With a View like this, who needs a Room?!!

© Priya Tuli

With all due apologies to E.M. Forster, this is a sunset over the famous caldera at Fira, Santorini. Understandably, it elevates caldera-view rooms straight up to the budgetary realms of Fortune-500 types, rather than mere penurious mortals like us. So I’ll just take the view, thank you.

“But where’s the caldera?”, asks every first-timer to Fira. Well, this IS the caldera, you say. (By now you're the expert, because this is your second visit!) All those islands? They actually form a broken rim, see it? And the Aegean rushed in there…so really, the sea is inside and outside and all around the caldera. The incline of the slope is steeper on the inner side, see? And gentler on the outer side. And ohh shhh, watch the sunset!

To witness a Fira sunset is truly spectacularly splendiferous, and has been known to reduce goobly types to tears. My first time was like that. (Please pass the kleenex). Now, although I’m far more seasoned, I still carry extra kleenex just-in-case.

My first sunset here was in November 2001. It was off-season, and Fira was practically empty, with just a sparse handful of tourists knocking around, three of whom I'd already met the previous day. (Me?! I'm no tourist, I belong here! Or at any rate, that's how it feels!)

I walked up to the deserted terrace of a café, which was shut. Almost everything was shut…off-season. An old man sat just at the entrance. We greeted each other with a smile and a 'kalispera', as I continued past him to the railing overlooking the caldera. Sunset was still about an hour away...and I had the ent