Greece 2022

Well Greece blew me away. I sort of knew what to expect on account of researching the fuck out of it but I don’t think I realised how varied it was and how much it actually had to offer. I was worried we’d get historied out too quickly, that if anyone suggested we go look at another ancient ruin I’d have to resist the urge to throw bricks at them. But the ruins were interspersed with beaches and mountains, relaxing by the seafront with a beer or a freddo, stunning little villages, and some of the most spectacular scenery I’ve ever had the pleasure of putting in my eyeholes.

Jump to “Useful shit to know…”

BUDGET for one person (based on two sharing) for 56 days.
Flights: £112.99
Accommodation: £761.63
Ferries: £137.08
Buses, trains: £181.14
Vehicle rental: £282.60
Petrol: £92.41
Groceries: £310.17
Eating out: £335.06
Tea, coffee, drinks: £150.01
Booze: £358.28
Tours: £127.90
Entrance fees: £145.15
Bungy jump: £96.03
SIM card, phone credit: £29.40
Souvenirs: £18.90
Everything else: £125.73

GRAND TOTAL: £3264.48
Average per day: £58.29
Per day without flights: £56.28

The Stories

Useful shit to know…

Athens Metro

It’s a fast, cheap and easy way to get around. There are three lines; Line 1 (Green), Line 2 (Red) and Line 3 (Blue). I find it easier to go by the colours.
You need to buy a ticket before you travel. The ticket machines are available in several languages.
A single “Athens Area” ticket is 90 minutes and you can use as many lines as you need to in that time. If you can get to your destination and back within the 90 minutes, that counts as one.
A two trip ticket is two 90 minute journeys so again, as many changes as you want in that 90 minutes will count as one trip. It only saves you a few cents.
There are other options but these are the ones I used. You can get all the way to Pireaus Port on the Green Line, and all the way to the airport on the Blue Line but you need a special ticket for the latter. You’ll see the option when you’re buying your ticket from the machine.

Island Hopping Around The Cyclades

If you know the name of your boat you can track it on Vessel Finder.
Piraeus Port is absolutely vast but there’s a free shuttle bus that runs from one end to the other.
You can get to Piraeus with the Green Line (1). I believe they’re extending the Blue Line to reach Piraeus but I don’t know when that’s scheduled for completion.
Rafina Port is much smaller, you can get there by bus. I’ve written a short guide HERE if you need help. You no longer go from the Mavromataion bus station.
You can book tickets on a few websites. I always checked them all as sometimes there’d be a better ferry on one but not the others.
Having said that I favoured Ferry Hopper as they were very user friendly and I liked their app.
Other options are Ferry Scanner, Greek Ferries, and Ferries.gr.
Check the confirmation email you’re sent carefully. Sometimes you need to check in on the ferry’s website to get a boarding pass. Sometimes the e-ticket you’ve been sent will suffice. Once we had to go to an office and have the tickets printed.
It’s worth noting, I don’t think a single ferry we caught got us there at the scheduled time. Usually it was late to the port we were waiting at having already visited other islands. Your ferry will likely be late arriving, or leaving, or both.

All the ferries we caught were fuck off great big ROROs. Nice and stable, I didn’t feel sick once, even on a particularly windy day. Even these beasts are at the mercy of the weather though so if it’s very adverse then I’d make sure the ferries are running.

Buses

Whilst, with a lot of planning, it’s probably very doable to travel Greece with buses alone, they’re not frequent and would involve overnight stays in towns you weren’t intending to visit, and a few double backs. Some buses to more remote areas only run once a day. Some only once a week!
KTEL / ΚΤΕΛ have different branches, and therefore websites with timetables, according to where you are in the country. Some websites have English language versions, or I found Google Chrome pretty adept at translating them.
The main KTEL Bus page has information on each different branch.
Long distance buses are big coaches with luggage space underneath.

Vehicle Rental

Obviously the longer you rent a vehicle the lower the daily rate will be. It might depend on the season too.
On the islands we were paying up to €30 a day for a couple of days for a 150cc scooter. Quad bikes were €45 to €60. Buggies cost up to €100 a day depending on the size.
You’ll need the appropriate licence to rent a scooter. They do check.
In Tolo we paid €50 for one day car rental, but when we rented from the same place for eight days she dropped the price to the low season rate of €35 a day.
Greece drives on the right. People have a tendency to drive down the middle of the road on blind corners at speed, and they don’t slow down, they just violently swerve out of your way. Just drive really fucking slowly around blind corners so you have time to react.
You have to pay a toll to use motorways, you can pay cash or card. Make sure you use the correct lane when going through the toll booths as some of them are for the etags only. We found we could get pretty much anywhere avoiding tolls if you didn’t mind the increased journey time.

Money

Greece uses the Euro. (€)
In Athens and on the islands you can tap your card for pretty much anything and no one even blinks. We found that once we were in the Peloponnese, and Central and Northern Greece, whilst card was mostly (not always) accepted cash was very strongly preferred.
We never had problems finding an ATM. We were charged between €2.50 and €3.50 each time.

Plug Sockets

Type C and F, the two round pins. Greece uses a 230V supply with a 50Hz frequency.

Other Important Shit

Don’t throw anything in the toilet, not even your bog roll. No, not even the ones you wipe your arse with. It might seem gross and unhygienic to those hailing from countries whose sewer systems can take a bit of a beating, but it’s normal here. Don’t do it unless you want to drown in poo water.

What We Lived Off

With apologies to the vegetarians amongst you, but the cheapest of eats is the humble gyros pita. That meat you shave off the elephant’s leg in the kebab shop, chips, onions, tomato and tzatziki, all wrapped up in a pita. Usually between €2.50 to €3.50 for one (though we paid an eye watering €5.40 in Oia on Santorini).
It was sweltering hot when we got to Greece and remained so for the majority of our stay so we cooled down with freddos, which is basically iced coffee made with espresso. You can get freddo espresso or freddo cappuccino and it’s usually significantly cheaper if you get it to take away rather than sit in.
Tarrant has a dairy intolerance. It won’t kill her, it just makes her uncomfortable and wary of farting but we found that waiting staff weren’t really trained in the fourteen allergens. She ordered eggs on toast once and checked there’d be no butter on the toast. It came with cheese on toast. Literally no mention of anything but eggs on the menu. On Naxos she asked if the lamb kleftiko had any dairy in it and she’s always careful to state, “milk, butter, cheese, yoghurt…” because English isn’t their first language. He looked at us as if we were crazy and said, “It’s lamb?!” She asked what it came with and he replied, “Potatoes?!” as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. Anyway, the fucker came served on a bed of feta. So if you have any severe allergies you’ll probably want to triple check everything.

SIM Card

If you have an EU SIM then you can use it here but since the UK went crashing unceremoniously out of the EU that’s not a long term option for us. We used what we could of our GiffGaff Goodybags (at the time of writing it was 5GB) then bought SIM Cards.
There’s an electronics chain store called Germanos, you see them everywhere. The chap there set us up with the SIM cards and two packages; one for calls and texts and one for data. Fortunately Cosmote were running a summer special with unlimited data for a month. Make sure they set it to not reoccur.
Once that expired we could have gone back into another Germanos for another package but we decided to download the app and do it ourselves.
The app is entirely in Greek so it was a painstaking process of screenshotting everything and uploading it to the Google Trabslate app but we got ourselves registered.

Your remaining data is shown on the homepage and if you click it you’re taken to this page where you can buy the GIGA packs.

When we wanted to add another data package when our month was up we had to add €10 credit which also got us call time and 500MB of data for a month. Then we used thar credit to buy a GIGA pack.
Giga Month is €8.50 and gives you 4GB for a month. Giga Week is €4 and gives you 6GB for a week. Giga Day Max is €1.50 and gives you 6GB for just one day. We opted for Giga Week and renewed it again after the week.
You can’t get another Giga Week until the last one has expired but you’ll have that handy 500MB to use if you can’t get to WiFi to renew.

Greece 2022

Greece 2022

The Stories

Getting To Know Athens

A Metric Crap Tonne Of Athens

The Mighty Acropolis

Island Hopping – Andros

Island Hopping – Tinos Part 1

Island Hopping – Tinos Part 2

Island Hopping – Paros

Island Hopping – Naxos Part 1

Island Hopping – Delos & Mykonos

Island Hopping – Naxos Part 2

Island Hopping – Santorini Part 1

Island Hopping – Santorini Part 2

Back To The Mainland

Full On Corinth Tourist

Broken Shit On A Budget

Some Time In The Mountains

The Very First Olympics

So Cold It Burns

Show Caves & Murder Towers

Mystras Vs Sparta

Monemvasia, The Big Rock

Extended Stay In Delphi

Holy Rocks

Seat Of The Gods