Day the 5th: Island Transition

Caroline and Hannah come into the room at 5:00 AM, after going to bars for several hours, and they pass out. I had gotten about eight hours of sleep, so I get up to a false dawn and no Tom. I soon found him, however, down at the beach talking to a couple of attractive Asian women. One of them went to Melbourne University and the other went to Cornell.
We talk and the go have breakfast. Tom goes back to the room and goes to sleep; eventually, the Cornell girl and I go swimming in the ocean. This ended up being one of the best mornings of my life (due, in part, to the fact that I usually sleep through them). I sat there, on the beach, under a small tree, and read my book and wathed the people. The people were awesome, especially in the morning; there were big, naked families snapping pictures, couples, friends, and people like me just enjoying the perfect temperature. I was overcome with a profound sense of contented happiness that is somewhat foreign in my experience; different than sitting by the fire with a dog and a good book, different than seeing someone you love do something great, and basically opposite in feeling to the enjoyment derived from personal success. It was more of a sense that everything was right with the world and all of the individual parts of it, and that it would continue to be right as long as places like that beach existed anywhere.
Anyway, I enjoyed this for at least five hours, and then I went and woke up my crew. We had to get to our next island, Naxos. We had some lunch, the legendary Gyro Pita snacks, and took our (again) crazily aggressive taxi back to the main port serving Mikonos. We had another fast boat to Naxos, but we were quite a bit more cramped on this voyage.
We arrived at Naxos without a hitch and took the taxi to our hotel. This driver was considerably less crazy, although he did seem like a character out of a Greek version of Deliverance. We got there fine, and we checked into our "hostel," which was actually a fantabulous resort. It had two absolutely pristine swimming pools, a small dining area, a bar, and wonderful architecture and bougainvillea growing everywhere. Our host, a large and happy Greek who constantly wore t-shirts with ridiculous English saying on them ("Talk dirty to me, please") , told us that they were actually at half capacity even though we didn't see anyone else. It reminded me very strongly of the Miracle Manor. We had dinner at their little bistro, surrounded by their seven mewing cats. The beds were incredibly hard but we had no problem sleeping.
At this point, some discussion of the sunlight in Greece is warranted. The light is completely different than anywhere else in my experience…it looks like something out of a movie. You may remember sequence in Gladiator with the main character dreaming of his wheat fields back home; the scene looks like it had had the contrast increased as well as a lot of other image processing. Everything looked shiny and gorgeous, with clear colors that all went well together. You can get the same effect if you are laying out in the sun and you close you eyes for a long time and then open them.
Everything actually looks like this in Greece. The landscape is gorgeously sparse. However, the light has a different quality; it is almost more blue and colder, but not like a fluorescent light. Everything almost looks like it's made of crystal.