Imagine Greece. Picture for a second those glistening waters, the brilliant white churches with blue domes upon them, the pink and yellow and blues that dot the buildings amongst the clifftop town spilling down towards the sea. Think of that panorama before you, the blazing blue sky above and the shimmer of heat in the haze… and that’s Oia, a town almost conjured out of cinematic imagination at the very tip of Santorini.

Our final island is the glamorous, volcanic beauty that is Santorini, famed for its spectacular sunsets and clifftop towns. We arrive in mid-afternoon, after a two crossing from Naxos, at the ridiculously busy ferry port, still undergoing reconstruction after being badly damaged in a storm, and fight our way through masses of tourists to find our driver, and be taken up the steep, steep road to the rim of the caldera where our hotel awaits.

The sun is starting to set as we arrive and we spend the next three evenings in a similar fashion – gazing out to the horizon watching the end of the day change the sky from vibrant orange to dusky pink, deep rich purple and eventually, a host of twinkling stars above us.

A short boat crossing from Mykonos harbour lies the island of Delos, now uninhabited save for a small phalanx of archaeologists, but once the centre of Cycladian life and home to tens of thousands of Ancient Greeks, or Naxions as they were then more commonly known.

Famed as the Greek party isle, and a mecca for gay tourists, Mykonos is an obvious starting point for our Hellenic odyssey, and one we’ll return to at the end. The town is absolutely gorgeous, both a visual, twinkling treat at night-time and a cosmopolitan, gleaming white experience during the day. Pedestrianised and full of winding streets, it’s like an open-air, designer souk – populated with fantastic art galleries and fashion houses rather than the leather shops and spice merchants of North Africa.