Nea Kameni is a volcano that was once part of the land mass of Santorini. When it erupted, it sent a large chunk of the island hurtling to the ocean floor, leaving the island in a ball-and-cup formation called the Cauldera - a circular volcanic mass accompanied by the crescent-shaped main island.
That main island is a spectacular place that’s famous for its clusters of dramatic cliff-face buildings, wedding-worthy sunset, association with the Atlantis myth and Minoan civilisations, and tasty tomato patties which my best friend and I feasted on at a ouzoeri in the main town of Fira.
“Our friendship is like that volcano,” Marilyn muses over our lunch. ”They don’t know when it’ll erupt. All they know is, it will.”
It couldn’t have been clearer the day before when we went sailing around the Cauldera and climbed Nea Kameni. But today, like my hair, is unusually gray.
“It’s been 16 years and we’ve never fought,” Marilyn continues.
Well, there was that one incident in year 8 when I’d imprecisely folded some cardboard she had for a geography assignment. We didn’t talk for a day.
But as for those notoriously bad fights that best friends can have, well, it’d really take something extraordinary for one of those.
But what? We’re very different people, but bizarrely harmonious in a way that makes me wonder if we were identical twins in a past life. We’re both obsessive about hygiene (we went through a bottle of hand sanitiser on this trip). We both can’t stand wearing nailpolish because it makes our fingertips feel hot. We never, ever like the same boys.
We can’t even play scissors-paper-rock without presenting the same freaking object every single time (I know, right?).
“Maybe we’re due for a fight,” she says.
We’d already had our share of meltdowns on this trip. In Athens, en route to Mykonos, we hauled all our luggage to Piraeus port, only to discover we should’ve gone to the port at Rafina instead – a train, a bus, and an hour-and-a-half away.
In Mykonos, aka “the stupid island I never wanted to go to” (quote comes courtesy of my fed-up rant at Rafina), we got lost in the tangle of streets of the tiny Old Town. After all, those streets were built to disorient pirates, punctuated by shops designed to dazzle. So, just like pirates of old, we too walked around in circles for hours - Marilyn nearly in tears, me nearly asleep on my feet. It’s a good thing no swordplay was required.
Even in a place as breathtaking as Santorini, we’d had our moments.
The day we climbed the volcano, we swam in open waters to get to the hot springs (something neither of us were sure we were capable of), scaled 300 or so steps up a cliff in Oia, waited for hours for the “famous” Oia sunset, only for it to cloud over, and then sat on a bus for ages in damp clothes encrusted in volcanic minerals to get back to Fira.
We’d spent a large chunk of that day being whipped by the sea on the pirate-esque ship that took us around the Cauldera.
For my part, my flip-flops broke at the volcano’s peak AND I got an Ayers Rock-shaped sunburn on my back while on the small island of Thirasia (note to self: putting sunscreen on your own back is neither clever nor effective).
All in all, it was the amazing kind of day that shows you what your limits are. But, as it turned out, it also highlighted the main difference between Marilyn and I…
