I love Greece and Greek people, but I need to rant about the island ferries

Our last morning among the Greek islands kicked off a long travel day.  According to our tickets that we’d purchased ahead of time, we had an 11:45am ferry leaving Santorini that arrived in Piraeus (Athens port) at 3:45 in the afternoon.  Even though we were only 20 minutes from the port, our hotel suggested we leave at 10:00 in case there were big delays, which seemed wise since the two-lane switchback road leading down to the ferries went to one-lane at times due to construction.  On this day, traffic cooperated, and our driver let us out at the port at 10:25.

Our exact check-in and loading points weren’t obvious from glancing around, so I went into the ferry operator’s (Seajets) office to ask the worker where and when we needed to be somewhere. I showed him our reservation confirmation on my phone, and he told me in an exasperated tone that those times were impossible, that no route exists at that time, and furthermore that it’s impossible to get from Santorini to Piraeus in four hours. He then shoved six boarding passes at me and said the ferry comes at 12:30 and arrives in Piraeus “not before 5:00”. Okaaaaay…that’s almost helpful. So not only did we now have two hours to sit at the port, but we also had a rental car representative (from Sixt) set to meet us in Piraeus (too early now) who I needed to make sure didn’t leave since our ferry would arrive at least 75 minutes later than I originally thought.  So, I sent an email to a generic Sixt address and we started our long wait for the ferry.

The ferry boarding experience was one we will never forget.  I should start by explaining that Santorini gets millions of tourists every year, so has plenty of practice and opportunities to improve inefficient or otherwise ridiculous processes.  With that in mind, I’m forced to believe that the terminal and ferry workers are either incapable of creating a sensical boarding experience, or they are purposefully making it miserable in order to cut down the number of tourists.  My gut tells me they have the capability.

Our instruction from the Seajets worker was to go to Gate 4 at 12:00.  “Gate 4” was actually the only building at the port that wasn’t a café, restaurant, or ferry kiosk, and there was a perpetual line outside of it that spanned a football field.  Several ferries call at that port, and it appeared that all passengers were sent through Gate 4, so the line was a big mix of people trying to get on different boats. We decided to get in line closer to 11:15 and were glad we did because it took close to 45 minutes for us to finally enter the building labeled Gate 4.  Once inside, I quickly realized that we were just going in one door and out another without anyone checking tickets or doing anything else value-added, so the building and Gate 4 actually served no purpose other than to make people think they needed to line up.  At one point the workers even came to the middle of the line and said, “there is no line, double up, go up front”, so the line quickly turned into two jumbled lines with people still wondering what was going on.

Once we made it through the other side of the Gate 4 building, we were herded to the far end of the L-shaped port.  We were among the first in line for our ferry, so we all imagined the loading point must be at the short part of the “L” where we were located. As we waited for the next 20 minutes, hundreds and hundreds of other passengers were herded onto the pier, first filling up our area and then packing into the longer part, perpendicular to where we stood.  There must’ve been 500 aspiring passengers out there, many of us with luggage, and still no one had checked our tickets or even clearly stated which boat was coming next.

Finally, our Seajets World Champion ferry arrived in all its glory, and promptly proceeded to dock as far from us as possible, right by the end of the “L” where the very last people in line had been waiting.  Many around us started protesting, but all I could do was laugh.  At that point, it was a free-for-all to load the ferry, but there was really no way to get closer to the new “front” since there were so many people, so we ended up being some of the last to board.  Good thing we arrived two hours early!

After getting up the ramp onto the ship, we entered what looked like a big parking garage with low ceilings, although there were no cars. Everyone seemed to be headed for one of the two far corners at the opposite end of the ferry, so that’s where we went.  That’s when I saw the next piece of evidence that they were conspiring to make sure we never came back.  In the two back corners of the ferry, in this little garage that had no A.C. or noticeable airflow, there was a single little staircase leading up to the passenger area, and at the bottom of the staircase is where they were finally checking tickets, maximizing the amount of time we had to spend in this unbearably hot and uncomfortable area.  And of course, there was no line, just hundreds of people trying to shove past each other and escape to the upstairs. With the constant shifting of this human blob with people trying to squeeze past each other, keeping all six of us together was basically impossible.

After 10 minutes of this, with still loads of people in front of us and behind us, we heard a worker shout that no luggage was allowed upstairs.  They were asking people to leave their luggage by hand-written signs labeling the various stops the ferry was making.  Rather than fight our way backwards through the human blob and add our bags to the growing pile, we decided to press on towards the magic staircase.  We finally had our turn with the ticket guy (at least 15 minutes into the ferry ride…what if we had the wrong ticket, or no ticket?), who let us through, bags and all, and arrived upstairs where another worker wanted to see our tickets to show us where our seats were (this was the first moment I even knew we had assigned seats). She saw our bags and started laying into William of all people, asking him in an upset and pleading voice why we brought so much luggage upstairs, and what would we do if the ship had an emergency.  It took all my self-control not to rip into her about how unnecessarily miserable this whole process had been, and by the way, why would you question a child like this when his dad is right here—and then William calmly responded perfectly and diffused the situation by saying, “well, no one stopped us.” Brilliant.

We made it to Piraeus around 5:30pm, and thankfully my email to Sixt had found the right person, so the guy meeting us with our rental car was still there.  After grabbing some souvlaki and gyros to go, we headed north and had a beautiful drive for a bit while the sun was still out, and then pressed on in the darkness. Around 9:15pm, we had two hours to go and I realized I had missed a turn, or maybe taken a wrong turn?  The good news was that we were only a few minutes from the road we wanted to be on, but the bad news was that we had to drive about 10 minutes in the wrong direction before I could turn around.  The further bad news is that there were two tolls to pay in that wrong direction, and the worst news was that once I got back to where I had realized we were on the wrong road, I took another wrong turn and had to do the exact same wrong loop again!  This was a move that would come to be known as The Double Detour, and was also filed in the bulging folder known as “pulling a Mikey”.  After all the excitement, we reached our destination in Meteora at 11:57pm. We’d been travelling for 14 hours and were exhausted.  The owners of the home we were renting in Meteora were so incredibly sweet and were at the home waiting for us with a homemade apple cake.  They were so affable, and the cake was so good that we were able to forget the difficult travel day we’d had and drift off to sleep with pleasant thoughts and happy tummies.