Three days in Italy

Day 1 (May 28)

We were up at the crack of dawn (or a bit before) and dawn cracks pretty early here at the moment. We had to be ready for the car that was arriving at 5am to take us to Stanstead airport. Nothing particularly exciting happened during the drive, at the airport or during the flight to Bergamo.

From Bergamo airport, we caught a bus into Bergamo, from where we had to find the bus that was going to Lovere. This wasn't too hard to do, though we did have to wait a bit for the bus. The trip from Bergamo to Lovere was about an hour.

Once we got to Lovere, we had to find the hostel. This was a bit tricky. The directions we had said the hostel was 200m from the bus stop, but we didn't know in which direction or whether the bus stop we got off at was the one that was 200m from the hostel. Anyway, after a bit of a walk in the wrong direction, and a bit more of a walk in the right direction, we found it. It must have been about 2pm by this stage (local time, which is one hour ahead of UK time). Unfortunately for us, the opening times in the window of the hostel indictaed it was closed until 3:30pm. We decided to go and find some lunch.

There was a pizzeria in view from the hostel, so we went there hoping to have pizza for lunch. Alas we were too late and they weren't doing pizzas anymore. We had sandwiches instead, followed by gellati. Where we were, we were right next to the harbour, so we went and relaxed under a tree for a bit to wait until the hostel would be open.


We headed back over to the hostel at about 3:45pm, but it still wasn't open. Upon closer inspection, we found that there was a note on the door indicating that on this particular day the hostel wasn't open until 4pm.

We decided to just wait across the road (there wasn't much room on the hostel side of the road). While waiting, we got to witness a car accident. It made a great noise, but neither car seemed to be too badly damaged, and after a brief discussion the drivers seemed to agree not to worry about it.

Anyway, we finally got into the hostel, signed up for HI membership (a requirement to stay there that we hadn't previously been made aware of) and checked in. When we got to the room, we pretty much all just went to sleep.

When we woke up, we figured we ought to get some dinner. We went back to the pizzeria, again hoping for pizza and again we were told that they were not serving pizza at that time. The people at the table next to us had pizzas however, that were still in the very early stages of being eaten. We never did find out what the hours for pizza at that place were, but we never went back again either.

We went back to the hostel and asked the woman working there where would be a good place to go for pizza, explaining how we had just been denied for the second time. She recommended a restaurant down the road. It was very good pizza, and not too expensive. We made the decision then that we would head back there the next night for a pasta meal.

That was pretty much it for day one. We were all too tired to do anything after dinner so we just went back to the hostel and went to bed.

Day 2 (May 29)

Day two was our only full day in Italy, so it was our main day for doing something. I think I was the one who first suggested that we go for a hike somewhere, and that's what we set out to do.

We asked the woman at the hostel if she knew of anywhere good to go hiking, but she didn't. She did suggest that we try the tourist information office, so that's what we did. When we got there, we had a bit of a look in the available pamphlets, though we didn't see anything particularly useful. While we were looking, a couple came in and started talking to the assistant, so we had to wait. I got sick of waiting (it was very stuffy in the office), so I went off and bought a postcard. Gen and Damien waited around and talked to the woman, then came and met me in the shop.

The woman had suggested that we hike up to a church, San Giovanni, which is on top of one of the nearby mountains. She said it would take about an hour and a half to get up there. It sounded good. We decided to buy food from the supermarket for a picnic lunch, which we'd have when we got to the top.

She had given us a map, though it was somewhat unclear and the directions were in Italian. Genevieve, having done a bit of Italian once upon a time, could figure out most of them.

First we had to make our way through some back streets of the town, before we could get to the mountain behind. There was a road all the way up, but it got rougher and rougher. It was cobblestones for a while, and then it consisted of bigger stones that were quite uneven.


Unfortunately, we got lost on the way up. We missed a turn, and we ended up walking a reasonable way along the wrong raod. Eventually, we conceded we were lost and decided to turn back. We were ready to give up on finding the church and we were going to go back to a picnic table we'd seen on the way up to finally have lunch. However, on the way back down we spotted the turn we'd missed and realised we were quite close to the church now. Once we had it in sight, we stopped at another picnic table (much cleaner than the one we had passed) and had our lunch.

We had bought bread and prosciutto and cheese and cherry tomatoes. The tomatoes had been vine ripened and so were much tastier than most tomatoes you get nowadays. We also had yogurts.

Once we had finished our lunch, we walked the short remaining distance to the church. We were immediately disappointed when we saw that the gates were shut, until we realised that there was a way in for pedestrians. I proceeded to go and start taking photos of the view. Unfortunately, it was overcast. I was then confronted with two Italian men who looked like serious hikers. One of then said something to me I didn't understand. I couldn't quite remember either of the important phrases that Gen had taught me: "Non capisco" and "Non parlo Italiano". I got as far as "Non" and they got the idea. They then asked something (sufficiently slowly) that I got the idea they were asking my nationality. I replied "Australian" and immediately they exclaimed "Kangaroo" complete with actions.

I continued on my exploration of the church grounds. We spent a while at the church, Genevieve and I both taking pictures with our 20Ds (thank you staff purchase). The photo below shows the view from the church grounds. The hostel overlooks the marina, so this gives you an idea of how far up we hiked.


This is the church itself.


When the time came to head back down, we decided to follow one of the shorter routes on the map. We weren't sure exactly where the path shown on the map was, and we were going to head down one when an old Italian man came over. He started talking to us in Italian, though he was going slowly so I'm sure he knew we were foreigners. He also used a lot of hand gestures and pointed at the map a bit. Anyway, we got the idea that we shouldn't go down the path we were considering, and went down the way we came up for quite a while. Eventually we came to a point we could identify with certainty, so we took an alternate way down from here.

When we got back to the hostel, it was already after 4pm, so we could get in. We had been thinking of going for a walk to an adjacent village where we had been told we could go swimming in the lake (we couldn't go swimming in the section of the lake at Lovere). However, we all agreed we were too tired for this. We showered and headed out for a relatively early dinner at the same restaurant as the previous night.

This time we decided to have pasta instead of pizza. When I was in Italy with my family when I was nine, at one place we stayed, we often had lobster fettucine. So, for old time's sake, this is what I chose. It was very good, with plenty of lobster meat, and (I think) quite a bargain at 13 Euros.


We also had dessert. Our waiter went to the effort of reciting the dessert menu to us in English. I had profiteroles. After dinner, we went straight back to the hostel for a well deserved sleep.