Dateline June 14, 2016, Greek Isles on the Oceania Sirena
We came to the port to check in for the cruise and were handed a memo: "Egypt stops canceled." Egypt and Israel were the whole reason we had booked this ship; the rest was gravy. Our hearts sank.
We decided to let everyone else line up to give the staff an earful, and went off to find lunch at the Terrace Restaurant instead.
Gordon and Karen. We spotted a couple at a table and asked if we could join them. We had no idea, sitting down, that we were meeting two of the dearest friends we would make on the whole trip. Gordon Barnard and Karen Perry, from just outside Phoenix. We will have a good deal more to say about them as this leg goes on, but the short of it is that the friendship has lasted, and we believe it will for years to come.
After lunch we found our room, a Concierge Veranda, a touch smaller than we had pictured, but it felt grand to set the bags down and let someone else do the fussing for a while.
The cancelled Egypt stops had set off a cascade: five new ports, an extra day in Israel, and a finish that would no longer be Istanbul. We had booked a number of our own excursions on shore, so there were calls to make and refunds to chase.
As for Oceania, we will be diplomatic. Their customer service and ours got off to a rocky start, the kind that has a couple muttering "never again" before the lines are even cast off. But the ship had twelve days to win us back, and we like to think of ourselves as fair-minded people. We would let them try. Now, back to the adventure.
Santorini. Santorini was the first of the Greek islands we touched. It is what was left after a huge volcanic eruption blew the original island apart, leaving the caldera you see today, a great flooded crater some seven miles by four, ringed on three sides by cliffs that rise nearly a thousand feet. The bay runs so deep that only the largest ships can anchor in it, so we tendered ashore in the boats. It was in that line for the boats that we found Gordon and Karen again, and they threw in with us for the day.
There are three ways up to the top: walk, ride a donkey, or take the cable car. We took the cable car and felt no regret about skipping the path, which the donkeys share and decorate freely. There are old black-and-white photographs on the walls of the cable-car station showing the donkeys have been at this a very long time.
At the top we wandered the shops and passed a place offering a pedicure of sorts: you lower your feet into a tank and let the little fish nibble the dead skin away. Tempting and a bit creepy in equal measure, so we kept walking, to the bus stop and a ride out to Oia at the far end of the island. The bus wound along the cliffs, locals getting on and off, and cost five euros each way. The ship's excursion to see much the same thing ran a hundred and forty-nine dollars a head.
In Oia we walked the lanes above the shops and found a restaurant tucked at the top of a building. We chose well. The views were unreal and the beer was cold, and we sat a good long while taking in both.
Janice had been hunting a scarf across half of Europe and finally found it in one of the little shops. We rode the bus back, got off a stop early to walk down the cliffs toward the cable car for the views, then took the car down and stopped at a local shop for a few bottles of Santorini wine to carry aboard. A fine day.
Heraklion, Crete. The next morning John was nursing a cold and a sore throat and chose to stay aboard and rest, so Janice headed into town on her own. She was on a mission: after being served wine from a pitcher all over Italy, John had his heart set on bringing a proper pitcher home, and Janice meant to find one. The shops near the port were all trinkets and trash, so she walked on to the Lions.
The Morosini Fountain, the Lions, is the loveliest thing the Venetians left Heraklion. Four lions pour water from their mouths, and when it was built it solved the city's water troubles, a thousand barrels a day. The square has a darker past, too; under Arab rule a thousand years back, it was the largest slave market in the eastern Mediterranean.
Janice thought about walking over to the Koules Fortress on the harbor, decided a photograph would do, and headed back to the ship for a quiet afternoon by the pool. We both wanted to be rested for the three days in Israel ahead.
Limassol, Cyprus. We pulled into Limassol the next day, and Gordon, Karen, John, and Janice set off together, only to learn it was a holiday. The old-town shops were shut and even the castle was closed, so we caught the local bus to the end of the line to see a big new resort, which turned out to be closed until 2017. The driver told us we ought to have gone to the ruins. Truth be told, after ten weeks we were thoroughly ruined out.
We doubled back to the old town, found a place advertising beers for three euros, and had a long, easy lunch, better than anything on the ship, until it was time for the shuttle back.
Rhodes. Coming in to Rhodes we caught a picture of the city from the water, a beautiful sight.
Once docked, we noticed a US Navy ship across the way. Curious, we looked up her hull number: the USS Anzio, a guided-missile cruiser. She had been in the news that January, the ship that took aboard the ten American sailors held briefly by Iran after their two boats strayed into Iranian waters.
Rhodes is the largest of the Dodecanese islands, known for its beaches, its ancient ruins, and what the Knights of St. John left behind from the crusades. After breakfast we walked up to the Palace of the Grand Masters, once a Turkish prison and now a museum, and down the medieval Street of the Knights. The shops were full of lovely things, but at this point in life we have no need to gather more of them. They say it is the most complete medieval city left standing anywhere, and walking it, you believe it.
A day at sea. There is usually nothing to report from a day at sea. This one was different. We were at the pool bar with a few cocktails, working out roughly where we were on the map, when Gordon noted we were passing Syria. Right about then an emergency code sounded through the ship, and a minute later a generator started pushing smoke into the air. A fire had broken out in a deck-three kitchen. We did not love the idea of taking to the lifeboats just then, not toward that particular shoreline.
A while later, still at the bar, a jet passed low over the ship. Gordon, who flew for a living, called it an F18. Not long after came a sonic boom as it buzzed us close, though we never spotted it. Later still, with Janice in the shower, the whole ship shook from another pass. An F18 narrows the list of countries it might belong to, and our guess was a US fighter, but we will never know whose it was.
