Island hopping without losing days to ferries

Island hopping looks like the most relaxed way to travel and is in fact the one that punishes bad planning hardest. Roads can be driven at any hour; boats cannot. Miss the 07:10 and the next one may be tomorrow, or Thursday.

The good news is that the constraints are knowable in advance. An hour with a timetable before you book is worth several days on the trip.

Start from the boats, not from the islands

Almost everyone plans this backwards: pick five appealing islands, then try to connect them. Ferry networks are hub-and-spoke, not point-to-point, and two islands you can see from each other may have no direct service at all, requiring a full day back through the hub.

Do it the other way round. Find the ferry operators for the region, look at what actually runs on your dates, and build the route along existing lines. In Greece that means understanding which island group you are in - the Cyclades, the Dodecanese and the Ionian are largely separate networks, and hopping between them usually means going back to Piraeus.

The rules that stop a route falling apart

• Three islands in ten days, not six. Every move costs the best part of a day once you count check-out, the port, the crossing and finding the next bed. Three moves is a trip; six is a commute.
• Minimum two nights per island, ideally three. One night means you see the port and leave.
• Go one way. Chain the islands outward and fly home from the far end, or fly out and work back. Returning through the same hub twice wastes two days.
• Put the buffer at the end, not the middle. Spend the last two nights on an island with an airport, or on the mainland. Weather cancellations at the wrong moment cost you the flight home.
• Check the day of the week. Many routes run daily in August and twice weekly in May. The timetable you found online may be last season's.

Reading a ferry timetable properly

Three details matter more than the departure time.

The vessel type. High-speed catamarans are roughly twice as fast and considerably more expensive, and they are the first to be cancelled when the wind gets up because they cannot handle swell. Conventional ferries are slower, cheaper, far more stable and run in weather that grounds the fast boats. On a windy coast, the slow boat is the reliable boat.

The port, not the island. Larger islands have several ports, sometimes an hour apart by road. Arriving at the wrong one is a common and expensive mistake.

The season markers. Timetables are usually published per season and the shoulder-season version can be a completely different network.

Booking: ahead or on the day?

It depends on what you are carrying and when you are going.

• Foot passenger, off season: buy at the port. Flexibility is worth more than the seat.
• Foot passenger, high season, popular route: book a few days ahead. Some sailings genuinely sell out.
• With a vehicle: always book ahead. Vehicle space is the first thing to go and there is no standing room for a car.
• Anything involving a public holiday or a local festival: book as early as you can. Domestic demand is far larger than tourist demand.

Keep tickets on paper as well as on the phone. Port wifi is theoretical, and a dead battery at a gangway is not a negotiation you win.

When the wind gets up

Sooner or later a sailing is cancelled. In the Aegean the meltemi blows hard through July and August; in the Philippines a typhoon can stop every ferry for four days; in the Scottish islands winter gales rewrite the timetable weekly.

What to do:

1. Assume it will happen once. Build in a spare day before any flight.
2. Ask locally rather than online. The port office knows twelve hours before the website does.
3. If a cancellation is likely, move a day early. Being stuck on the island with the airport is much better than being stuck on the one without.
4. Accept it gracefully. The four days we lost to a typhoon were spent in a fishing village with four other stranded travellers, learning a local card game badly, and we were sorry to leave.

Getting around once you are there

Small islands are frequently better on foot or by bicycle than by anything else, and the local bus is usually more useful than its reputation. On Rarotonga there are exactly two buses, clockwise and anticlockwise, and if you miss yours the other one arrives eventually going the long way.

Scooters are the default on many islands and also the leading cause of holiday injuries. Check that your travel insurance covers you, that you hold the licence category it requires, and wear the helmet. Gravel, sand on tarmac and unlit roads at night are the specific hazards.

Choosing which islands

A pattern that works well: one island with infrastructure, one with landscape, one that is genuinely quiet. You get a good meal and a pharmacy on the first, the walking or the diving on the second, and the reason you came on the third.

Resist the urge to see the famous one at all costs. Greece has around 6,000 islands and islets and only about 200 are inhabited; Indonesia has roughly 17,500; the Philippines counts over 7,600 and new surveys keep adding a few. Whatever you skip, there is more of it next door with a tenth of the boats.

The small print that saves the day

• Cash. Small islands have one ATM and it can be empty on a Sunday.
• Water. Some islands desalinate, and the tap water is not always for drinking.
• Pharmacy hours are short and the nearest hospital may be a boat ride away.
• Book the first night's accommodation before you sail. Arriving at nine in the evening to a full village is avoidable.
• Check the last boat time on the day you leave, then check it again at the port.