Bus trip along a cliff-top road

The heatwave throughout Europe had started before I started travelling, but when I got to Rome I remembered what heat was really like. After a couple of gritty days there, I hit Naples on a greasy Thursday afternoon and realised I needed to get out of the city. Naples was great, and I met some fantastic people at the hostel there (and spent a good portion of the night with them, drinking birra in a caffe with the rain bucketing down), but I just needed to escape.

So I headed off to the Amalfi Coast the next morning.

The bus ride there was somewhat surreal. We took the highway from Naples to the coast, reaching the cliffs a good way east of Amalfi. And then the road hugged the cliffs for the rest of the way.

Those stereotypes that you've heard about Italian driving? They're true. Imagine a narrow, twisty road on the edge of a cliff. When I say narrow, I mean one lane in each direction - sounds good, until you realise that each lane is maybe wide enough for a car. When I say twisty, that includes a lot of hairpin turns. This road perhaps has a small rock wall, about half a metre high, on one side. This is somewhat comforting, given the drop. And a rock face on the other side. Not so comforting.

Add a bus (normal size), a driver who knows he (and yes, it will almost certainly be a he) owns the road (well, I guess that's normal for a bus driver) and believes that the brake pedal will wear out with too much use. This does not appear to be true of the accelerator.

Add other vehicles - cars, motorbikes and the occasional bus. Of course, the drivers of all of these vehicles also believe they own the road (but remember - the bus driver knows he does!).

You can probably guess the sort of thing that happens at corners. Just one more thing to complete the picture - the bus honks its horn as it comes up to each corner. Which means it is honking almost constantly. I don't know if this is intended to reduce stress levels. If so, I doubt it works.

At one corner, a car (not a small one - a station wagon, I think) stopped a bit too close to the corner to allow the bus to go through. Just as it was about to reverse, a motorbike came up behind it, stopping pretty much bumper-to-bumper. The bike refused to reverse, its rider insisting that the car had enough room to go between the bus and the low rock wall.

Eventually (with a little reversing by the bus), the station wagon did indeed have enough room. I think it managed to keep both its wing mirrors, and barely avoided scraping its paintwork. After it got through, the motorbike followed, and then the bus could go.

The whole thing took much longer than if the bike had just backed up, but the important thing was that the cyclist proved his point.

We had a similar incident when our bus met another bus coming in the opposite direction. A little bit of a stand-off, and then one driver agreed to reverse to let the other go through.

Finally, we made it to Atrani, a town about a kilometre along the coast from Amalfi. My dorm in the hostel there was practically underground, but in combination with the thick stone walls, this meant it was nice and cool.

There were two things that really struck me about the buildings. One was that there wasn't a whole lot of distinction between inside and out. For example, walking between towns, you walk along paths like this:



In a lot of ways, I felt like my room was half outside. Which was fine. I quite like camping out!

The second thing about the buildings was the sense of poverty I got from them. Not necessarily current poverty - in Italy generally, and particularly this part, there are many signs that the general poverty they may once have experienced, the subsistence-level existence, has been greatly reduced in the past decade or so. This is largely due to tourism (particularly intranational tourism). However, many of the Amalfi Coast buildings were clearly built in a time when there wasn't much to spare, and the attitude that results from this remains. This door shows this to some extent, but I admit I mainly took the picture for the benefit of my parents, who spent much of their time in the UK in spring last year taking photos of doors.



Each of the towns along the coast are set into a little valley. In Atrani, the main road passes above the town, between the beach and the main piazza. I can attest that the coast is generally as picturesque as you might have heard:

View of the coast from Ravello


View from the road over Atrani, sunset

More photos from the Amalfi Coast in another post.