Venice, Italy

Flew back to Bologna; as we landed everyone broke into spontaneous applause. This alarmed us on the way down to Malta; we wondered what clever feat the pilot had pulled off in a perfectly routine landing. It turned out it was because we were early, still can’t quite work it out but put it down to Italian passion. When we got back to camp, after a very hairy taxi ride – the driver is a true Italian with no self-preservation instinct whatsoever, I even shut my eyes at one point as we swerved past another car on a narrow lane (in NZ it would be one way) at about 120km/h. We had pizza in the cafe and watched the final of the Euro World Cup – Italy vs. Spain. At half time we’d finished eating and Italy was 2-0 down, it was also too hot to stay. We’re pleased we left as Italy ended up losing 4-0; there’ll be some very unhappy locals about for a few days! It was a horribly hot night with no breeze at all. I ended up having a second cool shower at 2am and finally got to sleep. Apparently it has been getting ever hotter since we’ve been away from Bologna. A British couple across from us said it was 43˚C in the city the day before! So we’re moving onto Venice and hoping for sea breezes...

Arrived in Fusina at lunch time and found it is quite comfortable as long as you’re in the shade, a good solid breeze so hope it lasts all night! We’ve also got a fabulous view – across the water to Venice and a shipping channel running across the front of the camping ground – everything from huge container ships to speedboats passing within 50 metres of the Enterprise, very entertaining. We decided to have a lazy afternoon, kept up a pretty good pace in Malta, and will venture over to Venice early tomorrow. We can catch a boat from just outside the camp.

Aah Venice, what a city! Truly unique. We found it quite fascinating and much nicer and cleaner than we’d expected. I’d heard horror stories of its smell but that wasn’t so yesterday. The water traffic as we arrived was fascinating: from ocean liners to water taxis to water buses to gondolas – so like a busy city street with the equivalent land vehicles – except luckily there is no equivalent to the ocean liner on the streets.

It’s sad to see the deterioration as it is starting to sink into the mud though. This was particularly evident in the Basilica di San Marco – a beautiful cathedral, with gold mosaics and marble columns. Unfortunately the floor is so wavy and uneven, we wondered how long it can stand – the columns are coming away from the floor in places.

We enjoyed all the little bridges over canals with busy gondolas plying their trade with the tourists. These two particular tourists were too tight to pay their fares but I was pleased to see they were busy – I had heard that they weren’t used much anymore but this must have changed, they were flat out. I stopped to offer to take a photo of an Asian couple in front of the Bridge of Sighs so he insisted on returning the favour – ended up taking 3 photos, he wanted to get it right! If this trip has taught me nothing else it’s that people of all nationalities are just people and you get friendly/unfriendly, arrogant/humble, lovely/horrible people in every population...

We took a ride in a public Vaporetto (a water bus) on the Grand Canal (main street) – to the Rialto Bridge. We got off at the next stop and decided to walk back to the bridge; we went into a couple of shops, then got hopelessly lost. It’s the greatest rabbit warren of a place – we couldn’t find the main canal, all the small canals criss-cross with the streets and all the buildings are high and the streets narrow so it’s impossible to get a fix on where you are. We had a map but it was just a tourist version, and didn’t name most of the streets, so not much use for navigation. Eventually we saw a sign pointing to one of the stops we’d passed and decided to follow that even though it wasn’t the way we wanted to go. Once we got nearer the main canal we started getting back into crowds of people and then saw signs for Rialto and eventually found our way out of the warren!

The Bridge of Rialto is quite fascinating in itself, lots of shops all the way over it – three lanes of walking: one on each side of the bridge and one in the middle through the shops. It’s like stepping back in time because apparently all the big cities used to have bridges like this – the original London Bridge was one example. All-in-all we loved Venice and would highly recommend a visit, but don’t leave it too long as it may not always be here.