My two girlfriends and I decided to take a trip together after graduation, and we chose Samos, Greece as our destination. We booked our trip through Apollo, which included a charter flight, hotel stay, airport transfers, and plane tickets. We ended up staying at Votsalakia Hotel, just 50 meters from the beach!
In this post, I’ll share the reasons you might love or not love visiting Samos, depending on what you’re looking for in your experience.
Hotel – The hotel is family-run, with the grandmother preparing breakfast and the sisters managing most of the other operations. Their hospitality was exceptional, especially considering we had lots of questions during our stay (since we were three 19-year-old girls—I’ve traveled alone once before, but one of my friends had never traveled solo).
The hotel is set up like small apartments, with a fridge, stove, and sink, so we could cook basic meals if we wanted to (we tried once, and it didn’t go well!).We were there for 7 days in mid june. Which means we bought air conditioning after the second night because we couldn’t sleep. It was so worth it !
Hotell Votsalakia
Favorite Resturants
Flavour – we went for dinner and/or drinks almost every night there! We absolutely love the woman who own it and she even gave us her card incase we wanted a seasonal job their! Safe to say we became close and that is party for her great margaritas. Seriously, name any fruit or berry and she can make margarita out of it!
Korali- With an ocean view and great caesar salads! This restaurant is also family driven and has an adorable family feeling when you walk through the doors. It fits great for a romantic two person dinner or family night. The owner offered us ozou to taste. He had this giant 2L bottle with the label worn off (no kidding since it’s 2L of hard liquor). The traditional Greek hard liquor is usually served straight with some ice. The reaction the ouzo has with the ice turns is milky white and it tastes like liquorice. So if you like jager or anything liquorice? You should try it.
Evis bar – The first thing you see when walking up the pathway to the hotell is Evis bar. If you see a mural of a lizard holding a beer with its lounge, you’ve found it! They have almost all drink at the same 9 euro and I can tell you .. you get your money’s worth. If you drink socially than maybe stick to the mocktails because they mix alcohol with some mixer not mixer with some alcohol (iykyk). We went their two night because the wednesday they had a rockband playing. The first night we were intrigued because one of the bartenders came out and gave us water while we waited across the street for a cab. Very nice!
On the friday we went for drinks to celebrate midsommar, a swedish holiday. Since they wrote ‘happyy midsommar’ one their bar we felt it was fitting to bring our mini midsommar pole with us for drinks. boy did we get questions about it! We ended up giving them our midsommar pole as a thank you for good service after showing them swedish midsommar song such as ‘små grodorna’ and the bar owner asking if he could take a picture of it.
A short 15min cab drive and you can get to the water cave at kaladakia beach! for my first experience in a water cave it was beyond my expectations. There is a food truck where you can buy ice cream, snacks and other hot meals. The sunbeds was 6 euro though! (yikes) Beautiful clear blue water, I couldn’t believe how much the water changed from a 20 min cab ride. we went two days in a row because we wanted to come back with a waterproof phone case to bring our phone to into the water cave. I greatly recommend investing in some typ of waterproof videography to have pictures such as these!
