Eurotrip - Featuring The Heff

* Sorry, crappy WIFI again, so no pictures *

Hello again!

Moving on with the Contiki tour we find ourselves on the bus to Naples. It’s becoming quite difficult to write new blogs given every day we wake up in a new city. I find myself waking up in the morning trying to remember what country I’m in. It’s rather exciting, but I usually don’t know until I have a look outside the tent. To keep track of the many things we’ve seen is also quite difficult, as every city we visit is so vastly different from the last. If we continue the way we are travelling at the moment, I expect a rather exhausting finale to the trip, and that just happens to be in Amsterdam.

I can’t quite remember what note I left you all on, but I’ll just pretend it was Venice. On the way to Venice, we had a short stop-over in a small city called Verona. This is where the Romeo and Juliet story came from. We scored a snap of the famous balcony where Romeo was calling out to the lovely Juliet. Also here is a statue of Juliet, in which we were informed emits good luck to those who caress her boob. Great fun! In the same alleyway is a huge wall with little pieces of paper all over it. The idea is to write a love message and stick it on the wall to promote love, and I suppose peace. I love seeing stuff like that, it always puts a smile on peoples face. We didn’t have any paper or pens, so we couldn’t spread any love.

To me, Venice would have to be one of the most popular cities in the world, most commonly known as the ‘floating city‘. It was definitely one of the places I was most keen to visit. With streets of water, and everyone owning a boat as opposed to a car, our day of Venice was a rather interesting and fascinating one. Contrary to what I first believed, Venice is actually a collection of 117 islands scattered all over the joint. Home to all the churches, St Marks Square and Gondolas’ is one main island - to me, name unknown. Our camping site was not on this island unfortunately. To get there, we had to catch a 30 minute ferry, where we saw a few smaller islands, that I hope were not actually used any more based on the state and age of the buildings that inhabited them.

St Marks Square on the main island was pretty exciting. On arrival our tour manager, Tara, notified us of a few cool and unusual rules that are special and unique to certain parts of Italy. One law that is unique to St Marks specifically is the non-kicking pigeons rule. It’s ironic that they’ve made an actual law preventing a person from kicking a pigeon, but at the same time, the council has started putting contraception into the food of the pigeons to slow the population. I like to think the police were arresting too many people because it was impossible to walk through the square without booting one of these flying rats. These little bastards were everywhere.

Benny boy and myself decided to hang with a few champions from the group for the day, and just spent the day walking around the many skinny lanes, checking out the many leaning buildings that looked as though they were about to fall into each other. A fact I didn’t know about the city was that it was built the way it looks. Someone decided it would be a cool idea to build the city with streets mainly made of water, I always had the assumption that it was a regular city that had just sunk over the years. Whilst there, I’m not sure if we saw it at it’s peak tide, but I would hope so, given how close the buildings were to the water. We were told that when they have a king tide, the whole of the shopping square, along with all the shops, gets flooded and everyone walks through the square with water up to their hips. I imagine it must be a pain in the dick for the shop owners who have their shop flooded. I noticed that a lot of the shops in the area had carpet floors…Could you imagine the smell after a king tide? And the corrosion!

One of my highlights was definitely the Gondola ride. A few of us got together and hired a Gondola for about 45 minutes. I always thought the massive stick on a Gondola worked by pushing against the sand at the bottom of the water. I was quite wrong. It turns out the massive stick is just a paddle, and there is a very fine art to working this paddle. I was most impressed when we started turning, by using only the shifting weight of our paddler and the singular paddle itself. We scored ourselves two bottles of wine and had a wee tour through the many ‘streets’ of the city. To sit there, and actually realise that we were in Italy, in Venice, in a Gondola and drinking bubbles was quite a surreal moment. It all came crashing down what we’ve been doing for the past couple months. I feel as if we’re living life at the moment.

Moving on from Venice, we found ourselves on the way to Florence. On the way though, we managed to squeeze in a visit to Pisa, to visit ol’’ mate leaning tower. It really does lean, and on quite a substantial level at that. There were a shit load of tourists, all lined up taking their ’funny’ little snaps of them holding up the tower, or pushing it over. We did see some rather original ideas, but almost every person had the same picture taken. It’s a funny thing with the Asians, they’ll take 800 pictures in a day, of what I don’t know. I’d hate to have to sort through their photo’s. For the Asians who aren’t snapping every brick they see, there are the one’s who have just got themselves a video camera. These funny little chaps hold their camcorder in front of them and have it constantly running all day. I’ve found myself walking past many recordings and often wonder how many videos I’m in around the world. Another thing I love about Asian tourists are the pictures they take with people in them. Especially in the older crowds, there is a vast lack of emotion. As opposed to cracking a smile, a lame pose or at the very least, a thumbs up, these people simply stand there, with either a straight face or sometimes even a frown. One must ask whether these people are actually enjoying their holiday, or if they just wanted to do it for some pictures and to say they’ve been there.

Arriving in Florence, our first night entailed some hardcore Karaoke. The cheapest thing on the list were 2L cocktail jugs that were rather potent, and hit that spot well and truly. After a 2 Euro bottle of wine and few swigs of this golden serum, I was well on my way to becoming a microphone hog. I sang a couple tunes, whether a knew the songs or not. At one point in the night, all the chaps on our tour had managed to lose their shirts and were running around wreaking havoc among a fellow Contiki tour that happened to be in the same bar. One of our lads somehow managed to lose his pants as well. Being May Day eve, every man and his dog were hitting the streets for the massive street parties that were going on. The night before May Day, everything is open until 6am in the morning, including most cafes, markets and even clothing stores. There were few large groups going around with massive drums, tambourines and whistles making excellent beats for the proles to dance and rock out to. There were so many happy people walking around, it only made sense to get into the spirit.

Before I go on, I’ll just mention that right now we’re driving on what could only be described as the Italian Great Ocean Road. We’ve been on the coast line for quite some time now, and at the same time we’re going through the mountains. It’s majestic.

May 1st is a bigger holiday in Italy than Oz I believe. Heaps of cafes and take-away shops were still open, but most of the museums were closed. Luckily, we had a city tour organised for us which took up a good chunk of the day, and rather than just sight-see and look at art like every other day, we were able to just have a chill session in a cafe and sit in various parks. Florence is also the home of many famous statues and was home to such historic figures as Michelangelo, Galileo and Da Vinci. We managed to see two replica’s of David, but unfortunately, the real David is in one of the galleries that are closed on public holidays.

One of our optional extra’s in Florence was a four course Italian meal in some overly-fancy restaurant. For the entrée, we were served up some bread with some soupy stuff on it, followed by traditional Italian pasta for our ‘second’ entrée. Some of us from the tour were faced with a shock when confronted with the pasta served. Unlike what most are used to - Pasta with a heap of sauce and meat, the Italians believe that their pasta is so good that there is only the smallest amount of sauce, perhaps just to give it a colour other than yellow. To be completely honest, they’re correct, that pasta was bloody amazing, even if it was mainly oil rather than sauce and meat.

Since the first day of the tour, all we’ve heard about has been “Electronic Space Disco”. This is just a club that every Contiki tour visits and has somehow strung up a good deal with Contiki. A lot of hype went into this club, and I’d like to believe that the hype wasn’t a waste of time, we had a damn good time. There were two floors to the club, the lower being host to the bar and the karaoke, and the upper being the dancers domain. Our main man, Gi-Gi, was our bar-tender for the night. The rule is that if you are good to Gi-Gi, he’ll be bloody good to you. The man could make a mean cocktail, in particular, his Gi-Gi special. To this day, I have no idea what was in them, but they went down great and turned me into a walking wreck. At one point in the night, Benjamin was looking very angry about something, and so I decided to ask what was up. He gave me a sip of his ‘whatever it was’ and it tasted like a standard cocktail, rather than a Gi-Gi cocktail. With this he complained to our tour manager who went and consulted Gi-Gi. Ben’s next cocktail tasted like methylated spirits with petrol as a mixer. Needless to say, our Big Boy couldn’t walk without two people either side of him, and had thrown up so many times, I thought he was going to start throwing up his bowels. We threw him in the tent, without mattress, stomach down, and threw a sleeping bag on top. 5 hours later, I awoke to find him in the exact same position. He managed to wake up still off his face, and this continues for another 3-4 hours through the day before he slept it off on the bus.

And so we reached Rome. A heap of us put in for a guided tour of the ruins and the Colosseum. I re-call the guide telling us what the Colosseum was actually called, but I can’t remember. The name Colosseum was only a nick-name that eventually became the name everyone knew. It was given this name due to it’s colossal size. I’m pretty sure it was the something Amphitheatre.

Every now and then, our bus driver, by law, must have a day off from driving and Rome was that day. Each of our campsites are usually quite a distance to the city itself, and will take 30+ minutes to get in each day. On the drivers day off, Tara buys us an all day metro pass which gives us unlimited access to the underground, trains and buses. Everyone went in together, but Ben and I had to smash up some washing and Ben needed to check if he had any money on his internet banking, so we went in a bit later. On arrival we decided to walk the back streets of the city, which we were told is where all the locals hang to get away from the hideous tourist prices. Through these streets were a heap of awesome graffiti works and all the lanes were big enough for a moped at the most. After having a caffee latte at a little coffee shop where no-one spoke English, we smashed up Vatican City. Of the whole of Rome, we asked for two things. To see the Colosseum and the Sistine Chapel were our two big things. If Ben and I made it to these, our Rome experience would be complete. Didn’t happen unfortunately. We arrived at the chapel just as they were closing the doors. A reason to go back.

I started writing this blog on the way to Naples, but have had to put it off, and so I shall continue. Unfortunately we didn’t get to spend a night in Naples, but we were able to drive through it, and had to wait around for a ferry for quite a couple hours. Naples is the dirtiest city in Europe, but also happens to be the third biggest city in Italy. The place is a dump. We were told that if we ever come back, we were to never ever stay out after midnight. Naples is gangster country, all the mafia stories come from here, and to this day still continues.

Our ferry departed from here to the island of Capri. Never have I experienced such a place. I didn’t read about this little trip, or even hear of it until I was given the ferry ticket. Despite the crappy weather, this little island was still gorgeous. I could have found myself walking around it for a week. It’s a bit bigger than Magnetic Island, but has huge mountains all over it, which make to be good look-out spots and great walks. When you see pictures and programs on TV of crystal clear blue water and think to yourself “That’s probably just Photoshop or video effects” - you were wrong! These beaches do exist. The water was quite similar to that of Hyam’s Beach in NSW, but clearer, if possible. Unfortunately, the beach was made up of rocks. These little bastards hurt to walk on, and make everyone look retarded when entering and departing the water. Maybe the water was freezing, but that kind of beauty couldn’t be left untouched, so Benny Boy and I jumped in. Every other tourist on the beach thought we were idiots for even touching that temperature of water, but it was so worth it. Whilst on Capri, Tara hosted a Gelati eating competition for us. To enter, we had to walk into the nearest Gelataria and purchase two scoops of their lemon Gelati. Why lemon you ask? Because it’s the hardest to get down, and for me, the hardest to keep down. I didn’t think I had a chance, but about halfway through my tub, I noticed everyone hadn’t even touched the rim, so I smashed it down a bit faster. That lemon did not enjoy being in my stomach, so I had to push it down with more. That chunk then teamed up with the chunk that was already trying to come up, and formed a super-spew which I pushed further down with more. I cleaned up that tub and thrust it upon Tara’s face, only to realise the girl down the other end had done the same at about the same time. My tub was cleaner and quite clearly I should have won, but some bastard decided that she started with more…I’ve never been so upset in my life.

After Capri, the tour spent a night in Sorrento before the long drive to the ferry terminal - city unknown. A few of us had a smashing dinner at a little Italian pub. It was a lovely candle-lit dinner and with more traditional pizza and pasta, provided a grand finale to our trip through Italy.

This morning we hit up the all-famous Pompeii, in which I was particularly excited for. Ever since first watching Pink Floyd’s concert to no audience in the amphitheatre of Pompeii, I’ve wanted to see it. To make sure we saw it, both Benjamin and myself paid top dollar for an optional guided tour Contiki provided. I won’t go too much in to detail, but to put it simply…We didn’t see it. Some moron decided that the amphitheatre wasn’t worth including, or even mentioning in the tour. About two hours later, we met some people who did find it, and had a great time there, despite knowing nothing about the Pink Floyd concert. Neeeeerrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr!!

In two hours, we’ll be boarding the ferry on our way to Corfu. Since leaving Barcelona, Corfu has been the topic of discussion. Beaches, heat, Greek girls and hire cars - Wooooooooooooooooo!!

Later dudes!