greek-islands.org - My visits to laid-back Greek Islands in the Cyclades and the Dodecanese

The information about Tílos are divided into ten different articles:

o Introduction
o Map
o Where to stay
o Favourite taverns
o Getting around
o Walking
o Arts & Gifts
o A few nice spots
o Beaches
o Photos (see menu)

 

 

 

 

• Dreams and planning

During my travel to the Greek islands I focus on the Cyclades, because I want to visit my long-time friends on Folégandros, and that is hard to combine with visits to other parts of Greece.

The only island outside the Cyclades I've been visiting so far is Astypálea back in 1996 (Kos 1985, but that was in another life). I remember that I needed to wait for a connection several days on Náxos that time and then it was not so many links back to the Cycladic islands.

But when I, during long dark winter evenings, dream about summer and the Greek islands, I look for small and tranquil places, and most of these kinds of destinations in the Cyclades are already covered by me, with some exceptions. So I guess it’s only natural to look for other interesting islands in the neighbourhood, such as the Dodecanese. During some years I have been thinking on Tílos and Nissyros and finally I at least was able to visit Tílos.

• Get to Tílos , via Rhodes

The easiest way to get to Tílos is to fly directly to Rhodes from your home country, and that is in most cases possible within Europe, because there is extensive package tourism to Rhodes. The last years I have been flying from my home town's little airport, via Copenhagen to Athens to a reasonable price, so I needed I way of getting from Athens to Tílos: flying or take a ferry from Piraeus. But I didn't find any direct connections from Piraeus to Tílos (mid June) and I also wanted to avoid extremely long ferry trips that I find boring. So as a result I needed to find a domestic flight from Athens to Rhodes. One week before my vacation started I was able to get a ticket with the private alternative to Olympic Airlines, namely Aegean Airlines. They have a good web site where they issues e-tickets (electronic tickets) which is very convenient.

Once you are in Rhodes there is a good regular service with a fast boat Sea Star that operates daily during main-season, and also somewhat outside main-season. During 2004 they started daily trips in mid June.

• Tilos

My experience of Tílos is described in the different articles on this page.

• Cyclades from Dodecanese

To go to the Cyclades from Tílos /Rhodes is not so very easy. I was thinking of flying to Santorini via Athens, but all flights were fully booked, and the price is pretty expensive as well. So I was trying to find some kind of ferry connection from Rhodes to an island in the Cyclades, from where I was able to continue to my next destination.

I was leaving Tílos one morning for Rhodes and there I waited three hours for my ferry, which were heading for Piraeus stopping at Kos, Kalymnos, Astypálea and Amorgós. The journey started at 2 PM and after 12 hours I was on Amorgós. There I hired a room and was able to sleep for three hours, before I needed to embark the small FB Skopelites at 5:45 AM in the morning. This boat was passing all islands of the Small Cyclades, so I arrived to my destination island Náxos at 12 AM. This is a good example of the difficulties to travel between the different island groups in Greece. With some effort it is possible, but one time is enough during a vacation to not lose too much time on a boring ferry.