Which Greek Islands Are the Best to Visit? A Complete Travel Guide

What's going on everybody? This is Island Hopper TV. Today we're going to talk about the things to know when visiting the Greek islands. Let's do it. All right guys. First thing, let's talk about which island is for you or in this case islands, since it's really easy to go from island to island and do some island hopping. They have the Ionian Islands, which are towards the Northwest almost in the Adriatic Sea. Then you have the Aegean Island, which is where we're at right now. The Ionian Islands are known as being more relaxing, but having more dramatic style beaches like Shipwreck Beach, which you can get on Zagnos or Kefalonia has some beautiful beaches, white sand powder beaches. Down here in the Aegean, you can see you have multiple different islands, almost 30 plus islands for you to explore that are available to you. That includes Santorini, Mykonos, the island that we're on right now, Knoxos. You can see Paros in the background over there. We go just South, we're in Mykonos. So many different islands around here that you can explore. If you go towards Turkey, there's Rhodes. So Crete to the South. I would say overall, if you're looking for relaxation, Santorini and Mykonos, you don't want to go there. That's where the people go for honeymoons and the parties. But if you want relaxing, you can find that on Paros, Knoxos, Eos, some of these other islands. So it's really difficult to go from the Ionian to the Aegean or from the Aegean to the Ionian Islands. So you're going to have to pick one of the group of islands, but the Aegean has way more islands than the Ionian side. What are some things you can expect to see when you come to the Greek islands? Well, you can expect to see clear water, translucent water with many, many beaches. Also on those beaches, expect to see lounges and day clubs, lots of those. Also plenty of history. You can expect to find archeological museums and archeological sites across many of these islands from the Ionian Sea all the way down here to the Aegean. Plenty of unique art, handmade, original handcrafted art right here on the islands. Also unique Orthodox churches, as you'll see in many of the pictures around the world. For travel magazines, you can find those same pictures right here in the island. Photogenic towns with quaint walking areas where you walk through these paths with bougainvilleas or flowers and white buildings on each side and painted or sometimes colored grout with stones walking through there. Very relaxing and peaceful. All right guys, let's talk about money. So in the Greek islands, yes, they do accept card, mostly Visa, MasterCard, U.S. UCB, but they don't take American Express. I've yet to find very many places, maybe five to 10% of the establishments take American Express, but the older people from Greece, they actually prefer cash. I don't know why that is, but they only transact mostly in cash. A lot of the restaurants, especially in the smaller towns, cash, not really cards. And if you tell them that you're going to pay with a card, they kind of, yeah, okay, whatever. And then they'll tell you it might be cheaper. You'll save like $40 to just pay with cash. But let me tell you something about the ATMs, especially the Euronet ATMs. I just pulled out $200, 200 euros. They charged me 240. That means they took $40 off the top on that transaction. All right guys, let's talk about food in the Greek islands. You can expect a lot of different seafood, lobster, other shellfish, sea bass, variations of bread and other types of falafel. Also grilled octopus salad or just octopus alone. Greek salad, which includes plenty of tomatoes, lettuce and greens, olives, and cucumber. But let's not forget about souvlaki and gyros with pita bread and several different sauces. And that fresh seafood with the fresh sauces. Really amazing. You add some cheese, goat cheese, all that good stuff. Wash it down with some wine or a beer, calamari, some shrimp, some hummus, some rice, so much variety out here in the Greek islands for food. Even unique things like vegetable ceviche. Greek islands has you covered on the food. And another thing to know about the Greek islands, it gets really hot during the summertime. That's the peak season too. But one of the things you'll notice, the ancient Greeks or the people who inhabited these islands before a modern era, they used to build really thick walls made of stone. And if you go right inside this building here, this is the Naxos castle. You can see just how thick these walls are. And they did that for a reason. That was to cool down during this baking hot sun. This is so hot right now, but let's also talk about the winters. In the winters, it gets very chilly and breezy. So it's humid and cold and windy. So that's a recipe for not very pleasant, but some people like to come to the Greek islands during that time because they get away from all the crowds. Let's talk transportation in the Greek islands. The number one way to get around island to island, in my opinion, is a ferry boat. They have high speed ferries. They also have slow ferries that have cabins on board, overnight ferries. You leave at 12, arrive at four or something like that. The high speed ferries, you can take one from Milos to Santorini, took two and a half hours. You can take one from Santorini to Crete. So I prefer the ferries. They also have airports. So when you come to the Greek islands and you choose to fly in or out, expect very small airports, like what you see right here in Mykonos. For example, here on Santorini, they have a big airport. I flew in one time from Venice, Italy. You can get around to some of the other locations in the Med from Santorini. Also, when you arrive on the islands, taxis, shuttles, plus a taxi, they're expensive. For example, to go from the port in Santorini to Thera, it costs $50 per person and a shuttle that didn't even include the taxi. Okay. The cheapest way that I've seen is to book a rental car ahead of time. For example, today we did a rental car. It costs $80 and that included insurance. I do recommend insurance, but on Milos last minute booking, they charged me one 20 per day and it wasn't a very good car. One guy told me he wanted to charge me 160 a day for the same car at a different agency. So do shop around a bit, but I wanted to put that out there. The last thing is buses. Most of these islands do have buses, but you're going to be sitting at some very unique bus stations with no shade. Oftentimes, especially if you're out on one side of the island where the beaches are and you want to go to the town. All right, let's talk about safety in the Greek islands. Do you, what do you have to worry about? What are you concerned about? It's going to be the sun probably more than anything. Petty crime is not really an issue here. Violent crime is not an issue either between the sun and maybe renting a car or an ATV all-terrain vehicle and having some sort of incident. Those are probably going to be your top concerns. But as far as safety, walking around at night, walking around in the daytime, you don't have much to worry about in particular on the Greek islands, whether it be Eos or Santorini or Mykonos or Naxos or Paros or Milos, really a safe place in my opinion. And I would say you could totally be a solo traveler, stay in an Airbnb off the beaten path, leave your window open, your door open and not really have any issues. I've talked to the locals about this too. It's not a dangerous place. Now, if you go to the Greek mainland, Athens, you might hear conflicting stories about safety, but the Greek islands, for the most part safety, that doesn't mean completely let your guard down and think that everything's hunky-dory, but it is a safe place from my experience, having been here solo and with friends. One of the things to know about the Greek islands is there's many stray cats. As you can see right behind me, a cat there. If you look right over here, there's his brother, but there's cats everywhere around the Greek islands. I actually like it. Some of them are really friendly and some of them just want your food, but some will just come up to you and like hang out with you for 20, 30 minutes and just show you a ton of love. And just some quick facts about the Greek islands. There's over 5,000 islands around Greece. Okay. That means Greece has some of the most coastline in all of Europe. Also, there's 18 UNESCO world heritage sites across Greece. Many of them are out here in the Greek islands. With that being said, the gods of Greece, Apollo and Atremus, they come from the Greek islands. You'll see that over on Delios, but if you go to some of these museums around the world that have Greek architecture or Greek artifacts like the British museum, many of those artifacts come from the islands of Naxos or Milos or Delios. Even the Athens museum has artifacts from here in the Greek islands. Also, you'll notice those blue doors on those white structures. Those are blue doors to ward off evil spirits. And just two fun facts that are interesting. Santorini is an active volcano. Do with that what you want, but it is an active volcano as you'll notice the caldera. I'm not saying it's going off anytime soon, but Hey, you never know. Also the Pelican, you'll see that across Mykos. That's actually the mascot of the island. I've seen the Pelican walking around right there by the windmills. Let's talk about what to wear on the Greek islands. Me personally, I've found linen to be a really good solution for shirts. They're lightweight. You can get the long sleeve linen, short sleeve linen, both for men and women. Also ladies getting shawls that you wear around your bikini when you're walking around, it is hot. Make sure you definitely bring some flip flops, maybe even some water shoes because you might want to get in the water. And there are some beaches that have rocks. Just keep that in mind. But flip flops overall, I wear those the most in the Greek islands. Tennis shoes maybe every once in a while if I'm going in the land to do some hiking. In terms of hats, I would say a full brim hat, but any hat in general is going to work. But those full brim hats work the best. Also consider bringing a snorkel fins, something like that. If you want to get in the water, at least goggles. Also one thing that I've noticed in the Greek islands, doing your own laundry daily, they call it the poor man's laundry, but it's hand washing your laundry. You can pretty much do that every day at the hotels and then you just let it air dry with the sun. All right guys, let's talk about cost and affordability in the Greek islands. I've noticed that you can find a variety of different pricing, but the most expensive are going to be Santorini and Mykonos for sure. Some of the hacks that I've used are checking Airbnb, checkingbooking.com, Priceline, Hotels.com, looking around. Sometimes you'll find different deals on different apps for accommodation. Food across the board has been really affordable except for in the tourist areas. I've eaten breakfast for as cheap as $5 per person. I've had breakfast for as much as 45 to $50 per person just for basic breakfast. So it really depends on where the location is, but you can find cheap food. When it comes to getting around the island transportation, it is fairly affordable. The ferry sometimes vary. I've seen the same ferry going one hour later for double the price on a different ferry line. So that's kind of interesting, right? $45 to go on a one ferry to the same place and then $90 per person to go on a ferry to the other place. Also, one more thing, they use the Euro currency. So the currency here is Euro. I've heard in some places they do use US dollars, but it's very rare. For the most part, you're going to want to have Visa and MasterCard. Those are your best friends.