My tour of Santorini

I have always wanted to go to Santorini so this was one of the reasons for choosing my recent cruise on MSC Musica.
The cruise line excursions can be very expensive so I booked a tour through Cruising Excursions.
They are an independent tour company that we recommend to our customers and I have to say they were excellent.
The voucher that was issued advised us to get an early tender as the queues can be long for the cable cars if there are lots of ships in port and they don’t wait for any late passengers.
We were to meet at 9.30am at the exit to the cable cars. We got up very early to get our tender tickets to make sure we were off very early and as there were no queues we had about an hour to look around Thira before meeting our guide Poppy.
Poppy was from Athens but visited Santorini about 20 years ago and fell in love with the place and has lived there ever since. Its easy to see why as this place is stunning.
Even better was that there was nobody else booked on the tour so we ended up with a private tour in an air conditioned minivan. Poppy told us the day before they had 44 people booked so we just got lucky.
We walked through Thira to meet our driver and was taken to Oia which is the place you see in all of the brochures . It is so beautiful and the people were so friendly and welcoming. It is very hot and crowded so we were told it is better to go from the 15th September when there are less tourists.
Poppy walked us though the town and made sure we got to all of the best viewing points, pointed out nice places for food and drinks and gave us lots of information about the island.
There are lots of designer shops here but they are all in small traditional buildings so nothing looks out of place. The blue domed roofs are all churches and most of the hotels are tiny with plunge pools built into the cliffs.

Not all are air conditioned because they are built into the caves to keep cool and the buildings are all white to keep out the heat.
We had some free time here then off we went to sample some wine tasting. We had the kids with us so they were provided with cool drinks and we got to sample 3 different wines. We were not here for a long time but the people were lovely and the views were stunning.

We ended the tour back in Thira where Poppy recommended a lovely restaurant to have lunch before heading back to the ship.
There are lots of trendy restaurants and bars here but nothing is over commercialised so it feels like an upmarket resort in traditional surroundings. I love this place and will definitely be back.
I can now have full confidence in recommending Cruising Excursions to my customers. They are fantastic value and hopefully there will be smaller numbers than the huge long lines of cruise ship tour guides that we saw. They are fully aware of times for each cruise ship and guarantee to have you back to the ship in time.