Greek Isle Excursions

[merts]

Hi ~ we are planning a cruise in August and just got the excursion booklet. Aghh! Just a little confusing as to what to do. Any suggestions on which island may be a beach island (travelling with 3 teenage girls..) and which island may be better explored on our own?
The itinerary includes: Athens, Mykonos, Corfu and Split, Croatia.
Any help would be so appreciated.

[Hank]

Mykonos is a good beach island and can easily be done on your own. This island is quite famous for its beaches, although be forewarned that its possible you might see some females going topless (its not real common, but its quite legal). One of our favorite beaches is called Paradise Beach and you can get there quite cheaply by taking the local bus. Since you have 5, it might be worth a few extra Euros to just take a taxi. As to the bus, you will need to go into town (about 1/2 mile from the ship) and than walk over to the bus station that is near the windmills (there is another station on the side of the town closer to the ship, but its the wrong bus station for Paradise. Paradise Beach is clean, sandy, and has lots of facilities including chair/umbrella rentals. There is even a swimming pool, although the Ocean water is so clean and delightful there is no reason to use the pool.

There are also quite a few excellent beaches on the island of Corfu. Our favorite here are the beaches near Paleokastritsa and it is about 4 miles from Corfu Town (the port).

As to touring on your own, its possible at any of your ports depending on your spirit of adventure. But, since you are a group of 5, you might want to arrange a car/driver/guide for some of these ports such as Athens. Its best to look around on the internet and make arrangements for tours, but I am worthless for this function since we do everything on our own and hardly ever take a tour (unusual for an American).

Hank

[norahe]

I was on a cruise to the Greek islands in April. We only did one excursion and the rest of the time we did things on our own. We were a family of 3. In Athens, we got information from PortReview and followed the instructions. It only cost us 1 euro each to take the train into town from the port. When we got into Athens, you could see Acropolis on the hill and all you need to do is walk up the hill. In Mynkonos we were there at night so there was no excursions planned. We just walked around. We found that on the excursions we had to pay adult price for my 16 year old son, which includes the entry fees. However, at most places if your child is under 19 they get in for free. For example at Acropolis it cost 12 euros/ adult. If, we had gone on an excursion they would have charged us an adult price even though we did not have to pay the admission fee when we went on our own. The other thing to consider is it seems like their are 5000 people all taking a tour. If you do things on your own and it gets too crowded you can go somewhere else. The only tour we took was suppose to be an English only tour but they did not have enough people to offer a Spanish only tour, so they put us together. So my husband who speaks both languages found that he was bored because he heard everything twice and not always the same information. Another problem with 5000 people all taking tours at the same time, we would end up being in one area longer waiting for the group in front of us to move.

I definitely would recommend doing things on your own because we were able to cover more areas and linger longer at things we wanted to see than our friends who stuck primarily to the tours. You also save a lot more money this way. In most cases, the cost for one adult excursion was the price we paid for 3 to do it on our own.