Practical 10 days guide to Greece. There is more to Greece than islands.

The trip started with early morning Delhi-Doha-Athens flight. We reached Athens at 7 PM local time. Local sim card was not available at Airport, which was a minor inconvenience. The airport is not in the Athens city and it took us some 30-45 mins to reach to our hotel. Our first reaction - Athens, with its ancient city charm has glimpse of current volatile environment. As we had return flight booked from Athens only we planned our trip in such a manner that we cover Athens at the end of our trip. We stayed in Athens Way hotel which was perfect fit (cheap, centrally located) as we just needed to spend a night there and we had an early morning train to Meteora. We bought some stuff from the local market and were just too tired from our flights to explore anything.

While we were landing in Santorini, we could see from our plain that we are onto something unique. The small airport added to the charm of this blue-white paradise. We had a pickup arranged from our suite. We wanted to stay in typical white house in Santorini (on the hill slope facing sea). They were obviously more expensive but you are not going to Santorini every year. We were there for 2 days and we chose Thira as our base. Santorini is a very small island and we booked a two wheeler to cover it. I am not equipped to explain in writing how beautiful the place is - instead I am just gonna share few photos from our stay there.

What to say about Meteora? Lot of people do not include this beautiful place in their itinerary and focus on islands but this hidden beauty is truly one of its kind. The place is known for monasteries on big rocks. How monks were able to build such beautiful monasteries on the rocks is something no one can wrap their heads around.

Kalabaka was a beautiful surprise. It is a quintessential Greek small town (warm people, fresh air, amazing feta cheese beautiful architecture). Kalabaka is just next to Meteora and you'll have to stay in this town if you want to visit monasteries as there are not much staying options in Meteora. We had booked train journey in the evening and were returning to Athens. We stayed in Athens again for one night and had early morning fight to Crete.

Crete is the largest island of Greece and has two domestic airport. We booked our hotel in Heraklion as it was right in the center and we planned to self drive around the island. We landed in Chania airport which is West of the island and picked up our pre booked car and started driving towards Heraklion which was 142 KM drive.

https://photos.app.goo.gl/PoPAyhFPMaVnBep89

We reached Heraklion and there were just way too many small lakes, beaches, historical sites to visit. We spent three days there and we could easily do three more days, that too would not be enough. Best part was the drive in Crete, the landscape is beautiful and the ocean's water shade is breathtaking.

Now we are back to Athens. We covered famous The Acropolis, The Acropolis museum, and roam around the city for two days without any agenda. There was Van Gogh exhibition also in town which we missed due to time constraints.