Non per la fantasia - Grazie a Dio!

Amalfi Coast

A few weeks before we left, our basic outline for the trip (a week each in Rome, Florence, Milan and the country) changed to include some days in Naples, in order to visit Pompeii and Herculaneum. And since we were here, we could also make the time to follow several people's advice to see the Amalfi Coast. I hatched an idea that maybe we could rent a motorbike (a Vespa, of course) and ride along the coast road. It would be quite an intense drive, so we would only want to do it one way, and Salerno to Sorrento looked the nicest route to travel: sun at your back, views in front. I did a bit of research to that end, and saw that there weren't actually that many rental companies that would do a one-way rental, and there weren't even that many that had Vespas.

So on our easy stay-at-home morning on Saturday, I looked into it a bit more. And I was right first time. Nobody would do a Salerno-Sorrento rental, and nobody had a Vespa. Our hosts had offered to help when I mentioned that I had this plan, and at the time they also suggested we could get a fast ferry back to Naples. Wow, eh? What a fabulous day trip that would make. So since they had offered, I contacted them to ask if they could find anyone who would do any kind of rental along the lines we were hoping for. After a while, they did give me a website and a contact name for someone who would meet us at a station on the north side of the peninsula with a Piaggio, and who would let us return the bike at Sorrento. That seemed as close as we were going to get. It could give us time to start driving along the southern coast, and we would just see how far we got before we felt like turning back. And then we could get a ferry or train back to Naples from Sorrento in the evening. We had a plan.

Sorrento

I sent a text message to the contact Giuliana had given, but go no reply. So I started to just make a booking through the website. But then we looked at the rules and started wondering. Although we have fully legal motorbike licences from Vietnam, would that be enough? Some websites said yes, others said no. We didn't want to be not covered by insurance if anything went wrong, so we contacted the rental company directly to ask: Do we need an international licence? And they came back, Yes. This plan really wasn't turning out well.

Next, we looked at just taking a bus tour. It was the last resort, but there was not much else we could think of. The very definition of a last resort, I guess. I googled to see what there was, and the first one to come up had exactly the itinerary that we were looking for. Not too expensive, 60Euros per person. Scroll down, and look! For not too much extra you can have a small group tour, maximum 16 people. That would be nicer. Scroll down again, and for not much more again (still only 80-something euros) you can have a semi-private group of maximum 8.  Let's do that! Oh. No availability till Wednesday. Right, 16 people it is. Oh. No availability till Tuesday. Oh. Okay. Full coach group then - maybe a 50-seater bus. Ah well, we'll still get the views and see what it's all about, and at least it's cheap.

The town of Amalfi

So this morning we went to the Duomo, just around the block (our building door opens on to the back wall of the Duomo - you can see Roman bricks poking out through the plaster) for an 8.15 pick-up, as per the tour company's instructions, based on where we were staying. We had found the ATM we were looking for last night, and it was opened up and usable; and we'd had breakfast at a cafetteria, and at 8.08 we were walking in front of the Duomo to wait in the middle, when we saw a couple of people being helped into a passenger mini-van. Stephen asked if that was our bus company, and indeed it was.  It turned out that our entire tour group was 6 people! We were very pleased not to have paid the extra for the small tour.

Part of the Amalfi Cathedral

As I said, the itinerary was exactly what we wanted. We took the freeway to the start of the peninsula, and then went through Sorrento and along the southern coast. We had some photo stops along the way, of course, with only one being a blatant souvenir shopping stop, and we had lunch with several other bus groups at about 11.30, but after lunch we had an hour in the town of Amalfi itself, and then another hour in Ravello, up the hill somewhat. The original itinerary had us going over the top of the mountain from there, and so back to Naples, but during the stop, the driver had word that there were roadworks along that route causing delays, so instead we went back down to Amalfi and continued along the coastal road to Salerno where we got back on the freeway for home. We were back at the apartment at about 5.

Scene from Villa Ravel, Ravello

And thank god we didn't get to follow our original plan! The amount of traffic in both directions near Sorrento was quite a surprise, given that today is the first day back at school for many schoolkids, so the holidays are over, and it was already around 9 am when we were driving there, so these weren't people driving to work in the city. It was just a lot of mountain traffic. There was a bit less traffic on the other side, but driving still would have required a lot of concentration and effort. Sometimes there were traffic lights - not on a tall pole, just a single red light, placed quite low, because there were places where the road was so narrow that each lane had to take turns to go through. I suspect I might not even have seen a light like that, and just gone barrelling on through. Or I would have come around a curve and ploughed into a line of waiting cars. No, we were both really pleased that we could relax for the whole day and let someone else take the responsibility of figuring out where to go and what to see, not to mention how to steer and where to brake.

We headed out again soon after 6 to do a bit of shopping (some wine to thank the hosts for their effort on Saturday, finding information that we ended up not using at all) and dinner. Finished up having pizza again (not much pasta to be had in Naples, apparently) then home for a cuppa.

And that is just about the end of the Naples chapter. Tomorrow is mostly train travel.