Kristian and Frances

After we left Barcelona it was on to Venice, Italy.

We spent two days in and around Venice, which probably isn't nearly enough, particularly since only one day was in Venice proper.

We stayed in a small camping village called Camping Jolly. It was nice, despite the cramped bungalow we stayed in. There was an odd odour which was a constanct bother while we were inside.

When we got out of the taxi I noticed a puff of white seeds floating by. How pretty I thought. This nice image would come back to haunt me in a couple of days. But for now, the puffs of floating seeds was like a spring snow.

I managed to convice Frances that we should explore Venice without a map. I have a philosophical thing about maps. You look at a map and it not only shows you where you are but consciously and unconsciously it tells you where to go. Sometimes this is helpful, often it shows you where to go to get a fix of cliched images and tourist hellholes. I took a quick look at her mums map to get a general layout of the city and set off down a side street.

We spent a few hours wandering near empty back alleys crossing the canals that the city is famous for. Like Cordoba, the twisting side roads would suddenly stop and you'd find yourself in a square or in front of a grand cathedral and before you there would be a number of alleys to head down and you'd choose one and it would be back into the shadows and narrows. Speaking of narrow, I think we discovered the narrowest alley in all of Venice, perhaps the Universe. The alley was just wide enough to walk through, mainly because the walls of the buildings on either side were leaning towards each other creating a kind of incomplete arch. We headed in the general direction of the big San Marco plaza, and eventually found ourselves on the main tourist road (and by road I mean path, as there are no roads as such, just canals and footpaths) just outside the square. It was horrendously busy. We shuffled through the crowds past designer clothing stores and perfume shops etc and then without warning found ourselves in the huge expanse of the plaza. The most striking thing was not the towers or the cathedral, but the pigeons. Many many pigeons. To give you an idea of how many pigeons there were, and how used to humans they were, we witnessed a man lay down in the plaza and pour a little birdseed on himself (birdseed was for sale at numerous vendors for .50 cents, we didn't buy any) within a few seconds he was lost underneath a blanket of birds. Without any exaggeration he was covered by a layer from head to toe, in places more than one pigeon deep. A small child was running through the plaza and not seeing the man under the birds tripped over the prone fellow and scattered the birds, revealling the surprised person underneath.

We spent some time wandering a little further and found a nice little restuarant (over 100 years running!) out of the main tourist district and had a lovely lunch before making our way back home.

The next day we took a train into the mountains to the north west of Venice to visit Allano de Peave, which is the birthplace of Franceses Italian grandfather, it was a wonderful trip. We stopped off at a deserted train station and walked about 4kms up a road to the small village where we found one shop open, thankfully it was a restuarant. We had a nice lunch, though my pizza patata was just a pizza with french fries on it! Who would have thought that you could get a chip pizza in rural Italy. It was still nice though, just very suprising. I thought only Dominoes and Pizza Hut were capable of coming up with such odd fusions. It was a good day with a lot of walking in beautiful countryside. Unfortunately the floating seed was thick and it awakened hayfever unlike any hayfever I had known! Terrible! Argh! And it only got worse in Rome, and lead me to have a terrible terrible cold for two days while we travelled from Rome to Bari by train and then by Ferry to Dubrovnik (where I arrived almost completely healthy, thank god, as this was the place I was most excited about, and probably my favourite place so far).

After Venice we took a train to Florence. Frances is writing about Florence as I write, so I'll skip that, as we had pretty similar impressions of the place, except she went inside museums and galleries and I just sat around by myself and read my books. Which suited me just fine.

We didn't see any of Rome, I was falling ill and Frances wasn't that interested, we were only there for one night, so we spent that night in our camping grounds (same type of bungalow as Venice but without the smell) lazing by the pool, having a swim, drinking beer and wine and eating pizza. It was wonderfully relaxing, but again with the clouds of seeds! Any so my night in Rome was spent in agony, unable to breathe, unable to sleep and in the most uncomfortable bed this side of Uranus. That hell was nothing compared to the 6 hour train ride to Bari the next day and the 4 hour wait at the ferry terminal. Fortunately the sickness was overcome on the ferry. The blessings of Croatia!

It might be because we spent most of the time in cities, but I was somewhat disappointed by Italy. I know I would love it if I had a car and could get out into the rural areas, mountains and coast more readily, but the cities just didn't really do it for me. I could be overly disgruntled about having to fork out a euro or so when I needed to go to a public toilet. I could be disappointed with the generally poor quality of coffee, of all things, who could expect that the coffee in Italy was poor! Maybe it was the hayfever and cold. Italy just didn't do it for me. Don't get me wrong, it wasn't AWFUL, and I would like to go back to see the non-urban Italy, Venice was nice and my experience of it complicated by ruminations about the vice that is tourism (as a tourist myself), Florence was just generally a brown city. Rome was unvisited but the camping ground nice, but marred by so many spring time pollens!

Yet a few hours in Croatia and we both feel enchated by it. Maybe it is our host, Milo, at the guesthouse, who is unbelievably kind and friendly ("So many bloody Aussies in Croatia!" - with a smile), or the guests who are equally as friendly, or the old lady who sold us oranges at the market and didn't seem put out to speak English to us ignorant tourists. Maybe it is because the land is so beautiful. I don't know, I'll find out and I can't wait.