Walking in Lake Mountains. Thoughts about travels so far.

Although our travels have taken us to well worn tourist places and routes.  The Luberon, Corfu, Italian Lakes, we have stayed away from tourist hot spots on the whole. 

In many villages most streets are not wide enough for cars

Waterfall taken from Ponte Romaine near Cossangno 

In the Luberon we visited the less well known hilltop villages, here in the lakes we have not been to Bellagio on Lake Como, or any of the gardens or villas that are open to the public.

The Lakes are spectacular in their setting.  High snow capped mountains, then lush green slopes dipping down to colourful lakeside villages.  Some areas remain very rural as soon as you move a few yards from the tourist centres. Of course they all follow the same pattern and so it is possible to have two much of a good thing if you just visit one tourist village after another.  This is why it is good to have a mixture of lakeside tourist centres and boat trips, and nature in the unspoilt mountains.

Rugano holiday village with no road access

At present we are in one of the higher hilltop towns of Mazzania.  It is quite a bustling place as we found out when we entered the local bar and pizzeria at 5.30pm yesterday.  It was absolutely full of people - well men.  The only women were serving behind the bar.  We struck up a conversation will a tall Amercan former baseball player, Charlie Yelverton.  He was amused to hear that his second name is also a place near where we live on Dartmoor. He had lived in the area for 40 years after arriving here on a baseball coaching trip.  

We also speculated that we have struck up conversations with a few ex pats in our travels.  Single men whose life revolves around the local bar, and we reminded ourselves that cafe culture does not last all year - even on the continent.

Everything looks so much more attractive in the sun, and we have had mixed weather.  So our impressions of one place or another are probably clouded by the weather to some extent.  We are lucky to always have a place to go to, so unless we are cycling through heavy rain or wind, we can have enjoyable travelling days even if its not sunny.

The same day whilst we walked in the woods we met a man who spoke no English, and we speak only a word or two of Italian.  Anyhow, we told him we were heading back from our walk towards Mazzanio, and he immediately became our guide.  Taking us on the most direct route back.  Although we were delighted that he wanted to be our guide, he was like a mountain goat and we were a lot slower of the uphill mountain tracks. Italian have loved giving us directions.  Our B&B host spent ages yesterday trying to explain how to get somewhere in Italian when I had a very detailed map in front of me which was obviously going to be a lot easier to follow than her Italian that I did not understand.  But we appreciated that she wanted to help, and she also pressed many left over breakfast items on us which we had for lunch.

In this area below the Val Grande there are the remains of many small settlements and terracing where crops were grown, now all overgrown with great trees growing through them. Most of the roofs and some of the walls have collapsed, but here and there the remains of doors, porches and windows remain.  One village we found Rugano nearby is still intact and the houses seem to be holiday homes.  Most of the stone roofs have been replaced with tiles, and the dry stone walls of the old houses have been stabilised by render.  We speculated how they got the building materials up there as there was no road to the village just a track.

We always try and be as eco-friendly as possible when travelling.  Being conscious of what we throw away and minimising rubbish is hard enough at home, but here we are always being offered plastic bottles in the rooms and we accumulate paper and compostable things like apple cores and banana skins etc. This is always a problem, even on the boat.

We are still using the plastic bottles we took from home and have probably used another 5 on our travels.  In Italy there are drinking fountains in all  places we have stayed so we have been able to refill them easily.  In other places we have boiled the travel kettle at night and filled up the bottles when cooled in the morning.

We have found plenty of corner grocery stores in Greece and Italy where items are sold in paper bags not plastic packets.