RHUMB TO VENICE AND ADRIATIC COAST

Being in Mariano Comense, the newspaper of Cantu puts in contact with Ely to make us a small interview and the same day that we left, it was published. The picture shows the clipping of the newspaper.

Sadly we say goodbye to Ely and Maurizio, to whom we took many affection for the days that we have shared.
We went to Brescia for another expected meeting; the family of a friend in Spain, original from Colombia; Sebastian, Michelle and Liliana, with them we also spent very beautiful days.

Although it was very hard; we arrived to Verona, the known city for the love story of Romeo and Juliet. We only spent one day there, so we did an intense visit, seeing that it’s really worth a visit.

The centre in surrounded in its most part by the river, which was uses as a defends once, and inside there is the Duomo, the amphitheater, Erbe square, and near that square the house of Juliet, where the people write their love wishes in the entry to the place where is the known balcony.


In the house of our friend Andres of CS, we prepared with them a “cake party” which it consisted about to make around 200 creeps of different flavors, and we shared later with a lot of Andre’s friends.
In the night Andres and a friend brought us to a hill to see the nice night views.

Our next destination is Venice, very famous place for which we had a lot of curiosity; but something that we never had thought is that we could go by taxi from Verona. A taxi pick us up out of Verona saying that he was going to pick up his client in Venice, and that today was our lucky day.

Venice, is like a couple of islands separate around 5km from the mainland, and which are separated by a big canal and plenty of small canals which flowing between the old buildings, and hundreds of tiny streets unity by plenty of bridges.


The most singular of this city are the canals of course. Here is not allowed the motor vehicles, so the police, ambulance, even the postman goes by ship, launch, gondola…


But a part of the canals, the streets are so incredible, there are streets where only one person can go through it, and on the top of the building are almost touching each other.
Personally the most interesting is to lost by the streets, specially which are out of the touristic circuits; and lost yourself it is very easy because the whole city is a real maze.


If you visit Venice be careful with your pocket, everything is very expensive, for example one hour in internet is around 8€, of course we have different methods, the library of the university students is very interesting to visit…

The San Marco Basilica that is found on the square of the same name is another nice place to visit, especially if the visit is in the night, when there are few people, everything is light, and the musicians make pleasant night with their music.


During our first day by the Adriatic coast, is the first time that a big truck pick us up, and we found a very nice guy, Hans, with who we went during hours to the city of Pesaro.
As we had not clear destination, we use the big length that Hans gave us on his journey, and we decided to arrive Urbino, but for the first time too we couldn’t arrive to our destination, with the night fallen we slept in Gallo.

It seems that we never arrive…, Urbino is on the top of a hill, and on the highest point there is a fort from where there are amazing views of the city and all around; a landscape that remember us to our land in Cantabria, everything green, mountains and the sea near here. We also saw the sculpture of Rafaello who was living in this city.


Hitchhiking all the time we arrived to Civitanova Marche where we spent the night over the beach, with an amazing sunrise the next day in the morning.

FIRST IMPRESSION OF ITALY

We left back Menton and cross the border with Italy, as the Spanish border, it was totally empty. The expectative of the bad use of hitchhike in Italy, was true; we spent 10 hours to arrive to our destination Torino, by 4 cars and plenty kilometers by walk. We cross beautiful and green valleys, with high top snowed mountains from the foothills of the Alps.

We arrived to Torino in the night and we stay with a very nice couple of HC, Stefano and Anna during three days. Torino its very large city with a lot of lively on the streets, there are many nice places to see, like the Egyptian museum, one of the largest outside of Egypt.

The Mole Antonelliana is the symbol of Torino; it is an old synagogue that at present is a cinema museum.

From the Castello square we watch and walk through the long and straight avenues of the city which brought us to the Republica square, where there is a huge market with everything you need.

We have brought a very nice memory of Torino for the company of Stefano, Anna and all their friend, with whom we shared same music styles; and thanks to them for the opportunity to try the really Italian ice cream, a test, and texture, mmmmm….

Before to arrive to our next destination, Como; we stopped for a while in Milano, visiting the Duomo (cathedral), the galleries and the park Sempione where there is the Arch of the Peace and the Sfarzesco castle.



Very tired carring our backpacks, we were looking for the house of my cousin Ely in Mariano Comense, little bit north of Milano. Ely and her husband Mauricio where happy with our visit and we felt in family for some days.

We visited Como, the natal city of Volta, a city surrounded by an antic roman wall.






We walked around through the narrow streets, with the nice Duomo; but the most beautiful here is the Como lake with green mountains all around.




The changes that we wrote about in our last entry are about our heavy staff (18kg, and 16kg) We decided to reduce the luggage, to be more comfortable and visit the cities even with the backpacks; after one month traveling we have seen that we don’t need to carry many of our staff. So we left the tent, the kitchen with all the staff, clothes…and now the weight of the backpacks are 12kg, and 10kg.

MONACO

Walking to the suburbs of Nice, we arrive to Villefranche-sur-Mer, where is waiting us a pleasure surprise. Hitchhiking a girl pick us up, and after introduce each other like always in French, we saw that she is Spanish, and not only that, she is from Santander in our community. With her, Carmen, all together we visited the Princedom of Monaco; the prince palace, its exotic garden, and the church where are buried all the antecedents of the Raniero family, between them the “recent” dead of Raniero III.

Another important thing to distinguish is the luxurious of this Princedom; gardens and swimming-pools on the top of the buildings, huge yachts like the yacht of Onassis parking on the port; and of course! Ferraris, Porches… and all kind of luxurious cars running on the streets of Monte-Carlo.

Carmen offers us to bring us to Menton, the last city of France, where we met our HC contact, Thomas. We also met Carlos and Carmen, a couple of traveler who coming by bike from Spain to Bari in Italy; all together we shared our anecdotes of travels.
Thomas, cellist of the Philharmonic of Monaco invited us this night to see the test of the orchestra in the Monte-Carlo auditorium.

FRENCH MEDITERRANEAN

The polar cold still accompanies us during the days that we start our journey by the cost of the Mediterranean Sea.
The first interesting city where we are going is Narbonne; like other villages around, people live from the wine sector.
Just in the heart of the city is located the old cathedral of Sant-Just, with a sophisticated acoustic system to communicate with other parts of the building till 100 meters of distance.


This method was used by the soldiers when they arrest prisoners in the cathedral, to have them under control.

Walking and hitchhiking we cover the way to Sète, a small port city with important international connections. But we had to arrive until Agde, separate from Sète by 15km of beach, and where is waiting our HC host, Mary, who treat us like her own children.

Already in Montpellier, we were lucky of accommodate in the flat on Antoine, with 2 Americans and a Pakistani guy. We walked around watching the great monuments and the young atmosphere for the universities.


Montpellier is very big, so we walked a lot out of the city to hitchhike to Nîmes; only 20 kilometers far from Nîmes, the second car which pick us up convert to the feat of the month. There was a hippie couple, and the driver was drinking beer all the time; the problem was the language because they spoke Russian and some French, he said that he wanted to show us something nice out of Nîmes, (this is what we understood) But the time was running and the distance more and more far, until 40km out of the city; then we start to doubt if they want to rob us or something…
Finally he stops in a small town where he met a friend, the friend came to the car and they started to speak in Russian, the Russian was looking at us all the time, and then he occupied the place of the driver and the driver came behind with us; at this time we were thinking the worst way…but finally nothing happened, they only wanted to spend some time together; the main problem was the language and they didn’t say nothing, where we go…what we are doing… At the end they brought us back to Nîmes.

This city is one of the most that we have liked; there are a lot of ancient roman architecture, like the amphitheater, the square house and the gardens full of statues and water canals.


We went out of our way to visit Avignon, a surrounded town by a big roman wall; inside there is the palace of the Popes.

To the south following the Rhone River, in the city of Arles, we continue watching roman relics like the old theater and the amphitheater, everything lively by the big festival of the city, where the show passion for the bull, doing different plays with them.


There are cities like Arles, where is impossible for us to go out by walk, because all is surrounded by highways; so we had to cover all the way to Marseille with three cars, a city of chaos where we were obliged to go out by train, because this night we had a meeting with Luciana of HC, in Toulon, where we spent a nice party night with she and her friends.

On the way to Cannes we had a small problem, we got stuck in the highway, and we had to walk by it for two kilometers to the toll, behind of the handrail of course…


We went to Frank house a member of HC, who host another girl from Galicia, Belén. With them we walked around the city and we visited the famous place where the famous Cannes Festival is celebrated.


Belén accompanies us by hitchhike to Nice, a nice, care and rich city; more like Italian style with narrow and colorful streets it its old town. In the port we saw many luxurious yachts and big houses around.
We spent the first night in the beach, then we enjoy with the company of Alice of HC and her songs with the accordion.


On the next days we will do some changes that we will let you know. Here there is a French map with our way, which already start to change of the original way.