Back beneath the water

I've been somewhat absent from these parts for the very best of reasons — a holiday in Italy with my mother. We enjoyed our trip to the Amalfi coast so much last year that we wanted more of the same — good food, interesting and challenging walking, daily swimming, all in beautiful places. Our trip to Amalfi had been organised by a company that specialises in hiking holidays, in which people travel from hotel to hotel on foot on routes organised by the company (but generally on designated walking tracks used by various people), and the company organises people's bags to be transferred from hotel to hotel separately. We organised a similar thing, but with a different company, around Lake Como, over three days, starting in Varenna and ending in Como with stops overnight in Menaggio and Bellagio.

The hotels were lovely, the food was excellent (it's really hard to eat badly in Italy to be honest), and we swam every day either in the lake or in hotel swimming pools, but the organisation and walking itself left a lot to be desired. This company was a bit chaotic and unreliable (for example the pack of material such as maps, baggage tags enabling our bags to be conveyed to each hotel by taxi drivers was not delivered in time and had to be sent by FedEx to our first hotel), and the walks they'd organised were wildly uneven in terms of difficulty. (For example the first walk was close to 16km up and down steep mountain paths made of loose large stones — we bailed after about 4km due to the heat — whereas the second walk was listed as '6.5 miles' but would be lucky to have been 6.5km and was essentially a flat path along the lake used by old ladies walking their dogs.) My mum and I are pretty confident and resilient hikers, and were underwhelmed by the overall quality of the walks. I think it didn't help that the company was based in the US and possibly had never done any of the walks themselves, whereas last year's Amalfi organisers were based in the UK, had a team in Italy, and had members of staff who had done all the hikes whose experiences and suggestions were included in the instruction material. So, overall I liked the places we went to, but didn't much enjoy the main purpose of the trip: the hiking itself.

Our time around Lake Como was bookended by a couple of days in Milan at each end. Both Mum and I had been there before and felt no need to do particularly touristy things again, so we spent most of our time walking around, eating in restaurants and cafes, and swimming laps in a beautiful and venerable indoor swimming pool — the oldest in the city.

Our time in Italy was affected by a rail strike, and also a strike of airport staff that meant our original flight back to the UK was cancelled and the only available bookings directly to the UK were for three days later, so things ended with a rather desperate search for flights (including some ridiculous options such as a 21-hour flight with a stopover in Qatar, a flight with three changes and an overnight stay in Greece, etc), in which the best available option ended up being returning to London via Helsinki (and an overnight stay in an airport hotel). So the last 48 hours of the trip ended up being spent in a Milan laundromat while Mum washed her clothes and we both talked for hours with a young Mexican backpacker who was also washing all his clothes (sample anecdote: 'I went out in London with a bunch of Germans from my hostel and we almost got stabbed'), then in an endless chaotic queue at the airport with a bunch of confused and irritated Finnish people, then in Helsinki airport, with two three-hour Finnair flights that were certainly not originally part of the plan! I did get to bring home salty licorice, though, which was an unexpected and welcome bonus. International travel is wonderful, surreal, and always full of the unexpected, that's for sure!

I do have a number of photos from the trip up on Instagram — if you have an account, you'll be able to see them there at ronnidolorosa. All in all, it was a weird and wonderful time.