Holidaze and Rivieras

I got a bed in a dorm and before I had time to grab my things to go do some work on the GIFTs project, I made a friend. And then another. And then another. And then another. OY. Needless to say, I got no work done, partied til the wee hours of the morning with my new friends and woke up to my friend calling me to ask when I was coming over.

Ap, who I know from McGill Enviro program, graduated last April and I hadn’t seen her since. We arranged a place to meet and had a much-needed cheesy run and hug moment on the street J I stayed with her and her dad at their apartment, which was in the process of being packed up. Her dad just retired from his job at WFP and they are moving to Florida. Ap just got into a masters program at Columbia! It’s so amazing to see where all my friends from enviro are going and what they are specializing in. Our group of friends from McGill are scattered all over the world now and even if we haven’t spoken in a while, all it takes is a little message and it’s like no time has passed!

It was so wonderful to see her. We spent a lovely few days together and I got the food and shopping tour of Rome that I wanted. The days were filled with lots of sun, laughing, giggling and catching up on the past year. We did a little bit of sightseeing. Ap kept luring me to interesting places with the promise of good food. Sneaky.

I booked a flight to Cannes to come visit my aunt and uncle. My uncle was here working and my aunt came to play! It was so great to see them. We shared a lovely teeny apartment that turned out to be just perfect for the three of us. It was like extreme luxury camping. My first full day here required a change of wardrobe. I had packed for late winter/early spring and the weather has since changed to summer. Hot, sunny, summer. Poor me. I know. But, I get grumpy when I’m hot and sweaty. So, new clothes were needed. The morning consisted of a long walk to find a non-existent public pool with my aunt and her cousin B, also here for work. The afternoon consisted of a very successful shopping mission, during which I purchased the exact items I wanted.

 
Yesterday, we woke up and had a lazy breakfast on our sunny balcony and then headed out for our day of exploring. Our mission was to find a coastal walk on le Cap d’Antibes. My aunt and I took the train down the coast a little and got off the train in Antibes. We navigated our way around and then hopped in a taxi and were dropped at the beginning of the trail. 

The walk was glorious. The trail was beautifully constructed from carved flat stones and laid out perfectly along the edge of the water. We stopped to eat our prepacked lunch at a perfect spot with a chair-like perch on the white rocks of the cliff. Our view while eating lunch was of the pristine blue sea, with little white sailboats bobbing along.

Auntie M and I made our way back to Cannes. An easy bus and train ride later, we were back in town, just in time for me to skype with my GIFTs supervisor. 

After my “work” meeting, I headed back to our cute little apartment and we got ready to go out for dinner with a friend of theirs from the biz. The restaurant was an Armenian place where the menu is set and the food is plentiful. Too plentiful. 

What ended up being the appetizers had filled us all up. Then there was the main course. Then there was the second main course. Then dessert. By the end of it, I thought I was going to pop. Their friend was a riot. He is an Austrian Jew from Uruguay who is constantly mistaken for a Spaniard in his own country. He had a wonderful way with words and kept us entertained throughout the meal. Very intense, funny and interesting. He requested that I make him sound taller than he is. 

I sent the aunt and uncle off on their next adventure to Barcelona and stayed behind to relax in the apartment in Cannes. I spent the last two days catching up on my GIFTs work, reading and lying in the sun on the balcony. Nothing extremely exciting, but exactly what I wanted to do. 

Now, I'm heading back home to Oxford for a few days before I head back to Montreal. My wife is meeting me at the homebase tonight and she is staying for a few days. A is taking us to the country and I can't think of a better way to finish off nearly four months of jumping around than spending some time in the country with loved ones. 

Ischia to Capua

After a few days in Ischia, we decided it was time to move on. After a few days of ho-humming, we got our act together, decided on an agriturismo inland between Naples and Rome and made our way there for two nights.

 

We drove through this tunnel

 



The agriturismo was in Capua, which is just off of the autostrada, and I would be surprised if that town had ever seen non-Italian tourists. We were constantly surprised by the fact that no one spoke English. It is an arrogant tourist thing to say, I know, but true!

We spent two lovely days in Capua, exploring the teeny town and surrounding areas. On the drive back to Rome, we stopped at a mini-coliseum in Capua. It was spectacular. And empty. We were the only people, let alone tourists there! This was an area where they would train the gladiators before sending them off to Rome to fight in the Colosseo.

The drive back to Rome was speedy and easy, with one more stop along the way for lunch. We ended up in a little town at a non-descript resto where we had the best pasta of the entire trip! After lunch, we had some time to kill so we drove up the mountain, in search of a grotto. We kept getting distracted by different signs and fun-looking roads so we never actually made it to the cave. We did find a little cemetery overlooking a man-made lake with snow-capped mountains in the background. After having satisfied our sun-needs, we hit the road again and headed to Rome. I dropped A and dad off at the airport and headed into Rome to find a hostel for the night.

I is in Ischia

Hide and Seek Peacock

Nice Castle!

It has been awhile. I’ve been slacking on the blogging. What I haven’t been slacking on is the fun-having, food-eating, sun-worshipping and life-loving.

I have to backtrack now to remember all the good times that I have been lucky enough to enjoy over the past two weeks.

One thing I feel I must mention, is how incredibly lucky I feel to be graced with such wonderful loved ones. I have just been bouncing from one wonderful person to another over the past few months and I can’t even begin to explain how fortunate I feel to have such great people in my life. I must have been a saint in a past life to be blessed with such an amazing existence. I know that tragedy, sorrow and difficult times make for more interesting reading and more well-rounded people… sorry to disappoint folks. It’s been all smooth sailing on my end with no waves in sight. That is, other than the waves I’ll be crossing tomorrow, on my way to Ile Ste-Marguerite, off of Cannes. But I am getting ahead of myself.

Our time in Ischia was… well… wonderful. We were there one week before tourist season and so there were very few annoying people crowding our space. The only downside was that the thermal baths around the island weren’t yet open to the public. Lucky for us, I had managed to book our apartment somewhere with a thermal bath just metres from our door. After a first night of fitful sleep with me worrying that I had made a big mistake booking us at this place, dad woke me up like he used to when I was a kid. (No, not by sending the family dog outside to get cold feet before he would put him into my bed… that one was reserved for my big bro! ;) 

The Caterpillar!

I woke up to freshly made coffee, a view to take one’s breath away and a suggestion to hop into the thermal bath before I sat down for breakfast. 

The view was perfect. We had a big balcony that had a panoramic view of the island, with Mount Epomeo on the left, the Villa Ravino Giardino in the center and the bright blue Mediterranean on the right. My fears that I had chosen the wrong place to stay quickly disappeared when A walked in and had already visited the garden. Phew.

We spent one day touring the local town market and stocking up on delicious food for our kitchen. We were directed to the market by a string of locals who understood our charades for food. The market was relatively small with two fish stalls and three fruit stalls. A and dad found the fish stall they wanted to buy their food at. The fishmonger was such a character. A huge rotund man with hands the size of my face, he started laughing and responding to my dad's silliness. I've never seen fish that was so fresh. I actually saw one that was still alive. No joke. I didn't want to tell the man in case he just smashed it with his huge hands and fish juice went flying everywhere.

San Angelo

Another day was spent driving around the coast, trying to find the beach that supposedly had thermal springs shooting off into the Med. We didn’t find it. What we did find was my intolerance to narrow roads that barely allowed our little car to pass through. OY. My poor nerves. We did find an adorable little town called San Angelo with a Presqu’Ile, jutting off of the end of it. A and I went to find a place to sun ourselves on the flat rock overlooking the bright blue sea.

The next cloudy day found us walking up the highest point on the island (Mt Epomeo) which had the self-proclaimed title “the best panoramic view in the world”. Unfortunately, it was too cloudy to judge, but it was REALLY cool! We drove up partway and then parked and hiked the rest of the way, through what I can only imagine were ravines, roughly carved out over the years by gushing water. The higher we climbed, the more the terrain changed from quite lush forest to ashy-white stone that was easily broken up by hand.

As we climbed, we passed by men who were cutting down trees in the woods. A called it coppicing and it seemed like a very efficient forestry management technique. They could cut one tree trunk in every ~10m² patch. That truck, after many years, would sprout one or many more trunks and then the men (I assume) would return and cut another. It’s like shaving! You cut them down and they grow back thicker and more plentiful. How is that for a visual? Except in this case, it is more like selective shaving, since there weren’t many trees being cut. I also noticed that they were careful of where they selected the trees. No trees were cut on steep inclines, I assume to ensure that erosion wouldn’t occur.

At the Top!

A volcano with a view

Back on track. We climbed to what I assumed was the very top, and found a few little vineyards at the base of what I can only assume was an old pilgrimage site. It was a church or chapel (no idea what the difference is) carved directly into the cliff of Epomeo. I should mention that Epomeo is an inactive volcano. Hence the ashy-white stone and the really interesting rock formations. We climbed around the top and found a little trail that would lead to the very highest peak. A had disappeared at this point, so dad and I made our way up. I left him at a point just past his comfort zone, holding onto the rock. I pranced onwards to see how high I could get and what I could see. It turned out that the path was carved out ALL the way to the top, where an Italian flag was flying at 788m above Ischia. Luck had it that as soon as I reached the peak, the clouds parted and left me with a small window of a view onto the town on the coast of the Island.

Hearing the increasingly stressed out calls from my dad, making sure I hadn’t plummeted to my death, I made my way back down and we returned to the car to find A. We all returned safely to our precious thermal bath.

The one rainy day we had, we ended up going into Napoli. I must admit that dad and I had settled in to relax for the day. A was going without us and we realized that she would have way more fun than us, so we joined. Also, we needed her to protect us from the Napolitans. We parked the car by the port in Ischia and took the ferry, car-less, into the city of thieves. We had a fabulous day walking around the city. I want to go back. It was fabulous. The city exudes this air of old grandeur. The first building we walked into was a shopping area that must have been an old train station. Vaulted glass ceilings that felt like they were 50m high, big extravagant designs and just… classy. The main road was lined with old palazzios with huge doors that carriages would have gone through to pick up the rich people for their rendez-vous. A friend of mine had described the city perfectly: “gritty and wonderful”.

Sunset from the roof of our apartment

The volcano I would conquer!

We left Napoli rather reluctantly, A more than the rest of us. We hopped a ferry back to Ischia and had no pick-pocketing incidents. 

The side of Epomeo

Do as the Romans... and head south

The next day in Rome, we had a breakfast of the fruit we had bought at the little store down the street and set off for our day in Rome. A “dragged” me to her favourite shop to buy me a delayed birthday present. A silk scarf with beautiful turquoise and coral designs. She then led dad and me to this little market across the river and left us, with a plan to meet up for vino later in the day. 

Dad and I walked the market, laughed with the vendors at our inability to adequately communicate and finally bought some delicious food. We agreed on three sandwiches, some veggies and a bottle of white wine, all of which we brought to the side of the river and picnicked by the Tivere. I found us a comfy, sturdy wall to sit on and we ate in the brilliant sunshine, looking out over the river, under a chestnut tree. 

Once finished, we were both relatively tipsy and headed off to wander aimlessly. It must run in the family, this love of walking around with no set destination in mind. We ended up at the top of a hill, above Trastavere, near the Spanish Academy, overlooking the city. Once my photography needs were satiated, we made our way back down and set off on a mission to find me a bathing suit for the upcoming trip to the island of thermal baths: Ischia.

The mission proved successful. I found a little store run by a lovely Italian woman who I joked around with about needing adequate coverage for the winter curves. Dad, not one to be shown up by A who had bought me a birthday present, was generous enough to buy me the bather as a delayed birthday present. It seems to be an ongoing fight between the two of who can be beholden to who(m?). I’ll just sit back and enjoy the fruits of the fight. It’s like being a kid in a divorce who keeps getting presents, minus the divorce. A keeps threatening dad that she’ll keep me and adopt me and dad keeps reminding her that I’m his, not hers. I keep explaining that it doesn’t matter, as long as they both keep me well fed. It’s adorable.

After the swimsuit mission, we went to meet A at the wine bar and sat and had a bicchiere each of delicious vino, recommended by the surly owner (who wasn’t actually surly, but quite sweet after we joked around with him a little). We headed back to the apartment so that I could get my computer and connect to the world wide web for the first time in *gasp* three days. Also to figure out where the hell we were going, how we were getting there and where we were staying.

Two hours of internet searching led us to rent a car from the airport in Rome, drive down the coast, bypass the city of thieves/Napoli and catch the last ferry from Pozzuoli to Ischia and arrive, several hours late, at Villa Ravino, where we have rented an apartment and may never leave.

The drive yesterday was incredible. A friend of mine has always raved about Italy and has been here several times. I never really understood the attraction until yesterday’s detour/drive. I finally get it. We were driving down the coastal roads, on these little windy roads, past little villages with the Med, a brilliant blue on our right, and these gorgeous green hills that turned into craggy mountains on our left. I felt such an amazing
sense of soul coming from the land. It must seem super cheesy to say, but I just get such an amazing vibe from the actual earth here. It just seems happy, laid back and abounding. As if it has all the time in the world to produce a cornucopia of delicious food. I love the language... it feels like sumptuous food in your mouth when you speak it. Every word just tastes amazing and feels like an old melody that you’ve known since childhood. Then there’s the food. Enough said.

Anyway, after realizing that the scenic route was taking us 3 times longer than the autostrada, we changed course. Thanks to the amazing technology of the Iphone map ap, we hit the big roads and zoomed down, past Napoli, to Pozzuoli, where we arrived just before the last ferry left for Ischia. We had time to buy our tickets and some picnic makings for the ferry ride and got in line to load our little fiat into the belly of the monster boat.

An hour and a half ferry ride, past little islands that seemed inhabited only by villa-like fireflies, we arrived to Ischia. The drive from the ferry to the villa wasn’t too bad, but we arrived in the dark and after the land-lady had gone to sleep. She graciously woke up and showed us to our quarters. The situation seemed bleak last night. The apartment is decorated in the style that my great Aunt Katie’s cottage was decorated. We decided to sleep on it and make our decision of whether or not to stay the next day.