Apologies to my dedicated readers for the lackadaisical approach I’ve taken to my journal upkeep of late….we’re travelling more slowly and hence I have a lot less to report. Add to that that I’ve been working a bit recently and you have my excuse.
After arriving in Rome we stayed in a B&B of a nice young man for a couple of days whilst we attempted to reroute our tickets so that Andrew gets to go to Japan and that I can go straight home from here rather than via Hong Kong and Moscow. However, to our disappointment we discovered that all British Airway offices and essentially most offices of oneworld associates are now closed to the public and you have to telephone in changes. This sucks on a number of levels – it’s harder to deal with people on the phone, it takes longer because they have to send requests off to the fares department rather than doing it on the spot, and we’ve also been told numerous times that we cannot change our tickets over the phone. Thankfully we were able to call BA and find that they are immensely more helpful than QANTAS and they were able to change our tickets for us (after a week of to-ing and fro-ing to the fares department mind you). Not that it came cheap – it cost me bloody 300 quid to change my ticket…thank goodness I’m still working is all I can say.
Anyway, we made a vague plan to head down to Sicily but decided it was too much travel in one day (about 11 hours) and broke it up a little. We booked four nights in a B&B in Piano di Sorrento, a small town 3km from Sorrento, but ended up staying 6. The woman who ran the hostel, Rachele, was just wonderful. She was so friendly and did everything in her power to ensure that our stay was pleasant. It was just us in her house as it is the beginning of the low season and guests are few and far between. Despite this, every morning we would get up to the kitchen table set with breakfast and a cheery ‘Buongiorno’, the bathroom was always cleaned immediately after we had finished showering so it was like we had never been in there…..everything was spotless but not without soul. To top everything off we spoke in Italian and English so that we could both learn a little….I’m seriously considering going back after Andrew has gone back: it fits my checklist of warm weather, friendly owner and learning Italian.
We spent the first couple of days relaxing; well, Andrew relaxed and I worked intermittently. We walked into Sorrento and it was fantastic to see all the places that
Spunk and I visited so many years ago….Fauno bar for a drink, a restaurant we ate at, the gym we went to where the men marvelled at my calves, the shop I bought some stockings from…poor, poor Andrew. The numerous irrelevant stories I told.
On Thursday we decided to head to the Amalfi Coast and check out what everybody had been raving about. We boarded a bus to Positano, said to be the most beautiful of the towns on the coast, and we weren’t disappointed. This is despite the fact that I was in a shitty mood, felt sick from the winding bus and consequently had been in such a hurry to get off that I had left my sunnies on board. FRICK!!! I finally get another pair that are okay and I leave them on the freaking bus. Sigh. Needless to say I was mega-shitty, but it didn’t stop me from appreciating the beauty of the town nestled amongst the rugged cliffs before me. Quite similar to Le Cinque Terre in terms of the town and its architecture hugging into the rock, but in the words of Andrew, it was more ‘cliffy’. The drops were more dramatic and the ruggedness more pronounced. The skies were streaked with dark grey ominous clouds that we ignored at our peril for the patches of blue sky that murmured sweet nothings of weather that could have been. The bus wound along the ascending and descended road that cut into the cliff-face, tooting at every corner for the road was really only made for one and half vehicles and to pass the bus needed to manoeuvre slowly and carefully around. Thankfully the traffic are very aware of this and everyone tends to drive quite slowly, so despite making the Great Ocean Road look very wide it doesn’t seem to be an accident-prone place. Then again, who am I to judge?
We wandered around Positano for about an hour, and found that the town itself was not as pretty as the towns on Le Cinque Terre…it was very touristy and didn’t seem to consist of much, lacking the beautiful winding narrow laneways sparsely littered with locals and instead housed jewellery stores and expensive clothing labels.
After an hour it had started to get cold so we decided to jump on the bus to make our way to Amalfi and hoped to locate my lost sunnies. We arrived and made our way to the SITA office (the bus company) and were able to communicate effectively with the guy about what had happened. The buses were certainly run quite efficiently as he could tell me where that exact bus was at that time, but he wouldn’t know about sunnies until the end of the day. We left Rachele’s address and moved on to explore Amalfi to discover that apart from the Duomo there was absolutely nothing there, much less than Positano. Yet another tourist place with not much to offer. Certainly I think the appeal of the coast is the views you get making your way from one place to another. You can hike between the two places and I might try to do that if I get time before I leave. The Duomo was located at the top of a set of steep stairs and was sufficiently different from the duomi that we had seen previously….when you first walk inside you walk into a courtyard full of plants, which was a nice change to the plethora of Mary and Jesus paintings. Not that it lacked these, of course.
We decided that we would head home a bit earlier than planned when the weather turned on us, but unfortunately so did everybody else and we were left standing in the thick pouring rain waiting for the later bus. On the bright side the bus drivers let us stand inside one of the buses whilst we waited for the next bus to Sorrento, which turned out to be the one we were standing in! Woohoo! We just sat down at the front and felt very pleased with ourselves. To top it off the bus actually drove through Piano di Sorrento so we didn’t even have take the train back there! Awesome.
On Saturday we went to Capri, which is just as beautiful as I remember it. The ferry made me more sick than I remember though. We arrived and started the short trek up to the town centre up winding stone pathways and staircases, flowers spilling out from the garden fenced boundaries. After wandering around the centre briefly, we started the trek up to Anacapri, the town at the top of the island. We walked along the winding roads as the traffic soared past….well, the cars drove past and the motorbikes soared anyway. We located a staircase and began the climb up that avoids most of the roads. It was beautiful to walk amongst the trees as they shed their leaves to litter the stone stairway allowing hikers to crunch their way up to the top.
Just at the entrance to Anacapri is the church Villa San Michele, which we didn’t actually enter but I remember passing last time I was here. We walked through here and got some much needed water after our rapid ascent. We didn’t stay in Anacapri for long, enough to wander around the tiny town and grab a quick bite to eat. Before we knew it, we had trotted down the staircases to be back in Capri and onto the ferry back home. We probably covered about 20km in all our walking that day, and we were bloody buggered!
So that, my dears, is essentially what I’ve done for the past week. We’re sitting on a train and are on our way to Tropea, a small town that is apparently gorgeous on the way to Sicily. We have a couple of days there and then a few days in most likely in Palermo and then my boy is off to Japan, leaving me alone for a month in questa bella paese. Only 44 days till I get back, it’s starting to all go a bit quickly! Anyway, hope you’re all enjoying the warmer weather and the fact that I have finally posted.
Ciao!!
XXX
Sorrento photos
Capri photos
