Santorini Experience on RCI

[spangnash]

We are taking our first cruise ever this coming September - the 12 Night Mediterranean Greek Isles cruise on the Brilliance of the Seas. I am most looking forward to the Santorini stop and am trying to determine the best way to approach our time there. I have read a large number of posts and gather that Santorini should be quite easy to explore on our own, but I am concerned about getting a tender early enough to fight the lines to get up the hill, and then perhaps fight more crowds to get a bus or taxi to Oia (which I really don't want to miss). There will be 2 more cruise ships (in addition to ours) docking at Santorini that day (but 1 is not scheduled to arrive until 2pm, while we are scheduled to arrive at 8am). How concerned should I be? Is it safe to assume we'll be able to get an early tender if I am willing to get up at the crack of dawn (to stand in line, or whatever it is we will do to tender)? If we do get an early tender, should we be able to get the cable car up and catch the bus or get a taxi to Oia? Or should we 'play it safe' and rent a car to make sure we can get there? Alot of people on the Greece port forum recommend renting a car, but it seems silly to rent a care JUST to get to Oia... any thoughts/insight would be much appreciated!

[truffles2]

We took the ship's tour and were first off the ship. You need some type of transportation because the distance between Fira and Oia is too great. Also when we were there, we were the only ship and still there was queueing for the cable car.

[The Big Booper]

We were in Santorini along with two other ships in Sept. 2007. If you are up early you will have no problems getting on a tender to shore then lining up to get the cable car up. Once on top of the cliff you are past the bottleneck of the cliffs and should have no problems getting to Ola.

The problem will be getting back down the cliffs in the afternoon. We left at 2 PM and there was no wait to catch a cable car down. Later in the afternoon there were looonnng lines to get the cable cars which forced people to either hike down the switchback trail or ride the mules down, which share the pathway with people. One woman said she was in the shower for 30 minutes and couldn't wash the smell off.

If a picture is better then a thousand words, then here are 3,000 words.

The cliffs from the side



The zig zag pathway. At the far left of the picture you can see the cable car stations at the top and bottom of the hill.



Superzoom closeup of the two cable cars passing