First I will tell you a bit more about Tinos, because we went for another walk around the town in the morning. We woke up at 9am, just in time for the regular weather forecast over the VHF (Very High Frequency) radio (it's every day at 9am, 1pm, 7pm, 9pm and 1am). The conditions continued to be pretty rough and Maurizio said that we better leave in the afternoon, hoping that the sea would calm later in the day. Luckily the sail from Tinos to Mykonos was only about 10 miles--one of the shortest distances during the whole trip--so we would not be at the mercy of the elements for too long anyway.
The first stop on our weather-sanctioned morning walk through Tinos was a pharmacy as my hands burnt quite a bit the day before when we were fighting the elements (and the ferry)--there wasn't time to reapply sun cream amid all of that mess. I wanted to buy cotton gloves to protect my hands from the sun for the new few days. As Murphy's laws would have it, unlike every other town that we visited in the past, all of which were littered with pharmacies, the Tinosans didn't need any. It took us about 40 minutes to find one.
We continued up a small hill south-east of the port to have a look at a monument that we had noticed before.
We could not decipher what it commemorated, but I noticed an inscription on the top that read 1912-13 -- perhaps some battle before WWI. There were very powerful ghasts of wind up there, we almost had to hold on to something to not fly away--wouldn't even need an umbrella like Mary Poppins! But the view of the marina was worth the struggle:
One more view of the Panagia Evangelistria
Once we were satiated with the beautiful scenery, we continued walking away from the main port, over the hill to the next bay over, which had some houses and a beach, but was much calmer than the central part of the town. On the way back to our ship we saw a beautiful, long, old-style sailing yacht from the Netherlands making its approach:
At 5pm we headed out and set course to Mykonos. As our luck would have it, just as we were ready to hit the road (metaphorically), another ferry, this time a high-speed catamaran, approached the port so we figured we best wait for it to leave--we've had our share of quarrels with ferries already! Once we left the harbour, we got hit by the rough sea again, but it did calm a little compared to the day before.
The plan was to make it to Mykonos as fast as possible, have a walk around the town and then pick my dad up from his ferry at night. We actually ended up leaving just around the same time as the ferry did. The only difference was that the ferry left from Rafina and had to travel over 70 nm, while we were just around the corner from Mykonos (well, a 10nm kind of a corner). Our sail took only about two hours and before we knew it we had Mykonos in front of us. We headed to the New Harbour, which was about a 20-minute walk from the town centre. Per what has now become usual, we had to manoeuvre around a big ferry that was approaching the port as well--Mykonos is a huge tourist attraction and we were on one of the busiest ferry routes in Greece. At first we moored parallel to one of the piers, but were briskly told to move elsewhere. The newly assigned parking space was quite a squeeze--the port in Mykonos was by far the busiest of all that we have seen before; there were at least 30 sailboats moored along with dozens of jachts. It took some wiggling skill (particularly on Maurizio's part) to fit in, but we did it!
We still had plenty of time before my dad's ferry was due to arrive so we just went for a walk around the town. At first the town seemed only a tad crowder than Tinos and was actually quite lovely. But this all changed once we hit the proper centre where we had to elbow our way about. The concentration of tourists rivalled Venice, we saw fashion stores left and right and I felt some claustrophobia creeping in--after a week of relaxed and slow-paced towns, Mykonos was a bit too much to handle. We walked about for a bit, found ferries to take us to Delos tomorrow, braved the crowd once more and headed back to Oxalis.
My dad's ferry was about 30 minutes late and although it stopped a stone's throw from our ship, it moored on a different pier and I had to walk around for about 15 minutes to finally make it to the meeting area. So now we have a third sailor (in training)--Maurizio and I showed my dad the basics about Oxalis and headed to bed. Tomorrow we will take a small ferry to Delos and then head to Ikaria.
And now a few pics of Mykonos:
Approach to Mykonos
Never enough sunsets!
The old port of Mykonos at night