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Published: August 7th 2006
I left off 4 days ago in Rome with a vague idea that I was going to Corfu, Greece. Alas, I have arrived at The Pink Palace. But the travel itself was an adventure I never expected.
So I get to Bari, Italy at about 22:35 and have no idea where I'm going to stay. It's late so everything is closed. I walked out of the station thinking ... well I guess I'll just walk until I find a place. But all the shady looking characters walking around made me second guess myself. Now traveling alone I had to consider I no longer had the "safety in numbers" game working for me. I determined that I should find another group of people and follow them to wherever they are staying. After a few minutes I see a group of 5 backpackers head out, perfect. I followed them for about 10 minutes until they finally stopped for a break. I asked them where they were staying. They replied with a heavy accent ... "we don't know. We were just going to walk to the port so we know where it is and then find a place." I asked if I could join them and they said sure. We walked for a while and talked. Turns out these guys were from Lithuania and just backpacking around Italy and Greece. We got to the port and obviously there were no ships leaving at midnight. So then they sent to guys to walk around to find a place to stay (the rest stayed with our packs and took a break from hauling our 50 pound back breakers). They came back and said there wasn't any good spots and we could just stay here.
What I quickly realized is that when they said find a "place" to stay, they meant find a good field to sleep in. I weighed my options between sleeping in the grass by the castle by the port with these 5 guys and walking alone at midnight through the city to find a place to stay. I decided to stick with them. So we just plopped our stuff down and slept on the grass. Luckily I'm a heavy sleeper b/c we weren't far from the road nor the noisy port. We woke the next morning alive and well ... it was my first experience of what I would consider "real" backpacking. We tried to get tickets on the ferry that evening but it was all full so we booked a ferry for the next night. with 36 hours on our hands we decided to take a day trip to the nearest city, Taranto. We picked up a few 1 liter boxes of 0.69 cent wine and hopped on the train.
Taranto turned out to be pretty ugly so we wondered around for a while until another train left for Brindisi. This city was pretty nice so we got more wine and cheap food to hand out. In Brindisi we found a nice field to sleep in. This night I was a little more comfortable sleeping the field probably b/c I knew the guys better and had already done it once. Speaking of which, these guys were real cool guys. Though we live 4000 miles apart we had a lot in common. Fun guys to hang out with.
The next morning we went back to Bari, got on our ferry, drank four bottle of "Green Nines" (a Lithuanian liquor similar to Jager) and partied all night. Finally the ferry arrived at Igoumenitsa and I had to part ways with my new best friends (as they were in route to Patras on the ferry). I caught a ferry over to Corfu and as of this morning have been hanging out on the beautiful beach at The Pink Palace. I wish I could upload a picture to show you the view out my room that i will wake up to tomorrow while you suckers work!
Well, duty calls. I only have 9 more days in Europe, I gotta go take advantage of it!
(yea yea yea, I will be safe ... promise!)
-Matthias
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Jon
non-member comment
crazy guy
Sup, its your roomie, sounds like your having a blast across the pond... drink soma that cheap wine me. Everything's going good with the pad. Be safe and find some hot foreign women!!!