Friday morning was the start of our trip to the Amalfi Coast. We walked the hour to Termini again and took a train to Salerno, which is about 3 hours South of Rome. We were really impressed by how nice the train was (trains like the Hogwarts Express actually exist!), and everything was going surprisingly well for a while. After a lot of confusion, we got on the bus to Amalfi, which took us on a road right along the coast on the edge of a cliff.. the day was rainy and gray (the first time since we got to Italy that we didn't have perfect weather) but it was soo pretty anyway.
We had heard that the bus systems in Italy weren't reliable, and this was no exception. At the top of one hill, the bus stopped for no reason and we sat there for a while with no explanation.. the bus driver got out of the bus and walked around, and the rest of the cars on the road continued past us.. typical Italy. After about half an hour, we kept moving and were supposed to be getting off at the Atrani bus stop. The only thing we really knew about the stop for our hostel was that it was near a "farmacia" at Piazza Umberto I. So, when we saw Piazza Umberto I, we got off and thought we were doing great! Apparently, there is more than one Piazza Umberto I in Italy though... who knew? We found an Italian man working in a shop who laughed at us when we said we were going to Atrani becuase apparently there had been a flood and "no one was allowed to visit." We were a little confused, and when we called the hostel to ask about it, the response was, "If you want to come, you come." So we stopped for lunch at a restaurant in that town and got directions to Atrani... we were told by different people that it was 2km, 3km, and 4km from where we were, so we decided to just go for it and get our chance to backpack in Europe. It started with several flights of stairs up a mountain, an uphill hike on a cliff overlooking the water (so pretty - worth the hike), and at one point we walked in the middle of bumper to bumper traffic on a barely two lane road.
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| we hiked all that |
Finally, we made it to Atrani! We thought the worst was over, but we couldn't have been more wrong... Atrani looked like a war zone. Apparently there had been a huge flood in the mountain the day before, which had completely flooded the entire town. There were Red Cross rescue teams, relief workers, firefighters, and people from the town everywhere working to clean it all up.
We were a little shocked, but decided to make the best of our natural disaster/beach vacation, so after leaving our stuff at the hostel, we walked 10 minutes along the coast to Amalfi, a town over. We had pizza and explored the little beach town, and then headed back to the hostel. We were just about to go to bed when the power went out and sirens started going off, but everything was okay... that's just what happens when you pay to vacation in the middle of a natural disaster.
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