Page 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 Wednesday, September 27: We spent the morning repacking and getting ready for our side trip to Turkey. Charlie and Ore drove us to the airport after lunch. The Olympic Airways flight was an hour and a half late, arriving in Samos at 4:20 p.m. We still hoped to catch the 5:00 ferry to Turkey and rushed out to get a taxi. The driver spoke a little German, but no English. He did his best to get us to Samos Town as quickly as possible. We had a really wild ride but, as the harbor came into view, we saw that the ferry had already pulled away. It seems the 5:00 ferry really leaves at 4:30. We soon discovered that you have to buy your tickets and turn in you passport hours before you can board the ferry anyway. We bought tickets for the 8:00 a.m. ferry the next day. It was surprisingly expensive. For the round trip, the tickets cost $30 each, the Greek port tax was $17, and the Turkish port tax $20. A Turkish visa cost another $20, for a total of $77 each. On the other hand, overnight accommodations were surprisingly cheap. We got the "penthouse" room on the roof of the nearby Athina pension for about $17 without breakfast. The roof served as a huge patio area, and there was a good view if the harbor.
We strolled along the waterfront and some shopping streets, then had dinner on the waterfront. They threw in a free glass of wine with our mousaka as an inducement to get us to eat there. We walked back up the hill to the pension and sat on the patio. We went to bed early, but then some other guests arrived and made a lot of noise in the stairwell for at least an hour, so we couldn't get to sleep right away. Page 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 |
