Hell Train To Florence

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From Rapallo we travelled onto Pisa, toured Rome, before arriving in Naples. We stayed a couple of days in the small coastal town of Sorrento near Naples (lovely place), and were looking to commence our travels once more. The plan this time was that we would catch an overnight train from Naples to Florence, and so saving money on a hotel, as well as time travelling. But this was not good enough for a couple of master budget savers like us. No, we would go one step further and not book an overly expensive sleeper ticket, but instead catch a standard train, and sleep in the virtually deserted carriage that, in the middle of the night, it would “obviously” be.

Before catching the train that evening we had spent the day climbing Mt Vesuvius and investigating the ancient city of Herculaneum, which, by the way, was caught and preserved in a mud slide at the time of Pompeii’s destruction. We needed to collect our backpacks from the hostel we had been staying in, so we started back to Sorrento. This was where the plan started to veer off. Just outside the site of Pompeii, the train taking us back made an unexpected stop, an Italian voice came over the tannoy, and everyone started to disembark. Slightly confused we followed the other passengers, and waited on the station platform for some explanation as to what was going on. It wasn’t until later we discovered a bomb had supposedly been planted on the train!

Cutting a really long story not quite so long, they eventually got us on another train, we arrived at the hostel, collected our backpacks, and got to Naples station. The delay caused us to miss our scheduled train, and so we waited around for the next departure at twenty to twelve. Not only was this later then we intended, but it required a transfer at about two thirty in the morning. Not ideal if your planning on sleeping through the journey. But on the bright side, we did just escape the jaws of death earlier.

Half two arrives, and we sleepily make our way off the train, proceeding to wait for our connecting train. Time passes, three o’clock comes and goes, with four o’clock drawing nearer and still no sign of our transportation. We’re starting to get a little worried now, not to mention very tired (Did I mention we had barely escaped the jaws of death earlier that day?). But eventually the train arrives, and we climb aboard. Well when I say we got aboard, I mean we squeezed in through the door. You see the train we were supposed to get was cancelled for some unknown reason. This meant our would-be fellow travellers had been forced to join the passengers of the already packed train that followed. The result was a train so tightly packed that we could not even move out of the doorway.

This posed us with a couple of problems. The first being that we were standing in the doorway of the carriage with not enough room to even sit on our backpacks, which is not ideal in most situations, least of all when your expecting to get your two winks of sleep on the journey. The second was that just to my right was the toilet from hell, which was producing odours most un-natural. The final nail in the coffin was when someone, probably heading home after a good night out, decided to spew forth what I suspected was one of Italy’s fine pizzas.

Looking over FlorenceThe train stopped at the next station and we decided to get off and try to find a better carriage on this train of pain and suffering. Rushing along the platform peering into crammed face after crammed face, we decided we’d better get back on before the train leaves. We hopped into the next carriage, and found to our joy it was completely empty bar one of the train’s staff. He looked up and started towards us waving his hands speaking Italian. Obviously seeing that we didn’t understand a word he was saying, he converted to broken English and told us we couldn’t be here as it was the first class sleeper carriage. Lucky for us though the train had just started to pull away before he managed to chuck us off, and the rest of the train was not accessible from within this carriage. Having no choice but to allow us to stay he told us to be quiet and stay in the corridor. Well not ideal, but at least there was room to sit on our backpacks and no accursed odour to contend with.

After a rather sleepless night we arrived at our destination, Florence. And once more our tour continued…

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