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 before, a towel and a book and the good sunglasses, and woke before anyone else in the hotel fully intending to walk down to the sea. Then I sat on the edge of the bed for a minute, in a room cut into the cliff, and the minute went on for quite a long time.
The rooms here are not built so much as dug. The ceiling is a vault of whitewashed rock curving low over the bed, the walls are thick enough to hold a window a full arm’s length deep, and the light comes through one arched opening at the end and has to travel the whole room to reach you. By then it has gone soft.
These were houses once, dug into the volcanic rock because it stayed cool in summer and held a little warmth in winter, and because digging was cheaper than building. Now they are where you sleep off a ferry.
I think the room decided the day. It is very difficult to feel you should be somewhere else when you are lying inside a hill.
The first coffee I drank barefoot on the terrace, before anyone else had reached the pool. The caldera at seven in the morning is not the blue in the brochures. It is softer and greyer, with the opposite cliff still in shadow and the water flat as a plate. One boat was crossing towards Nea Kameni, leaving a line behind it so straight it looked drawn. Nobody on the terraces below me. Just folded towels on loungers and a man in a white shirt hosing down stone.
Breakfast appeared on a tray without anyone asking what I wanted, which is a kind of luxury I have never been able to explain to people who find it presumptuous. Figs, split open. Bread still warm. Thick yoghurt with honey poured into a hollow in the middle, a small pot of coffee, and a glass of water that began sweating in the sun almost immediately.
I ate all of it.
I had nowhere to be.
By nine I had admitted it to myself. I was not going down to the sea. I was going to read on the plaster bench in the cool of the room, then swim, then do very little in an order I would decide as I went.
There is a particular pleasure in a day with nothing in it. I think it is rarer than it should be when you travel, because travel teaches you to use every hour. You are somewhere expensive and far away, so every hour has to justify itself.
I have walked cities from dawn until midnight so as not to waste them and come home remembering almost none of it. Today I did the opposite, deliberately, and I remember almost everything.
The plunge pool on the terrace is small, a rectangle of pale blue set into the whitewash, and the first step is colder than you expect because the sun has not reached the water yet. I stood in it to mid-calf for a while, negotiating with myself.
Far below, a cruise ship was lowering its tenders and the first boats were already heading for the old port beneath Fira, where the donkeys and cable car wait. From up here they looked like toys.
I was extremely glad not to be in one.
At midday I moved to the long pool, the one that runs to the edge of the terrace and simply stops, so its surface seems to join the sea several hundred feet below. It is a trick, obviously.
It works every time.
You swim to the far end, fold your arms on the lip, and there is nothing in front of you but water. For a moment you cannot see where one ends and the other begins.
I swam slowly, the way I swim when nobody is timing anything, up and back until I lost count and then stopped trying. At noon the light off the whitewash is so bright you have to close your eyes to look at anything, so I put a straw hat over my face and listened instead.
The pool filter. A woman two terraces down speaking German on the telephone, explaining something at great length to somebody who was clearly not listening. A bell somewhere in town. The wind, arriving in the afternoon as regularly as a visitor and moving every towel on the terrace a few inches to the left.
Later I went back into the cool room with wet hair and lay on top of the covers with the door open to the glare. There is something lovely about lying in darkness and looking out at heat. It is the same pleasure as rain on a window when you are indoors, only turned inside out.
I slept, I think, for twenty minutes and woke to somebody setting a table outside.
Figs again, and cold water at the little table on the terrace. I sat with my feet on the warm step and watched the shadow of the opposite cliff begin its slow crawl across the water towards us.
Camille wrote to ask what I had seen today. I told her the truth: a ceiling, a pool and a hat, in that order.
She sent back one word, finally, and I am choosing not to examine what she meant by it.
At the end of the afternoon I swam once more. The water in September is warm enough that the evening swim is the best one, warmer than the air by the time the sun goes. I stood waist-deep at the far edge while the sun dropped into the sea behind Therasia, and for about ten minutes the water around me went gold, then copper, then ordinary evening blue.
This is the same sunset people queue for in Oia. I watched it from the water with nobody in front of me and a towel waiting on a lounger.
I felt slightly guilty about how much easier it was, and then I stopped.
They lit the lamps along the terraces after that, one by one. The pool below glowed pale from inside, and the caldera went so dark you could tell where the water was only by the lights of the boats.
I sat outside with my hair wrapped in a towel and a glass of the island’s white wine, still cold, and did not move until it was properly night.
I did not go down to the sea. I did not see anything I had not seen before. I did not take a single photograph worth keeping.
It was one of the best days I have had all year.
Tomorrow, I promise myself, I leave the hotel.
V.
More images from Santorini
