Day 5 - Lucca to Pisa to Santa Magherita to Portofino, All In One Day

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Today we are saying arrivederci to the Tuscany Valley and heading further north. We're really going to miss the Borgo San Luigi resort, as it was both beautiful and relaxing. Our first stop this morning is at a little town called Lucca. Lucca is a quiet little medieval walled city that looks like time forgot. It doesn't have as large of a tourist industry as Siena, so there are only a few souvenir shops, and most of the locals are just going about their daily lives. Lucca is about an hour up the road on the way to Pisa , and when we arrived, the coach was not allowed inside the city walls, so we got off the bus, just outside the entry gate. Lucca's city walls are much wider than other city walls we have seen. So much so, that one of the favorite pastimes of the residents was to either walk or bicycle around the city on top of the wall. Evidently, this is no longer the case, as the grass on top of the wall has grown longer, and there are trees along the path. But you can still climb to the top of the wall and walk along the top.

Upon entering the city, it was obviously a quiet little town. There were very few cars on the streets, but lots of people on bicycles. We headed for the first square, and found a large statue of the opera composer Giacomo Puccini. Puccini was born in Lucca and composed the operas La Boheme, Tosca, and Madame Butterfly, along with many others. The other main feature of Lucca is an oval shaped main square called the Piazza Anfiteatro or the Amphitheater Plaza since all the buildings surrounding the were built on the foundation of an ancient oval shaped Roman amphitheater. There is also a 13 century church, San Michel, and has a statue of Michael the Archangel at the top. Most of the town is untouched, and Anna brought us here to show a better example of a less touristy ancient walled city. We spent about an hour and a half wandering around the city, some people opting for a sidewalk cafe and a morning cappuccino. Jody and I just decided to grab a Diet Coke and wander around taking pictures. The city was quiet and charming, with some wonderful sculptures in the center of the city squares. By the time we met back up with Anna, she brought along some Buccellato, which is a sweet anise raisin bread made exclusively in Lucca from an ancient recipe. It was absolutely delicious! It's too bad it's not available anywhere else. That's one of the things I have learned about Italy that is different from America. In Italy, it is ok that Buccellato is only made in Lucca. In the US, the recipe would be commercialized and you would be able to buy Buccellato in every Wal-Mart across the states.

As we left Lucca, continuing north to Pisa, the roads were getting more mountainous along the way. So we sat back and enjoys the ride for about another hour. The scenery along this route is absolutely beautiful! Before we knew it, we were coming up to Pisa, home of the famous Leaning Tower, and probably the most touristy spot in all of Italy. I had read TripAdvisor reviews and others about Pisa, and the consensus was always the same: Really impressive, not to be missed, and done in 20 minutes. Anna explained, that basically the inside of the tower is very limited to the public. There are some tickets sold to allow people to climb to the top, but they are usually sold out a couple of weeks in advance, though occasionally there is a cancellation and you might just be lucky. Jody and I figured that it didn't really matter, as we were more interested in seeing the tower than actually climbing it. When we arrived at Pisa, we were greeted with one of those little tourist trains to make the travel from the bus to the entrance easier. We were basically left on our own for a couple of hours to see the tower, visit the Baptistery and Cathedral if we wanted, and grab a little lunch.

We were also warned that Pisa is also the Italian capital of cheap souvenirs. She was right! The souvenir stands in Pisa were much different than anywhere up to now. Every souvenir stand in any of our previous cities were run by Italians, in fact most of the people we saw were Italian. Even in Rome, there were a few foreign souvenir merchants, but they were generally street merchants. Souvenir shops were Italian. In Pisa, it was exactly the opposite. There were a few actual Italian shops, but they sold merchandise along with some souvenirs. But along the street, were row after row of souvenir booths. Almost all had the exact same merchandise, and almost all were run by either Indian or African vendors. There were lots of street vendors selling watches and jewelry, usually Made in China stuff, and they were extremely aggressive, often pestering you until you couldn't take it anymore if you acknowledged even the faintest interest in their products.

When we finally turned the corner and got our first glimpse of the Leaning Tower, we were blown away. It actually leans far more than I had expected! The pictures I have always seen show that the tower leans, but I had always assumed it was some sort of exaggeration. It's not! It's really big and it really leans a LOT! We were both VERY impressed! But, just like the reviews warned, now that we had seen, we were ready to go. Luckily we were not spending much time in Pisa, so we had to figure out what to do next. Jody & I were not really hungry, and we both had a big breakfast and it was really hot in Pisa. So we decided lunch would be our favorite go-to lunch - Diet Coke and gelato. The gelato wasn't nearly as good as Sergio's yesterday in San Gimignano, but it really hit the spot in the heat, and there's really no such thing as bad gelato. We decided it was too hot to stand in line to see the Cathedral and Baptisery, so we just took a bunch of pictures and bought a few souvenirs. We were supposed to meet back at a shady spot at 1:30, so we started wandering back at 1:15. Sure enough some of our group were beginning to gather, and the street vendors were beginning to descend on us also. We found out it was really better to just ignore them that to tell them no, and once you acknowledged them, they just became more aggressive.

Finally, the group was mostly assembled, and the train arrived to bring us back to the bus. Unfortunately, 3 members of our group were still missing, so the street vendors descended on our train. Unfortunately, one of the people on the train made the mistake of actually acknowledging the street vendor and asking how much? So for the remaining ten minutes before the stragglers showed up, the vendor was trying to negotiate a price. I've seen this type of sales behavior in the Caribbean, so it doesn't really bother me, it just a guy trying to make a living. By now the group was back together, on the bus and headed for our next destination - Santa Margherita Ligure.

It's about a 2 hour ride from Pisa to San Margherita, so we sat back and just enjoyed the ride. The Insight Travel buses are very comfortable.They are the standard 56 passenger motor coach, but since Insight Travel limits its tour size to 40 people, they remove the extra seats and spread the remaining seats out to give everyone more leg room. In our case, we only have 32 passengers, so the bus is even less full. The further north we headed, the more mountainous the land had become. Some of these areas were so mountainous that until the roads were built in the last century, there was very little access to some of these small cites by the outside world. In the meantime, Anna took care of some housekeeping while we were traveling along, figuring out who was planning to go on which optional excursions. There are a couple of people who are finding the heat and the walking a little too strenuous and are looking to limit any additional activities, but Jody and I have traveled around the country on a motorcycle at a much faster pase, so we went ahead and signed up for all the optional excursions. There will be time to rest when the trip is over and we are back in Orlando.

Along the way, Anna also showed us a video of the horse race in Siena, and it was crazy! I will have to check out a YouTube video when I get back to the states. One of the other things she pointed out was the large group of mountains off to the east. They looked like the typical snow topped mountains with visible snow on the top and sides. It turns out that it is not a snow capped mountain range, these are known affectionately as the "marble mountains" and the whit visible on the top and sides is actually visible marble veins in the mountains, and as we got closer we could see where mining operations were removing large blocks of marble from the sides of the mountains, much as has been done for hundreds of years.

One of the unique things about these mountain roads is the sheer number of tunnels and bridges. There must be hundreds of each! It took a while to notice that the roads were mostly level with very little rise and fall. It was all done by bridging across the valleys and tunneling through the mountain to keep the road mostly flat and level. The other strange thing was that the northbound and southbound lanes were not tunneled at the same elevation. In the US, all tunnels I have ever seen have the north/ south or east/west tunnel entrances at exactly the same level. The Italian tunnels could be at the same level, but more often than not one direction was significantly higher or lower than the other. As we started to approach Santa Margherita, we stopped at a highway rest stop so that we could use the rest rooms. When we reached Santa Margherita, the plan was to take a water taxi over to Portofino before dinner. It was more convenient to make a pit stop now, rather than to deal with it all when we stop in Santa Margherita. The bus does have a toilet, but the bus driver would rather we only use it for emergencies. Evidently, locations to dump the holding tank are more difficult to find in Italy than in the US.

Since we were stopping at a rest stop, we too advantage and picked up a couple of Diet Cokes for. the room tonight. Even though most of our hotels have had refrigerators in the room, it has been difficult to find Diet Coke at the hotel. With the rest stop behind us, it was time to get a glimpse of Santa Margherita. Santa Margherita is completely different from all the previous cities we have visited. There are a few old buildings, and even a couple of ancient Roman bridges, but lots of San Margherita is relatively new. A lot of buildings were built in the 1800's and early 1900's, back when the rise of tourism began. Also there was significant damage in WWII which resulted in additional new construction. But the streets are very narrow, and the they are trying to limit the number of motor coaches that have access to the city, so there are some significant restrictions for our bus. Our driver managed to make navigating the streets look very easy, but there were some spots where there were only a couple of inches between the bus and a couple of buildings.

We arrived at the drop off point for the water taxi after a little hassle from the local police, and took the boat ride over to Portofino. Now Santa Margarita is an upscale beach town with private beach access to some of the hotels. Where Santa Margherita caters to the idle rich, Portofino caters to the super rich. There are super yachts everywhere! The actual harbor of Portofino is actually quite small, so there is only room for a couple of Super Yachts, the rest are anchored in the bay off the coast of Santa Margherita. Our water taxi took us past the homes of Dolce & Gabbana, Silvio Berlusconi, and other famous celebrities. The 14th century abbey converted to a hotel where Rod Stewart was married. The 5-Star hotel where Madonna rented out an entire floor just to throw a party.

The water taxi dropped us at the dock in Portofino and we were left with an hour and a half to get a drink, some coffee, or just explore the town. Portofino is very small, there are several very upscale shops, and we were warned to be careful that the prices tend to be very high to keep out the peasants. There is an ancient church of St George at the top of a hill that affords some great views of the city. There is also an outdoor contemporary sculpture garden on the side of the hill. And of course restaurants, bars, and even a couple of souvenir shops. Jody & I decided we were not really impressed with the the overpriced coffee, or the possibility of meeting some celebrity, so we decided to do what we always do, explore the town. W climbed the road to the church of St George and took some great pictures along the way. The contemporary sculpture garden looked interesting, so we sprung the 5 euros each to visit. It was all right, with a couple of interesting pieces. There were a couple of art galleries, but the paintings were awful, and even had a terrible painting of a Ferrari. We looked in the souvenir shops and found one that had Diet Coke for 2.5 euros, and after looking at 25 euro t-shirts, we found a little shop that had the more reasonable 10 euro shirts. It's a very but not really pretty town, our cup of tea. We were far more impressed with Florence or Siena.

While we were waiting for the group to reassemble by the water taxi, Jody & I were looking in a jewelry store window. There were a couple of very interesting spiral wound bracelets with prices from 3200 euros to 8200 euros. This was about what we expected and the prices to not seem outrageous considering where we were. But Jody notice a beautiful pair of earrings made of what looked like pink sapphires. They were a couple of inches long and started out with a white sapphire near the top, but toward the bottom the color darkened with each stone and ended with a large dark pink sapphire at the bottom. They were beautiful and Jody was trying to figure out how to make them when a lady walked up, looked in the window and called the salesman over to check out these same earrings. She asked how much they were, and the salesman when in and got his book, came out and told her they were 60,000 euros. 60,000 euros for a pair of earrings! The lady said ok, and she and the salesman went inside, and sure enough he took the earrings out of the window, and she bought them! Jody was blown away! I guess she won't be getting these earrings for Christmas.

We road the water taxi back to Santa Margherita, and when we got off, the coach was waiting for us to take us to the hotel Our luggage had already been unloaded and was waiting for us in our rooms. The hotel is really nice and is right across from the bay. Anna had already warned us that even though we typically get the standard room, which typically faces the back, that there are usually a couple of sea view rooms thrown in. She always asks us generally not to discuss our accommodations with each other, as if someone gets a great room, someone else could get jealous and cause hard feelings. So her instructions are that if we get an upgraded room we should "Suffer in Silence". Well, we didn't get a sea facing room, but we did get a 5th floor side facing room, so that the ocean is visible form our balcony, and it really is a very nice room. Since there is also a swimming pool on top of the building, just above the 5th floor, we donned our suits and headed up for a quick dip to refresh ourselves from the heat of the day. One thing I will say about Italian hotels, the elevators are REALLY small. We rode the elevator up to the 5th floor with 1 other couple and we were cramped to fit all 4 of us in the elevator at once. Luckily we didn't have any luggage or it would never work. On the way home from dinner, the elevator was broken so we just decided it would probably be better to just walk up the 5 flights of stairs.

After our swim in the pool, we met everyone downstairs in the lounge for drinks. Anna was buying, so it was a free beer, wine, or soft drink for everyone. There was also a couple of trays of local finger foods that turned out to be delicious. We wore name tags again and are finally getting better at remembering most of the peoples names. We had dinner at the hotel, and it was great! Now that we're out of Tuscany, it's no longer all meat based. We had pesto lasagna, which was green and actually quite good. We also had a salad, rosemary chicken breast, potatoes and green beans. Jody was happy to finally get some vegetables. For desert, we had something that they called fruitcake, that was nothing like what we usually think about. It was some sort of cake with whipped cream and a fruit on top. It was pretty good, and certainly much better than traditional fruitcake.

Tomorrow, we are off to Cinque Terre. I have no idea what that is, but it's something about local fishing villages by boat, and a tour presented by a local guide. It should be great fun!

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