The Mykonos Trip That Was Mostly Boats

The two Mykonos

There is the island between about ten at night and five in the morning, and there is the island the rest of the time, and they have almost nothing to do with each other. If you have only heard about the first one, the second will surprise you.

Chora — the main town — is a deliberate maze. The lanes were laid out to confuse pirates and they still work: you will get lost, repeatedly, and it is the best thing about the place. Whitewashed walls, blue and green doors, bougainvillea, and about four hundred people in each lane by midday. Go at eight in the morning instead. Everything is shut, the light is low and pink, the streets are being hosed down, and you will have the entire postcard to yourself for roughly ninety minutes.

The windmills are fine. They are on every photograph of the island and they take about ten minutes to see. Go once, early, on the same walk, and do not organise a day around them.

How you end up on a boat

We had no plan to be on the water. We got talking to a couple at the next table on the second night, who were going out the following day and had space, and from there it simply kept happening — each boat produced the next one. Asking at the harbour works too. So does going to the same beach bar twice.

What to bring: bread, tomatoes, hard cheese, a great deal of lemon, and something cold. Cutlery is optimistic and largely unnecessary. Anything that needs a plate is the wrong food for a boat.

The water around the island is the entire point and it delivers completely — deep, cold, extraordinarily clear, and much calmer on the south side. The wind here is a real feature, not a footnote: the meltemi blows hard through the summer and it decides which beaches are usable on any given day. Ask locally in the morning rather than committing to a plan the night before.

Eating on an island that overcharges

This is the weakest part of the trip and I want to be honest about it. A great deal of the food is mediocre and priced as though it is not, particularly anywhere with a sea view and a doorman. Two of our dinners were genuinely poor and cost more than the best meal I ate in Napoli.

What did work: the small tavernas inland, away from the water, in Ano Mera and the villages nobody photographs. Grilled fish sold by weight, tomatoes, capers that grow wild here and taste of it, and the local cheeses — kopanisti is the sharp, peppery one worth going out of your way for. Louza, the cured pork, is the other.

The other thing that worked was not eating dinner at all on two of the nights and doing a long lunch instead, on the water, for half the money and twice the food. We ate an anchovy pizza off the back of a boat at four in the afternoon and I have been chasing that pizza ever since. It was not good. It was perfect, which is a different measurement.

Delos, which is the actual reason to come

Half an hour by boat from the old harbour is an entire uninhabited island that was, for a few centuries, one of the most important places in the Mediterranean — a sanctuary, then a free port, then a city of thirty thousand people, then abandoned so completely that nobody has lived there since.

You walk through streets with the mosaics still in the floors, past the terrace of the lions, up the hill to a view of every island in the Cyclades. There is no shade, no café, no anything, and the last boat back leaves in the early afternoon.

Take the first boat of the day. Two hours of ruins with almost nobody in them, back in town by lunch, and it costs a fraction of one afternoon at a beach club. It is the only thing I did on this trip that I would call unmissable.