Journeys End

Well here we are back in Auckland rediscovering what it is like to feel cold!  But it is also good to sleep in our own bed and put the suitcases away.
We had a good two days in Dubai especially when a friend of a friend kindly gave us a great mini tour of the sights and invited us to a wonderful lunch at the local sailing club. Thank you Bill and Elizabeth we think it made all the difference to the impressions we could get in our two day whistle stop tour.
While being impressed by the modern city we were pleased to visit the old town and enjoy the ambiance of the Dubai Creek.

Gillie watching the passing parade Dubai Creek

View from our Hotel roof top swimming pool

Zoom view from the roof

We are still pretty jet lagged from the 19 hour flight home but we feel that it was a wonderful holiday that exceeded our expectations.  Southern Visions provided us with great bikes, clear maps and guides and set up really good accommodation. Would we do it again - absolutely.

Arrivedecci Roma and Italy

Well as they say its over before you know it - our month in Italy is finito. The holiday was great and the last couple of days in Florence were lovely.


Bohemian in Florence

While all the streets of Florence are packed with beautiful buildings and people - when you go into the Bobolgi gardens the views from the top of the gardens in the centre of the old town are suprising and so Tuscan.

We took our last train ride down to Rome yesterday Thursday and stayed near the station.  Our last meal in Rome was under a covered area on the street with a powerful thunderstorm crackling around us and full on rain.  It was warm and the food was great. 

We had a quick look around our last Church designed by Michaelangelo of stunning proportions and the ususal plethora of wonderful statues and paintings.

We have arrived in Dubai and are slowly getting our heads around a different reality.  We thought we were flying out tomorrow but we have discovered that we do not leave until Sunday which means we will be getting back to NZ on Monday (and back to work on Tuesday!)



Florence and Beatrice

Well here we are in Florence a beautiful city at a lovely time of year.  We left Lecce on Sunday the 10 October bright and early on the super speed rail Italia train that whisked us North for 7 hours.  We followed the coast much of the way and then headed inland up to Bolonga where we changed for Florence. The train journey was extremely smooth and fast flowing through endless tunnels wherever hills got in the way.

We arrived late in the afternoon at our hotel "Hotel Beatrice"  If Palazzo Rollo was reminiscent of "Room with a View" then Hotel Beatrice is something out of a 1950s European movie. It has been in the same family since 1953 and retains much of the same style.  The hotel is on the second floor of a large turn of the 19th Century building and is accessed by a cage lift that one can imagine Sophia Loren and Maurice Chevalier elegantly entering. Not so with us - we opened the outside cage door and loaded with great difficulty ourselves (with back packs) and two wheelie suitcases in. It was extremely tight. Somehow we pressed the wrong button and went up to the third floor where a truly elegant older lady was waiting to get in.  She was quite put out when we said we could not fit her in as well. So then on down to the second floor, but I tried to open the inner door before lift had settled and found ourselves stuck just above floor level.  After much struggling and button pressing the proprietor came out and coaxed the lift to floor level. Guess what - the inner doors opened inwards which meant we couldn't open the damn things past the cases.  While I climbed on top of one of the cases while squashing Gillie against the lift wall the hotel man eased one case out and then we all virtually fell out behind them. He was very apologetic and helped us to reception where we had to wait while he processed earlier guests.  While waiting I had to go and rescue an elderly American couple who found themselves in the same trap.

The room is past its glory and the shower occupies the space where your knees go when you sit on the toilet - but hey it all works and it has lovely old fashion wall paper.  The landlord is relentlessly cheerful.

If Rome blew us away with all its archeological Roman ruins well Florence is like one huge Art Gallery and Sculpture park.  It is claimed to have the most treasures of any one place in the world and I believe it.  The light at this time of year is exquisite and the colours of the buildings and public spaces are great.

 The challenge is the same old thing - there is so much extremely interesting stuff to experience that the brain gets tired.  The other issue is that there are hugely more tourists here than in the South so we are working our way around crowds of tour parties all trying to consume as much of the culture as they can in the few hours allocated to them.  But we also recognise we are tourists as well. 

As with Rome the bridges over the river Arno are lovely structures although it is amazing to realise that the Germans blew all of the bridges up when retreating from Italy at the end of the war with the exception of the famous Ponte Vecchio. What is great is that they have restored all of them back to their former glory.

 We have spent the day looking at the sights including the Medici Apartments and gardens and  have now come back to collapse until this evening.
Tomorrow we head back to Rome for the night and then on Thursday we fly out for 3 days in Dubai.

Awaiting Table



Silvestro Instructs

 Well my day cooking with Silvestro arrived. I was a bit nervous that my cooking skills are not of a professional standard but that proved foundless. I joined  class with an Australian couple from Melbourne and 2 Canadian woman from Montreal They had done the week course and I joined in for the last day Chris joined us for the meals. It was geat fun Silvestro has a rustic farmhouse kitchen that looks like something from Designers Guild and we cooked up a storm with ingredients that we purchased at the markets. We made some Quince paste and then the pasta for the evening meal. Lunch was Fish soup with an abundance of Prawns mussels fish calamari all just quickly boiled with white wine and then ate at the table with gusto and bottles of Rose wine

Gillie and Darby cooking up quinces These slowly bubbled along all day and then we had a gift of quince paste to take home

Dinner at 6 pm was and we made a Lamb casserole and the veges of beans fennel aubergine and potatoes We did the  prep and then popped out to a wine bar for a glass of wine and back to virtually sit down and enjoy The Aussie couple were very interesting, with Darby having a vast knowledge of wine. Silvestro opened up his cellar for tasting and conversation flowed. It was nice to chat to a bunch of new people in English. We never left until midnight We waddled home to our Palazzo after a great day

a view of the kitchen



Hands on cook



Lecce (Light) and heavy Baroque

Time may well fly but on the other side of the scale there is so much to experience moment by moment that it continues to entertain and suprise.  What is interesting about Southern Italy is that it is relatively untouched by the hoards of tourists - so you get to see lots of things quietly.  Also we have been lucky in choosing this time of year - the weather is great but the crowds are diminishing.

We are staying in a Palazzo here in Leeche and it really is palace like.  From the crowded narrow street you would not dream what lies behind and above.

The street frontage is just that, when you go through the little green door in the arch you enter a big courtyard with lots of green creepers and space to park cars and bikes and still walk around.  The Palazzo Rollo has had the same people living in there for hundreds of years. Our bedroom is like an apartment, but off it is a whole range of rooms open to us full of beautiful persian rugs on marble floors, antique furniture and paintings. We have access to a library and a small dining room where breakfast is served. 

 These are shots of our lounge and bedroom.  They cant really capture the grandure of it all.  There are about 20 different suites in the palazzo with about 5 separate areas with their own lounges and breakfast rooms.  The roof is a total suprise with a huge garden with trees in pots and views to die for. The complex is so big it feels like Gormangahst. This place is not expensive but it is just the way it works.

Lecce is famous for its baroque architecture.  The local brown stone is easy to carve apparently and it has had such a long history that people have been carving themselves silly (in my opinion) its all a bit over the top and intense - every millimeter is carved to the enth degree which can get a bit mentally exhausting.  It does not have the same beautiful fluid quality of marble.  I can see its very skilled. 

I did see a bit of marble carving in a shop but it was too big to put in my case - its a 1920 carving of a woman on a chaise lounge

Yesterday we decided to take a trip over to the other coast to the Ionian Sea.  We went to a little settlement called Gallipoli - not the one in Turkey famous for the ANZACs but a ancient town built in the times of the Greeks.  We decided to take a train and when we got to the station I realised the "train" as in fact a rail car such as we had in NZ in the 1960s. As cute as a button and still in 50s colours.

We jogged along rails in this little train (at one point decoupling from half of it that went off in another direction).  The country side was something out of a spagheti western "The Good Bad and the Ugly" I expected to see Clint Eastwood gunslinging in every station we stopped at.

Gallipoli is translated from Greek to mean beautiful city and it is.  It looks like a Greek Island and was in fact originally an island defended by yet another castle.  At some time in the past they built a causeway to the island that has become so built up you do not realise you have left the old shore line.  We sat and had a lovely meal looking out to sea. (again I hear you say). With all the exercise we do not seem to be loosing any weight.

We caught the 5 .17 rail car home again to Leece which ran to its own timetable. We stopped at a Clint Eastwood station and crews from about 3 little rail cars converged and had a long intense conversation on the platform for about 20 minutes and then all got back in the drivers seat and we were off again. Did not know if it was a stop work or just a smoko break.

We got home and bought half a pizza and a bottle of wine and had a quite dinner in our apartment.

Today Gillie has been cooking with Sylvestro and I am invited for dinner. Gillie will update the blog with her gastronomic experiences next time up.  We have one more day in Lecce before heading to Florence for a few days on Sunday.

Ciao

Otranto and Lecce end of the cycle tourisimo ; - (

So here we are on the Adriatic coping with sunshine and wine..  It is impossible to describe the beauty of this place but its awesome. The days have been hot but with that touch of cool edge of autumn that make for the most beautiful indian summer feeling.  The locals are triming the olive trees and making little fires in the fields so the air has that beautiful woodsmoke smell to it.

We rode down the coast looking in at beautiful beaches and exquisite little villages until we finally made it to Otranto.  The people here truely live the life of the siesta.  All action in the morning and then totally quiet in the afternoons - and then everyone appears promanding in the evening.  Gillie is great at ordering at the restaurants and we end up sampling the local wines and food.  She does it all in Italian and they do not look confused.  I have become proficient in asking where the bathrooms are.
Otranto reminds me of the village in the Tintin book "The Crab with the Golden Claws".  There is a huge castle and a walled village full of curving winding streets. 

Note my sexy Italian costume - somehow they still figure out that I am a tourist.  The little streets lead to piazzas with beautiful churches or to the sea wall.

There is the church of the martyrs with 700 goulish skulls all preserved behind glass and an altar enclosing the stone that they were all beheaded on. Underneath there is an amazing crypt with icons and an fantastic vaulted ceiling over 1000 years old. Steve and Phillip could stand and consider for hours I am sure.

Its all a bit mind blowing.  There is so much that it is hard to digest and we are finding sitting down and looking at our photos is a good way to absorb the experience.  Its all in the brain but the CPU needs time to file it properly.  After spending a evening promanding and a day looking we set off on our last stage of the ride 44Kms back up to Lecce.  We are here safe and sound.  The next few days we will explore this amazing city and then Gillie is off to her cooking class on Friday.

The way the light catches the flat faces of the buildings is very Herge from my old perspective.  When we woke up this morning it was overcast and windy and rain was prophetised.  But in fact the wind was behind us it was cool riding and we only experienced a few drops of rain.  Here are a couple of photos taken on the road to Lecce

 

Coasting down to Otranto

We have had our biggest ride yesterday - from Squinzano to Otranto - we actually rode to Fasano and caught the train down to Squinzano to avoid riding through the city but we still ended up riding 79 Kms. We were meant to catch a 9.20 express but the tour company had overlooked Sunday train timetables and there was only one train at 10.40 which resulted in us having to peddle constantly to cover the distance to get here before dark.  People are so friendly and we are always greeted at the next hotel so warmly even though we must look like sweaty exhaustees.  Last night we crawled into bed at nine and slept like logs.
The tour is amazing as they give you detailed directions line by line to follow unmarked obscure little tracks to find your way.  It is like Orientering in a foriegn land where you dont speak the lingo.  One could get anxious not knowing where in the world you are, but it is also exciting to discover the next treasure.

They have figured out how to guide us brilliantly with one bike handlebar bag providing the line by line instruction and the other giving you a little map to give an overview.  The instructions are like "Turn left at the next cross road where the broken San Vito sign is hanging next to the old green fence keeping the little shrine of the virgin on your right".  I am learning to greet the locals in the field with a Salute or Buon Giorno.

We swam in the Adriatic and it was divine. 

Otranto is a blast - it is the eastern most point of Italy and has been invaded by everyone and his dog over the millenium  (spell check does not work in Italian).  Incredible Castle guarding the harbour and a beautiful old Cathedral with the skulls of 700 Christians who were beheaded by the Turks on display.

Unfortunately I am writing this in a underground internet cafe with old old old computers that do not feel happy uploading photos so I might have to leave it at this until we get to Leece tomorrow or the day after.

Up in the Hills

After romancing so much about Italian Hill towns we got our chance to cycle up to one for a few days. We went to a little township called Conservano and stayed in the hotel next to a castle.  Riding uphill was quite a effort even though it was only 36 kms it was hot.  The back roads are so quiet we kept disturbing sleeping lizards who scuttled out of the way as we trolled along.  Every village has fountains to drink from (water is plentifull and safe) - every fountain is a piece of art

 

In every village is a square where the old me sit and chat.  Of course Gillie stops to join in and ask questions. They even pose for her!

It is really noticeable how many people are employed by the state.  There are heaps of men in uniforms - police, army, carbonarni and priests.

Churches are everywhere in every village and people are always popping in and out.  It is an interesting cultural weave.

After a night in Conservano we headed on for higher up the hill to Alberobello which is very hobbitish with cone roofed "Trulli" everywhere.  The main church above is a classic example.  After doing our first 100kms we were ready for a rest and spent the next day chilling out in our own little Trulli.

Ours is the 46th on the right just to the left of the other one (yeah there are heaps). The whole thing is made of blocks of stone with arched ceilings inside and stone roof tiles.
We got to shake hands with a local priest "Father Pedro"

We cruised around the village all day yesterday and drank local wine and ate pizzas.  (the bike plan was to do a 50km ride to other villages).
Today and tomorrow we are staying in an amazing old farm looking out to the Adriatic its called Masseria Salamina and has been in the same family for four hundred years (they are our hosts).

It was a 40km ride today and we got here in record time.  We are planning for a swim.  Our bedroom is right off this little enclosed courtyard.
 I have been reading a book called the Thread of Grace - about the Italians surviving the occupation by the Nazis towards the end of the second world war.  Shocking story but the courage and gentleness of the people comes through.  Seeing all this history makes me realise how the story just goes on and on and no one knows the next chapter.  All the more reason to enjoy the world now.