The other village was up on a bit of a hill. And climbing a hill in this heat was more than we could do. The first bit was flat, but after 10 or 15 minutes of climbing, and realizing that we still had at least another hour of that ahead of us, we gave up.

At that point we’d reached a small plateau on the hillside with pretty nice views – looked like a local picnic spot – so we felt like we’d walked to some place at least, not just nowhere, and we were all very much OK with turning back, after admiring and photographing the views.

After all the walking and touristing – the boat ride was surprisingly tiring and we walked more steps than we had thought – we took the day off today and just hung on the beach. Well in shade under large parasols, because none of us particularly wanted to get sunburned. Good books, smoothies and other snacks, and even a little bit of bathing.

A non-walking day today. Instead we visited the archaeological excavation/museum at Akrotiri. Like the site at the top of the hill near Kamari, this town dates back to the Bronze age. It was destroyed by the volcanic eruption in 1600-something BC and the excavation has been in progress for some fifty-odd years.

The site was interesting to see, but I was disappointed to find out that absolutely everything they’ve found – tools, household objects, frescoes – has been carted off to museums in either Fira or all the way to Athens. Only the walls and stairs and streets themselves are left here, as well as a few token clay vases, and castings of bed frames, for some reason. (Wooden objects rotted over the centuries, and left behind hollow spaces in the volcanic ash, so when any hollows were found, the archaeologists made casts of them all.) They haven’t even put up replicas or projections or even posters with images.

On the other hand, it was interesting to see archaeologists actually at work, with their brushes and sieves and wheelbarrows.

We had lunch at the beach in Akrotiri, which was a much calmer experience than the crowds in Kamari. I wanted to try something local so I ordered red mullet. My plate did indeed contain a bunch of red fish. I was informed that even the fins were usually eaten and would taste like chips/crisps, which indeed they did.


Then we looked at pretty black rocks on the beach, and threw some into the sea.

Fira to Oia is the top item on all “walking on Santorini” lists and articles. So that’s what we did today.

Fira is the main town on Santorini, and also shares its name with the island. Santorini used to be called Thera or Thira, which after a while became Fira. Like many other towns on the island, it’s a cluster of small, white buildings clinging on to the cliff top.

A few kilometres from Fira we came to Skaros Rock, which looks like nothing but a strange rock outcropping from the distance, but turns out to hold the ruins of a Venetian fortification.

Right next to the ruins there was a loud sign proclaiming the area to be dangerous and forbidden and off-limits, even while there were paths and stairs leading into them. I’m guessing the paths weren’t up to some safety standard so the local authorities were forced to put up a sign to comply with regulations, but clearly they’d realized that actually trying to keep tourists out would lead to more danger of serious accidents than giving them safe paths to walk on.

The views from here made the crescent shape of the island and its volcanic origin very obvious.

The landscape between Fira and Oia was mostly volcanic semi-desert, occasionally interrupted by tourist accommodation in one shape or another. This island truly has a lot of hotels. Then again, I can’t think of anything else they could do if they didn’t have any tourists, because it’s not like you could grow anything much here.

Tufts of this one plant with yellow flowers seem to be the first ones to take root in the dry volcanic ground.


Today there were no clouds and no real shade anywhere. When we finally spotted a sliver of shade along a small chapel in the middle of nowhere, we could finally take a longer break without feeling like we were melting. When we made ourselves small and pulled our legs in close, we could all fit into the shade.

Ingrid kindly took photos of me today again.


Oia was even more tourist-focused than Fira. Everything was either a hotel, a restaurant, or a tourist shop.

Santorini has a fair number of stray cats, that seem to be tolerated most everywhere. There is one who visits our hotel every morning at breakfast time, whom we already recognize, and we’ve seen others feel at home at cafés and restaurants.

Oia is the town where the most famous photos of Santorini tend to be taken, with its blue-domed white buildings.

Today was the only day of this week for which the weather forecast promised a splash of rain in the morning. It seemed reasonable, looking at the sky, so we hung around at the hotel for a couple of hours before going out. This is our view from the hotel towards our planned walk for the day – that somewhat wooded area on the hills, between the two peaks.

But the rain kept not happening and we kept getting more and more restless, so in the end we just left anyway. Some rain won’t kill us.

The walking took us up, and up, and up some more. First in zigzags along the road, and, after the pass, along paths and stairs.


At the top of the hills, we came to the site of ancient Thera, a Bronze Age town destroyed in the volcanic eruption that destroyed most of Santorini and ended the Minoan civilization. It was amazingly well preserved – paths, walls, pillared halls, carved reliefs still fully visible.



Ingrid kindly took some photos of me. I was there, too! (Holding hard on to my hat because it was very windy up at the top.)



We took a different path down, which gave us a nice view of the road we previously walked to get up the hill.

Halfway down there was a cave with a natural spring.

We’d been wondering before why anyone would build a town at the top of the hill where there is no water, but at that time, pre-volcano, the hill was much taller so the town wasn’t at the top. So perhaps they had similar springs there.