Our accommodation at Nomikos Villas boasts not just any cave, but a cave that, as became abundantly clear, should just be filled in with cement and converted into giant Aegean waterslides.
The living room (remember? lino floor, fluoro lights, weird smell) has a couch with a 10cm thick mattress on a wooden frame – this is bed number one.
Then there’s the bedroom (a cave) which has bed number two, as well as this mysterious crevice in the wall with a light globe in it (a mini cave). Is it a shelf? Is it a shrine? Is it a mistake?
Is this all one big, expensive mistake?
I take one look at the bedroom with its low, dug-out ceiling and no windows. With great relief, I recall that I’d slept on the last available big bed and, so, this time it was Marilyn’s turn.
“You can take the big bed this time,” I say. “Plus, I’ll have an anxiety attack in here.”
‘Here’ being a cave. But, I guess, we asked for it.
And then there’s the bathroom – aka “that f–king bathroom” Marilyn wanted so badly. I guess it kind of looked like the brochure. But what do you get when you coat a cave’s walls in that same shade of cement they use in beach toilet blocks, with no windows, no ventilation, and lots of water?
Ah, so that’s where the smell is coming from.
Back in the livingroom, meanwhile, there’s a TV – plus satellite, with hundreds of channels! Of course, these are in every language other than English. We pass the evening, exhausted, watching music videos and attempting to drink local wine that tastes like liquid raisins.
Sleep time arrives. We say goodnight and retire to couch and cave respectively. All of five minutes passes.
“Keira?”
She says my name with a familiar inflection – like a scared child with a desperate sense of humour. It’s one I’ve heard countless times before across a broad spectrum of disasters.
I turn my head and look up to see Marilyn standing in the cave doorway (a caveway?) with her pillow under one arm, blanket under the other.
“I can’t sleep,” she says. “Whenever I close my eyes, I can see that mini cave behind my eyelids. It’s freaking the $hit out of me.”
“Do you wanna swap?” I offer, hoping the answer is no.
“No, that’s okay, I’ll just sleep in here on the floor…”
“You’re not sleeping on the f–king floor for 130 Euro a night!” I protest. “Do you want me to get a deckchair from the patio?”
“Okay,” Marilyn replies, making it sound like a more reasonable idea than it is.
So, in my pyjamas, I step out onto our patio – which isn’t partitioned from patios for other rooms – and walk over to our solitary deckchair. Thanks to a full day’s rain, it’s wet.
I look over to our neighbour’s deckchairs – they’re stacked on top of each other and have been under cover all day. So I grab one of theirs and bring it inside. Then I take our wet one and stack it on top of their remaining one. The perfect crime.
I complete this bizarre post-midnight task, stifling a guffaw all the way.
Marilyn layers towels and blankets onto this black wicker deckchair, dresses it in a sheet, grabs her pillow and lies down. And I go back to my rock-hard couch.
After a night of attempted sleep on these, it’s our turn to “feel so bad”.
Bring on the bottomless breakfast… right?
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.
“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.”
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.
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).
