Lileks takes a vacation in Greece:
A few switchbacks up we found a nice niche that would have been an excellent spot for a small bar; seems it had served that function once, as it had benches and something like a table. We chatted with some Brits who were also dying but cheerful about it. They’d met some donkeys coming down, and the lass astride one of them leaned over and said “Worst Day of my Life.”
We continued on, up the shite-strewn path. By “567 steps” they mean a step, then a yard of irregular, ankle-snapping stone, followed by another step, followed by a yard of irregular, ankle-snapping stone smeared with ordure, and so on. Another herd of donkeys, this one thicker than the last, and not particularly concerned with our presence. Suddenly you realized you had two options: you would be crushed against the wall by donkeys, or pushed over the side by donkeys. Neither seemed appealing, just like the growing belief you would either suffer failure of the heart or the kidneys.
With pictures and video, of course.
My wife and I visited Santorini last year. Beautiful place. Nice wine. We took the cable car.
My wife and daughters also visited last year. The twins were doing a semester in Europe as part of the college education. They enjoyed it greatly.
I actually rode the donkeys when I was there (albeit on Therassia – we took a cab up to Fira).
His description as a spectator doesn’t do justice to the sheer miserable terror of the experience. At all. It was actually a race. The donkey guy got the two-dozen animals lined up on the steps, slapped one on the rear, and off they went, three-abreast on a path only safe for one. Maybe. The donkeys jostled for position, squeezing past each other whenever there was an opening, heedless of the human legs and feet in between them.
Mind you, the path is bounded by a retaining wall of jagged shards of lava on the uphill side and a roughly 18″-high rock wall on the omigod-look-at-that-two-hundred-foot-drop side. By the time we got to the top, my knees were killing me from having spent the last twenty minutes or so squeezing the donkey’s ribcage to keep my legs away from the razor-sharp lava rocks (only partly successfully, as my heavy boots were all chewed up), and my back was messed up from having instinctively tried to tip our combined center of mass away from whatever side the fall to our death was on.
We walked back down. The torture of descending the steps he describes, where your toes get jammed into the front of your boots with every step, was worth it.
I had to throw away the clothes I’d been wearing.
Apart from that, though, I really liked Santorini.
And apart from that, Mrs. Lincoln thought the play was great. 🙂