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I am the kind of woman who prints the ferry tickets. Who screenshots the screenshots. I know the name of the hotel manager before we have crossed any borders. This is not a virtue. It is a small, careful performance I put on for myself, and the performance is what I love, sometimes more than the trip.
So when I tell you we boarded the wrong ferry out of Piraeus, I want you to understand the size of it — not the betrayal by Greece, the betrayal by me, to myself.
There were two ferries. Fifteen minutes apart. The signage was in a Greek alphabet I had spent three weeks teaching myself to recognise and forgot the moment a man in a fluorescent vest waved us forward. R was looking at his phone. I was looking at mine. We boarded with the satisfied air of people who had read the right articles. I was, in some humiliating sense, about to write one of them — a piece on Milos for World Travel Magazine, my notebook still hopeful in the bottom of my bag.
An hour in, I noticed the sea on the wrong side.
I said nothing. I am the kind of woman who says nothing for forty minutes while she examines a map on her phone the size of a postage stamp and re-reads the booking confirmation three times in case the words have rearranged themselves. They had not. We were going to Sifnos. Our hotel was on Milos. Our luggage — and this is the only thing that prevented me from quietly stepping off the boat into the Aegean — was, miraculously, with us.
I turned to R. He had been watching me for some time. He had the face of a man who had already worked out what I was about to say and was waiting only for the formality of my saying it.
“We’re on the wrong ferry.”
“I know.”
“How long have you known?”
“About thirty minutes.”
“Why didn’t you say anything?”
“I wanted to see how long it would take you to break.”
Restaurant on Vathi Beach, Sifnos, Image by Heinrich van Tonder, Shutterstock
The thing I want to tell you is what came next, which is that we laughed. Not the polite laughter of a couple managing each other. The other kind. The kind that doubles you over on a bench on a Greek ferry while a German woman across from you looks alarmed and then, slowly, begins to smile. The laughter that comes from being equally, gorgeously wrong. From watching someone you have known for sixteen years discover, in real time, that he is also a fool, and being grateful for it.
We did not call the travel advisor. We did not rebook. R said, what do you want to do, and I said, I don’t know yet, and he said, good, let’s not know yet for a while.
We did not know yet for three days.
Sifnos is the island you don’t know you need. It is quieter than Milos, lower, more local. The light is softer. The whitewash is older. The donkeys, I think, are not for the tourists. We found a small place to stay by walking — Verina Suites, run by a family who did not seem particularly surprised by our arrival, which I have come to understand is the Sifnos disposition generally. The terrace looked over the Aegean. The room cost roughly a third of what we had already paid for Milos, where, somewhere, a bed was being turned down for two people who would never arrive.
On the second morning, the Milos hotel called. A polite, puzzled voice. Madame, we expected you yesterday. Is everything all right?
I said, we’re on Sifnos.
There was a pause.
Why?
I said, we don’t know yet.
I do not know what she made of this. I hope she laughed when she put the phone down. I hope she told the kitchen.
That afternoon we walked up into Kastro, the old village on the cliffs, and I bought a small clay bowl from a man whose family had been making them, he said, for nine generations. Nine. The pottery of Sifnos is three thousand years old. The clay is from the island. The shape of the bowl I bought has not meaningfully changed since before the language I am writing in existed. I held it in my hands and thought about how proud I had been, that morning in Athens, of my printed tickets.
The bowl is on my kitchen windowsill now. It holds salt.
On the last evening we ate at Omega 3, the small restaurant on the bay at Platis Gialos where the chef’s mother, I am told, still tastes the sauces. We had not ordered the revithada — the chickpea stew that Sifnos cooks slowly overnight in clay pots from the same island clay as the bowl in my bag. She brought it anyway. It was the best thing we ate in Greece.
Grilled pita bread, tzatziki greek yoghurt with garlic, greek salad, baked Cheese at Sifnos Image by MM_vision, Shutterstock
R looked at me across the table, in the particular light the Aegean offers only at that hour, and he said, we should board the wrong ferry more often.
I did not say anything clever back. I was watching the sun do its slow business with the water. I was thinking about the woman in Athens who had printed the tickets. I was a little sorry for her. She had worked so hard.
Later, on the terrace, R poured the last of the wine and I started laughing again about the ferry, and about the voice on the phone, and about the bed in Milos turned down for ghosts.
He watched me laugh.
I caught him watching.
This, I thought.
Not the island. Not the bowl. Not the revithada.
This. ◼
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© This article was first published online in June 2026 – World Travel Magazine.
