There is a door at the top of the old town that is exactly the red I had on. I would like to tell you I planned it. I did not. I got dressed in a dark room at eleven…
Archives for September 2026
The Light Here Does Half the Work – Mykonos
I was supposed to go to Delos today. I did not go to Delos. I have been telling people for three days that Delos is the reason I came, and when I said it, it was true. There is a…
The Last Warm Days of Mykonos
The ferry from Santorini takes a little under three hours, and the wind arrives before the island does. You feel it first as a change in the boat. Then everybody standing outside stops trying to hold their hair down and…
Santorini – The Village At Noon In Megalochori
We only meant to stay one day. The plan was a single afternoon and then the road back. Then the team found a villa two streets from the square, nobody made a serious case for leaving, and by evening it…
Santorini – Blue Hour in Megalochori
It is six in the morning in Megalochori, and the light has not decided what it is going to do yet. The houses are not white at this hour. They are the colour of skimmed milk, and the shadows between…
The Band They Started by Accident – Corfu
I heard the clarinet before I knew where it was coming from. Not music exactly. Scales. Up, down, then up again. Somewhere above me, a child was getting almost to the same place each time and tightening up just before…
Santorini – The Island Behind the View
I kept my promise and left the hotel. I went the wrong way on purpose. Everyone who comes here goes to the rim. The caldera is the reason Santorini is famous, and every hotel, every terrace, every infinity pool seems…
Nobody Prunes Them – Corfu
You land on the water here, or near enough that your body believes it. The runway sits out in a lagoon on a strip of made ground, and the approach comes in low over it with the sea on both…
Santorini – The Day I Did Not Leave
I said I would go down to the water. I went as far as the pool. This was not the plan, and I would like it on record that I intended to go. I had packed the bag the night…
The Best Cinque Terre Boat Tours: Seeing the Five Villages From Below
The train through the Cinque Terre spends most of its time in a tunnel. That is not a complaint, it is the geography. The five villages sit in ravines on a cliff coast so steep that the only way to…
The Best Taormina Boat Tours: Isola Bella, the Grottoes and the Coast Below the Town
Taormina sits two hundred metres above the sea and spends all day looking at it. Everything about the town encourages this. The Corso runs along a shelf in the hillside, the gardens hang off the edge of it, the Greek…
The Best Sorrento Boat Tours: Capri, the Coast and the Bay of Ieranto
Sorrento is not a beach town and it is the best place on this bay to keep a boat waiting for you. That is the honest shape of it. The town sits on a cliff above the water with a…
