The other day, Sylvia brought out photo albums from our tour guiding days in the 1990s. The shots here are from one of the trips I led through Greece and Turkey when I had my own company, Halcyon Tours.
My tours were focused on small groups, learning about the local culture, and staying in local-style places where my clients could get to know the people of an area. Of course, there were plenty of opportunities for wine-drinking on rooftops in places like Oia on Santorini too!
Back then, Oia was still somewhat unvisited. Many of the buildings hadn’t been rebuilt after the massive (7.5 magnitude) earthquake that hit the island in 1956.
(You can read about the earthquake and watch a short documentary about it here.)
This is what Oia looks like at sunset today:
In high season now, as many as 17,000 cruise ship tourists disembark on the island EACH DAY, with most of them crowding into the small town of Oia at sunset time.
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To be immersed in the kind of adventure it was possible to have in Europe before the awful crush of cruise-ship mass tourism, check out my forthcoming novel, The Last Grand Tour, available for pre-order now. (It will be published on January 28, 2025.)
Here’s a synopsis:
American tour guide Joe Newhouse wants nothing more than to reach Venice. Since moving to Munich after the fall of the Berlin Wall, he’s watched his business fail, his wife leave him, and his love for Europe diminish. Now he faces one last ten-day tour with a surly group that doesn’t want to be there. As he leads them through the mythic lands of Europe’s Romantic past, he grows increasingly disturbed by their stories of earlier lives, puzzled by their desire to be with a man who doesn’t arrive, and entangled in an illicit affair that promises to either save him or plunge his tour-and his life-into madness.
Soaked in the Romantic atmosphere and dark deeds of old Europe-as well as the freedoms and hopes of a new era-The Last Grand Tour takes us on a perilous journey through Hitler’s Berchtesgaden, Mozart’s Salzburg, and Mad King Ludwig’s Bavarian fantasyland before reaching its stunning climax in the murky waters of Venice. Along the way, it explores the often-shifting lines between fidelity and freedom, illusion and reality, regret and desire.
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