Coffee, Pastries and Beer. A Culinary Adventure.

We have done Budapest, had lunch in Bratislava and now moved on to the Cultural hub that is Vienna.  

Needing a good base for a couple of days of exploration we pitched tent at a simple campground just outside of town.  Rested up and rearing for some action we headed into town the next morning to tour the streets in search of the perfect coffee.  Apparently Vienna is a coffee hub for the world…..I say apparently.  Well taking the advice of our trusty Lonely Planet guide book we headed for a coffee house with a large pedigree and as we found, a price tag to suit.  Well with expectations running high and my taste buds itching for some serious massaging, my hopes were pretty much squashed when our glamorous waiter hit the latte button on the coffee machine.  Grrrr that was our first taste of Eastern Europe for a while and it was almost like we had forgotten how expensive things were and how money didn’t necessarily buy you coffee happiness.  

Well with this disappointment we thought a Weiner from Wein (the locals name for Vienna) would cheer us up.  And it did, so it was back to exploring as happy shiny peoples again.

 Check out the sign, I don't make this stuff up....

Vienna is a maze of nice old city walkways littered with historical buildings, designer shops and large amounts of public artwork.  It is a very nice city to just walk around.  It was in one of the public squares that we stumbled upon a bubble making event where we got to show off some of our skill in front of a local tv crew.  See the photos.

Well all sudded up and smug with our efforts we took to a spot of sunning in one of the central parks with the use of some free city chairs.   Backing this up we had a nice lunch and Dids booked a spot at the Opera minus me.  I was off to the campground for a relaxing bbq and a spot of the old beer.  That is my opera baby.

 Lazy chairs in the park

Well it was five or so hours later that Dids arrived back to find me on the beers with some French and Slovenian travelers having a good ol time.  For those opera fans in the crowd, firstly I don’t know you and secondly the show was really good apparently.  Anyways back to the Frenchies.  One of the guys had earlier biked from Turkey through Iran and on and into Pakistan.  He did it on his own and slept either on the side of the road or with any local that would let him in!  Quite an amazing story.  This time he and a mate were riding from France to eastern Europe.  Unfortunately it was in Austria that his mate pulled up lame with a torn Achilles tendon.  Ouch.  So now they were hitch hiking and backpacking to complete their travels.  Good luck to them, they are traveling on almost no money!

Well with friends made, Facebook contacts swapped and the car packed up again we were on to Innsbrook in Austria.  I have to say, what a place!  Both Dids and I rate Austria as the prettiest country we have seen yet and Innsbrook is a good example of this beauty.  It is a smallish ski town at the base of some impressive Alps which frame it in an idyllic fashion.  You simply need to see a couple of photos to understand this.  Because of some rain on the day of our arrival, we opted for staying at a hostel for the night rather than pitching a tent.  Breakfast was included in the price and what a breakfast!  It just kept coming and the cheese cake at the end was a nice touch.

 Insert one nice hat moment....

Fuelled up and feeling good, we took the opportunity to hop onto a ski lift and head for the top of one of the local slopes for a few hours of trekking.  At the top of the mountain it was nothing but clouds and hail for a little while before clearing.  Once the ice cleared there was nothing but a beautiful view!  There is something about standing at the edge of a cliff and having clouds zoom past your face!

 Innsbrook and surrounding mountain views

The view upward from the top of the cable car.  We could have gone higher, but you know.

The view downward

What a mountain man.  I had to displace a mountain goat for this shot.

Yep, freshly cut

3 hours later and with a few km’s under our belts we were at the bottom, back in the car and happy for once to let it do a bit of the traveling.  On to Fussen, Germany and the start of the “romantic road” as it was dubbed.  It was in Fussen that we saw the Walt Disney castle in person but unfortunately we could not stand up to the busloads of tourists and the demotivating number of costly hurdles you had to jump through to get around it up close.  

Pulling up for the night we found a nice campsite that offered a free view of the castles from the tent.  Get that into you the German Tourist Board!  It was free, haHA!

 Disney Castle. Actually it is the castle built by the mad king Ludwig of Bavaria

Well the romantic road was pretty disappointing.  Bavaria is much flatter than we thought.  Actually it is pretty much totally flat and the road seemed nothing more than farms and a few towns.  After Austria I think we were a little jaded.  So it was a big ol, stuff the romantic road and we were off to Koln for the night.  Resisting the urge to indulge in the myriad of tantric massage parlors displayed throughout the local tourist information booklet (seriously) we poked our way around the city which had a cool cosmopolitan feel to it.

The mountains leaving Austria

Bit of frisbee action in Germany

Bit of random teddy action.

It was the next day that turned out to be a highlight.  Dids hopped in the car and said to me “lets travel to Antwerp for beer”.  Nawww, it’s special when your girlfriend suggests this to you in the morning….

In Antwerp a spot in a cheap camping ground allowed us to save some money which was soon redirected to our quest for beer.  Using our Lonely Planet again, we tracked down a pub which was rated as the best place in Antwerp't (or maybe Belgium, I can remember) to drink beer.  Well bugger me, the book worked and we found ourselves face to face with some 700 different beer varieties each with their own individual glasses.  Belgians do beer really, really well!  In the pub all you had to do was ask the nice lady in your most composed, least intoxicated demeanor if she had a beer of such and such a flavour.  The answer was always yes, yes they did.  We had honey, cherry, Champagne, chocolate, licorice etc, etc beers.  Mmmmmm!  I don’t think Dids was expecting the beers to be so strong though, some were 12% alcohol!  Hence the following drunken photo….  Haha!  The camera doesn’t lie!

 No explanations needed....

 The pub

The beer rating system

The next morning we suppressed a nights drinking with a Belgium Waffle, a heap of pastries and some bitter as coffees before heading off to Monster and later Julianadorp in the Netherlands to visit my family again.    

From the Netherlands, Dids will be heading back to the UK for 10 days to see her family and I will be off to Denmark for a Nordic adventure of the epic variety.  Maybe I’ll come back with a real life Viking?  You never know, I do have a spare seat in the car…. 

Bosnia to Budapest

Montenegro was quite an enjoyable experience and it was a really nice change to be outdoors experiencing nature rather than a city or town.   With our little taste for the simple life we took it upon ourselves to travel a little deeper to the east and on to Bosnia.  Did’s kicked the experience off in fine fashion by first getting clocked speeding by the local constabulary and then running the border crossing between Montenegro and Bosnia!  In her defense, the boom gate was open and they were all asleep!  But didn’t they all spring to life when she buzzed through doing 40!  There really wasn’t a funny side to be seen from their side apparently…..

With relations high between us and the local fuzz, we put the red rocket into overdrive and quickly made our get away.  The roads just over the border deteriorated rapidly and one of the first sights we were met by was more police swarming around a truck perched in our way on a tight mountain pass.  Told to make our way around we nudged the edge of the road and brushed only just past the truck which we found was parked there to collect the load of another truck which had fallen off the mountain!  Good signs!   Well the road further on was littered with subsidence’s; some nearly 300mm, where the mountain had just lurched away.  The most notable road section though was where the oncoming lane had just fallen off the mountain!  Far out!

It was apparent early in the piece that Bosnia was even poorer than Montenegro.  We travelled through some pretty and mountainous country side for our final destination of Sarajevo.  Entering town you could still see heaps of reminders of the war that devastated the area in the early 1990’s.  Many building still displayed scars from where they had been hit by anti aircraft projectiles, mortars and other ordinance.  As we headed through Dids pointed out sniper alley and the famous Holiday Inn where all the journalists stayed during the war.  Pretty full on I think.

We didn’t much fancy pitching a tent in Sarajevo, you know land mines+ tent pegs = the kind of fireworks our tent isn’t quite used to, so we found  a double room to stay at in the old town which was clean and quite.   The old town of Sarajevo was built by the Ottoman Turks in the 13 to 15 hundreds and is an amazing place where both Turkish and eastern European traditions mix.  Here the food was amazing, the beer was super cheap and the people were friendly.  Dids and I took a personalized guided tour of the city lead by a local historian who had lived through the war in Sarajevo.  This was amazing!  He retold his experiences of the war, of finding blood trails through his house, being shelled and sniped at as well as having his house shot at by a tank!  His knowledge of the area and its rich history was just incredible.  He escorted us around such sites as the location of Franz Ferdinand’s assassination which was used as the catalyst for world war one in which 22 million people were killed.   Now if you’re going to give your city a claim to historical fame, I guess that is a pretty notable one!

Graveyard in Sarajevo where just those killed during the war were burried.  Some 11,000 people from Sarajevo were killed during the war.  This graveyard extended right up one of the cities hills and could be seen from miles away.  Incredible.

The corner on which Franz Ferdinand was killed.  The guy who shot him had apparently just grabbed a sandwich from the corner shop before by chance finding Franz Fedinand infront of him.  And with a few shots world war 1 was instigated. 

With our minds buzzing from our new found wisdom, we left Sarajevo for Mostar.  It was our intention to staying the night but after a having a quick look around we decided it better to move on…..  We did the touristy thing and photographed the one attraction the town had to offer before high tailing it out.

The famous Stari Most Bridge at Mostar which is apparently a symbol of freedom for the country

On the road again, we started to notice a large abundance of Bosnian styled road side diners.  These are diners like nothing else!  From the road you can see the usual sit down area, but it is the large cooking sheds with up to 5 lambs rotating at tantalizing speeds over a bed of hot coals that changes the game!  The best thing about it all is that you can smell the rotating goodness well before you see it. MMMMmmmmmm freaking MMMMMM!!!!!

Making our way down the road of rotating lamb, we somehow got into Split, Croatia.  It’s all a little blurry for me…..  I soon came too though at the sight of some 200+ riot police all heading out of town looking very serious indeed.  Apparently we had arrived at the end of Split’s first ever gay pride parade which was a big hit among the locals….  

Split as a town, minus the police and parades was clean and cosmopolitan, much like Dubrovnik but with a better more livable feel about it.  There was an awesome old town tucked in between some old Roman fortifications that was nicely kitted out with funky little beer gardens and cafes.  Really cool.  As with the nature of this trip though, time only allowed us one night there before we were making our way to Zagreb with the aim of eventually being in Budapest. 

Before reaching Zagreb, I thought it best to take one last dip in the “Med” before I left it for good.  It was greatly appreciated on my behalf when Dids took it upon herself to point out the different types of sea weed that were around while I was swimming.  There was the big green sea weed, the small light green sea weed and the toilet paper sea weed……….. Hmmmmm…….Not happy Jan!

Leaving the “Med” behind (notice the pun….) we were promptly off to Zagreb.   In Zagreb we camped in the grounds of a local hostel where we took advantage of a decent BBQ area adjacent to the tent to have a big cook up.  I love the way that the Croatians, Bosnians and Montenegrins LOVE barbecuing, even more so than Australian.  I also love that they do it well!  The guy hosting the hostel was about the nicest bloke you would meet and he made us feel very welcome, especially while we barbecued which was brilliant.

After some rain that was not supposed to eventuate overnight eventuated, we packed up our now wet gear and moved on to Budapest.  Again we managed to find another hostel to camp at although I would be more correct in saying this was a bit more like a hippie commune than a hostel.  My first pass to the kitchen area had me stumbling across some brownies of the more hippie persuasion…..

On our first outing that afternoon Dids managed the wacky idea of buying us tickets to see the Hungarian equivalent of Abba…..  Well, that was 3 hours of interesting to say the least!  A Hungarian musical with English subtitles, you can chock that down as a first for me.  Translation was not needed for the fat guy dancing near the end however, that is simply a universal favourite!  The locals were all dressed up to their nines while I was standing around in my boardies and thongs looking like I was just dragged off the street (which I was).  Awesome.  I could feel their collective appreciation for my attire during the scheduled 20 minute interval….  It was a pretty cool experience however and the crowd seemed to like it because they gave five rounds of applause before we decided enough was enough and left.  

Look at the intent in her eyes.....

The next day we took advantage of some hire bikes and rode all around the town which was just amazing!  Best of all was the public thermal baths where we spent the main chunk of our day!  Ohhhhh my god they were sooooooooo good!  There were 3 really big outside pools, one at 28 degrees C, the other at 32 and the last at 38.  In usual fashion it took me no time to be yelled at by the staff.  Apparently you need to wear a hair net in the 28 degree pool, but not in the rest?  I was yelled at for just jumping in and loafing around.  My hat goes off to them though, they didn’t have the usual pause before yelling at me, they just yelled. 

Indoors at the complex there was a series of some 16 pools all mixed with different minerals and set between the temperature ranges of 16 and 40 degrees C.  Awesome!  You could jump between any of these as you pleased for as long as you could care.  To top it all off there were a number of saunas ranging from about 50 degrees C up to 100 degrees C!  I have never been so steamed and thermalised in my life!  (I just made up a word there, guess which one :) ).

With every muscle, bone and whatever else makes up a person relaxed, we were off to continue our ride of the town.  Gaps between each bit of peddling were filled with either beer or food.  One cool thing we noted about Budapest was that at a night time the public squares in the middle of town would open to impromptu bars where locals would spill out into creating an amazing atmosphere and giving the city a real night life.  Plus they had cheap beer……  Awwwww, I loved Budapest!

 Riding down the river

 Cruising around after a relaxing day bathing

Mmmmm beers

Not wanting to get sucked into staying in Budapest for longer than we could afford we have decided to make a dash for Vienna with maybe a stopover on the way in Bratislava for lunch….  It is a hard road we travel…..

Rafting Montengro Style

On the move from the coast near Budva, we decided to make our way up into the mountains to see the much touted national parks of Montenegro.  It took us very little time to realize that our GPS was going to be of little help here as its “comprehensive database” of Montenegro was soon exposed to be a full 6 towns and a handful of roads.  Money well spent I cursed again openly! So it was to our trusty Italian map of the area sprinkled with a healthy amount of Did’s women’s intuition which has so far been way better than any GPS!  Tracking up some pretty windy mountain passes and through some dilapidated villages we soon came to appreciate that we had virtually just stepped back in time.  Ahhh how refreshing, this is what I was expecting from Montenegro.

The mountain passes were steep and lush, the drivers were a little eccentric and the tunnels were soooo black that entering them you simply just trusted that there was more beyond the first 2m in that you could see!  Dodging the copious amounts of fallen rocks on the road, some bigger than a person’s head, we wound our way up to a little village called Zubljuak in the middle of the Durmitor national park.

The mountains around Zabljuak.  Very Swiss

Mmmm sheep.... They absolutely love their spit roasts here.  There are roadside vendors everywhere and you can see the sheep or pigs turning, slowly cooking as you go past.  Mmmmmmmmm!

One thing you quickly come to appreciate here is that people speak very little English and the tourist scene is very new.  There are many tourist information points to help you out but they pretty much consist of one of the only resident English speakers in the village and a host of business cards for all their mates about town.  “You want to eat? I know best restaurant, all others are too expensive and no good!”, “you want accommodation?.....” etc, etc.  It’s so blatant it is funny.  So with a little looking around we rented a room off a local lady which was clean, comfortable and with a cooked breakfast in the morning, quite hospitable.  Way cool we thought, especially since it was only 10 Euro per person per night.  

Soooo, what is there to do in Montenegro?  Well the locals seem to recon heaps.  But considering it is not winter, and all the snow related activities were closed, the next best thing is rafting the Tara river which is apparently the second deepest canyon in the world (second to the Grand Canyon in the US).  So boldly we marched off to the travel office to book an extended 42km trip which would see us travel to the deepest darkest parts of the canyon system.   Saaaweet.

The day began well, our pickup driver looked like lurch from the Adams family minus all but 3 teeth and the conversational skills.  The van he was ferrying us around in was less than roadworthy and it was a nice touch to see all the seatbelts had been removed.  It is this point in time that I had a pretty good feel for what the rest of the day was going to be like.   I took some solace in the fact that there were 4 Germans doing the trip with us and being the methodical and organized people they are surely they did some research on this company to see if it was all ok…..

The first stop was the rafting base camp where we were kitted up with our 2mm shortie wetsuits, booties and helmets.  We were fed a shot of vodka for bravery and a shot of coffee for god only knows what.  There was a fair bit of faffing around to be done Montenegrin style during this stage.  One thing that made me laugh was that one of the Germans had a pretty big head and did not fit any of the 2 sizes of helmet stocked.  So after some jiggery pokery, whalla, he was given one of the local’s bike helmets instead.   Zero Harm…..

So the raft was strapped to the roof of the van, we were piled in and it was off to the beginning of our rafting trip.  Pulling up in the middle of the road, the raft was lifted off the van and kicked down the hill to the river.  Seamless.  As we prepared to hop on in, three car loads of soldiers pulled up to see what was doing.  Luckily it was just for a gander because our guide gave a real impression of disgust towards them which isn't nice when they have guns.

Piling into the raft we were all delighted to find that the beautiful aquamarine glacial waters that fed the Tara River were 4 degrees C at this time of year making falling out of the raft a pretty big no no!  The rain wasn’t much warmer either……  It didn’t take Dids and I long to realize the grade 4 extreme rafting adventure we had been sold was nothing more than a nice gentle sightseeing boat ride.  Bummer, but god it was beautiful.

 Rafting the Tara River

Pulling up 18km later we picked up our lunches, off loaded some people who had only subscribed to the shorter rafting trek and got to see our van driver having a good time on the beers with some other locals of the “hard working” variety.

Back to the raft and a little later downstream we picked a spot to pull up and eat.  The whole time we were in Montenegro, Dids had been looking forward to seeing a bear in the wild and it was here that I managed to snap my first and only bear…..

 A Didi bear seen tucking into some unlucky campers picnic hamper.  Munch munch munch.... 

The rest of the day was a nice paddle downstream with PLENTY of photo opportunities.  At the pickup point we were met again by our driver again who was going quite well on the beers.  Our guide even gestured to me that it was funny because he had been drinking all day…..way cool.  So it was “alright everyone, into the van because we are heading up to the top of that 1300m ridge for a nice photo op”!  I’ll spare the details for the sake of my mum.

 The finishing line for our rafting trip which was right at the base of a 1300m canyon.

Obviously we did make it back to the village and we were glad for it.  

Where to next you ask, well it has to be Bosnia for some poking around and a bit of real life war story exploration.  Dovidenja.

 Directions are going to be interesting....

What a Shock, Eastern Europe

Dobradan (hello) from the eastern shores of Europe.  I have to say that my expectations of grey communist settlements, big farm hardened women with mono brows and delicious cabbage meals has been quashed by what we have experienced so far.  Firstly the area is as pretty as hell, more so than Italy.  The communist settlements have not eventuated as yet and the women, well no farm hands around here!  Our first four days in the east have been spent in Dubrovnik, Croatia, where we rented a private apartment which is all norm about these parts.  What a good move too, the apartments here are cheap, clean and only a short walking distance from the beach.  Using this as our base we have explored Dubrovnik quite well and I have to say it is a very pretty, clean and friendly place.  Unfortunately it is also very tourist driven and hence the price of most things is what I would consider over inflated for the area.  But for all this, they have made one hell of an effort to turn this town into something first class and you really need to see it to appreciate how nice it is.

Our apartment in Dubrovnik.  Notice the home made pizzas and the BEER!  Thats right guys, all 2.5L of it!

 The coast line all around

 Swimming in the Adriatic.  No sharks, stingers nothing.  No fish either.....

As with all things that seem too good to be true though, there usually is a catch.  My experience with this place is that the catch is: there are too many old blokes here exhibiting wrinkly bits that should be kept housed!  Seriously, what the hell is wrong with these buttered up old dudes and their need to expose themselves to a whole group of other old blokes?  We first stumbled upon this disastrous happening when we decided to hire some kayaks off a less than obliging rip off merchant for a 2 hour paddle around a nearby island.  The paddle was great and as a reward we managed to pull up on a rocky part of the island where the water went from zero to 10m deep straight up.  Good territory for me to try out my new dive watch I thought and the free diving I managed in these crystal clear blue waters was brilliant although a little fresh.  Taking the time to let the sun warm us both back up we lounged on a rock at the water’s edge like a couple of lazy lizards.  Soon enough we are greeted by an old man paddling his way over to our spot looking a little perplexed.  As I watched him make his way over, I started to think, hmmm, that guy is acting a little strange…..Well…… the white bum gleaming from just below the water’s surface was a dead giveaway and correspondingly my look of indifference became one of keep on swimming bloke!  But no, he thought it cool to pop up right next to us for a bit of a dangle before heading off over the rocks behind us.  This got me thinking, where the hell have we pulled up?  So foolishly I turned my gaze over the rocks behind us to find a whole garden of naked 60 somethings bopping around.  GREAT.  You had your peeping toms, your buttered up crispy fried’s and your “I just like the sun and wind on my dibs” old blokes.  DOUBLE GREAT!  With a big “let’s get the hell out of here” to Dids, we were off.  Since that point, every beach outing has not been complete with me finding myself face to face with an old dude, his package, my expression of disgust and his “ain’t it all awesome” attitude.  No, no it is not.

Filling in our time between the wrongful nakedness, we managed a boat trip around the nearby islands which kept us entertained for a whole day as did a tour around the cities fortified old town.

The little lady on the city wall

The coastline outside the old town.  This is where we kayaked

The old town as seen from the city walls

Dubrovnik has provided a beautiful, fun, safe and clean stop over, but for what this place brought to offer, we yearned for something more……and that was……spit roasted suckling pig.  That’s right, both Dids and I had heard that there was a place down the coast near Budva that served a mean spit roasted suckling pig and so we were off to experience this splendor of the culinary kind.  We found our way into a nice little sea side apartment at the beachside town of Sveti Stefan which was delightfully exclusive and came complete with hotel attendants solely hired to keep people like me off the beaches.  Way coool.  But it was the pig we were here for and it was the pig we found our way too.  I have to say, we were not disappointed, it was one awesome meal.  The food was first class and the price was ridiculously cheap.  Both Dids and I ate and drank until we were literally comatose with the meal costing 34 Euros including a nice tip.  Mmmmmmmm……..  I didn’t want to leave the next day but Dids promised me more food of this nature up in the mountain country of Montenegro along with some cool adventures of the wilderness kind.   How could I say no?  So it was to the trusty Ford mobile and after pointing it north, we are on our way to adventure it up gen Y style.  Later.   

Suckling pig belly......MMMmmmmmm, very good!

    

Mafia Pizzas and Million Dollar Boats

Well with Rome in the bag and most the famous sights checked off the list we find ourselves moving south down Italy’s coast line for Naples, the home of the Mafia.  With a brief uninteresting stop over at a little beachside campsite for the night we headed for the little seaside town of Sieano on the southern side of Naples (near the Almaffi Coast).  One thing was clearly evident as we headed south from Rome; this part of Italy is definitely poorer than the north.  With the aid of our brilliant Garmin GPS we found ourselves taking little backstreets through villages and all other manner of cattle tracks which allowed us to get a good feel for this fact.   I am sufficiently up to date with all the dead end streets of Naples right now.  There were a fair number of areas you would consider to be bordering on slums, most with the odd whiff of a third world country.  It is a shame to see so much garbage around the place as the natural surrounds of this part of Italy are still quite stunning.

 Sorrento harbour

 Sieano beach at sunrise

 Typical Italian house along the road into the campsite

 Sunbathing locals - Dids wanted me to take this photo

The next major observation is that the people here are absolutely nuts!   Their driving is far more third world than European and they seem to take extraordinary risks without the slightest care or moment of consideration.  Maybe a distinct catholic belief in the afterlife is some contributing factor?  I have had to adjust my driving massively to fit in with what is happening around me because if you don’t fit in, well then you’re the one who is in the most danger.  I have made the following observations that may help others who wish to experience this idiocy:

  

Don’t slow down if you want to fit in.  Concentrate on your driving and not those pesky road speed signs.  Your speed is set here by the crowd.

1. Know your car well, especially how wide it is and if your mirrors deflect when hit.  And know how to hit a narrow as hell gap at 40km/h.
2. Don’t take offense to anything that happens around you, no one else does (unless someone runs into you, then you can lose it Italian style).
3. Use your horn for everything and make sure you have a good one.
4. No one wants to crash, so use this philosophy and get a little lose.
5. You can and must overtake at every chance, no matter what the necessity ie. Road width, shear cliff proximity, potential for gross pedestrian harm etc.
6. Parked cars and people chatting can be found anywhere, including in the middle of a highway, busy intersections etc.  Don’t ask them to move either, it is not appreciated…
7. Finally, if you are worried about the police (all 3 kinds!?), well don’t.  They are simply so flat chat handing out parking tickets that if what you are just doing is just what everyone else is doing, well they don’t care.

Now that is just the road etiquette as I have observed it, there are other things I must warn of:

1. All Italians here fight for the center line of the road so expect to round a corner and have a car or vespa heading for you, this is normal.  They always seem to get out your way JUST in time.
2. Impatience is the rage, so get into it.
3. Pedestrians are nuts.  To cross the road here you just need to jump out and walk.  If you make the mistake of looking at the cars hurtling towards you with nothing but full commitment in your eyes and the stare of a demon, they WILL call your bluff and you WILL not be happy.
4. Italians are excellent at multitasking.  They can ride a vespa, dangle  a cigarette and chat with their mate on the back (or on the odd occasion in the car adjacent) while on their daily commute to work (or I assume they head to work, but considering I haven’t really seen anyone working this may be a mistake on my behalf.  I’m dedicating this comment to every Italian road worker and tradesman I have seen).
5. Finally, nothing can be taken for granted.  Just because you haven’t seen it or would never have thought it doesn’t mean it isn’t around the corner.  I saw a guy the other day jogging down the ACTUAL middle of the mountain highway here in his sweats pumping out the calories with his hand weights while a full time stream of cars, buses and trucks dodged him (barely) at a million miles an hour.  I had my money on this guy becoming the most glorious of hood ornaments, but alas, and did he seem to care at all about his predicament….Nope.  Cause he was an IDIOT!

Could it be the olive oil and a ridiculous amount of coffee consumption that is causing this craziness?  Dunno, but I did have the best croissant I have ever had in my life here so eh, who cares.

Well with our desire to keep driving here to a bare minimum, we found better ways of commuting.  We managed to see Pompeii which was big and old, enough said.  We went for a swim in the Med, it was rocky and fresh.  Then…..we did a COOKING CLASS wooohoooo and it was awesome!  We learnt how to make Napoli style pizza, fresh ravioli, baked fish in crazy water and tiramisu!  Best of all, following the cooking, we got to have a sit down lunch and eat what we had made.  The chef Mina who taught us was really nice and the whole experience was quite enjoyable as was the company.  I have a fair few videos of it all to allow Dids and I to reproduce the recipes again and again, which we will. 

 Our cooking instructor Mina

 Dids and I getting out cooking on

Pompeii street living

Well the next day brought around a good old long forgotten friend of mine called torrential rain.  Being a cliff side town, there was a massive amount of run-off that accumulated around the place which turned roads into streams and turned me and Dids from happy dry campers to drenched hysterical chappies (note: Dids is not a chappy, this is a figure of speech) This wrecked our plans to travel to the Island of Capri and basically forced us to up end our stay and head to the other side of the country for sunshine and a ferry across to Croatia. 

We didn’t quite make the port town of Bari for the ferry so we had to pull up short in one of the nearby seaside towns for the night.  The decision was to stay at an Agritourismo (farm stay) where Dids told me we’d be helping out on a ranch, sleeping in a barn etc, living it Italian peasant style.  Well, not so much.  The only one we could find was huge and grandiose.  It had 2 pools, a massive courtyard, grassy manicured lawns, marble statues etc.  I was thinking oh man, this is going to cost me a mint!  But after a long while of trying to find someone who spoke English to help us we found out that the place wasn’t open yet and was undergoing some renovations.  With a little negotiating  through an interpreter ( a young lad of about 15) we managed to stay the night, get free internet, free breakfasts, a free laundry service, a cheap 3 course dinner, all at hock and all for a ridiculously low price.  It was one hell of a score and simply worth it just to sleep in a proper bed.  I cannot stress how big and crazy this place was and we had it to ourselves!  It did feel like a bit of a hotel California though which had me a little concerned.  I don’t want to meet all those pretty, pretty boys she calls friends…..

The next day we headed for Bari and the ferry with just the briefest of stops in a big sports store called Decathlon where we bought up big.  Lads, the spear fishing gear in Italy is one quarter the price when compared to Adrenaline in Australia!  And all for exactly the same stuff, no exceptions, it is all cheaper!  I just wanted to punch someone in the face when I saw my latest diving mask here for 29 euro (about $35) when I had just paid $100 for it on super special in Australia!  And to top it all off it is all those rubbish brands like OMER and Beauchat that are the most common…..  So with more essentials for the car (new masks and snorkels, a dive watch and more) we headed to Bari and onto a ferry for Croatia.  Coooool, cheap beer, gangstas and crystal waters.