Day 11 Santorini to Paros

We arranged for a driver to pick us up at 8.30am to take us to the port to catch the ferry at 9.30 as we had been told we needed to be there half an hour before. Over the next two hours we watched as bus loads of people filled up the port, how did everyone else know the ferry was going to be this late?

It finally arrived at 11am and we all surged forward like sheep into the hull where chaos reigned. There were crew yelling at the top of their voices what area to put your luggage according to your destination. The problem being that in the cacophony Ios, Naxos and Paros all sound the same and become even more confusing when you are 
told that the Naxos area is for Paros luggage. I've seen better organisation at a train station in the middle of India.

In the few minutes it took us to say goodbye to our luggage (it's possible we will never see it again) we went upstairs to find seats and realised that we were already well on our way as the port was in the distance, unfortunately we aren't quite sure where we were heading to as we thought the ferry map we had been using might be incorrect .... luckily we don't have to be anywhere in a hurry.

By 12 we had arrived at the island of Ios, the colour of the ocean was a beautiful rich blue. We would now have to wait to find out whether the next stop was Paros as we hoped or whether we had mucked it all up and we should have chosen Naxos instead. 

Just before 1pm Google Maps told us that the island on our left was Crete, now we are really confused, we seemed to be on a Greek Island cruise, it turns out it was just a glitch in Google Maps. The announcement came that we were at Naxos and that the next stop was Mykonos, pretty much all the islands except the one we wanted. At 1.45 we arrived at Mykonos, now there were only a handful of people left on the boat. At 3pm we finally arrived at Paros and easily walked to our hotel.
Our hotel was in front of a nice sandy beach with lots of cute restaurants and cafes. We headed back to the port to buy our tickets to Mykonos for a couple of days later. We then wandered the tiny streets, feeling so much happier than on Santorini. Here it was quiet, felt less touristy and seemed much more authentic. We had a nice veranda overlooking the beach and a lovely dinner a few doors down - this is more what we had in mind for a Greek island holiday.