Boats, Busses and Trams

Thursday, September 17, 2015

This was a day at sea in which we traveled from Barcelona to Naples. We needed the time to relax after many successive days of touring various places.

Friday, September 18, 2015

This day was something like planes, trains and automobiles – only it was Boats, Buses and Trams.

We docked at Naples (or Napoli as the locals say) in the early morning. We had a full day tour scheduled – the Isle of Capri, Sorrento and then Pompeii. While we were just about ready to disembark, Steve could not find his cruise ship ID card. At that point, Tim also noted that he had forgot his card. So both ran back to their rooms with Tim retrieving his card and Steve finding his card in his pocket where it had been all along. They raced down to the disembarkation deck and made it to the consternation of the ship crew who were waiting on us. Nonetheless, we got off on schedule at 8AM.

OK, what follows was something like the marine boot camp.

We got off the ship, and promptly walked a half mile to the dock where we were to catch our ferry to Capri. There we had to wait for our tour guide, who had to wait in a line to get tickets for all of us to board the ferry. Then we got in long line to board the ferry and were herded on board to get in line to go up the steps to find seating, of which there was very little. The ferry took 40 minutes to get to Capri, and disembarkation from the ferry was chaos. Multiple ferries from multiple cruise lines were crowding every inch of the pier. Furthermore, as we pushed our way off the pier to the main street of the port area, there were thousands of people crowding the main street. We had to wait for our tour guide to get tickets for the tram that went up to the town square of Capri. Once we had the tickets we had to wait in a long line with 500 of our “closest tourist friends” to get on the tram. At that point Tim gave up and did a self-guided tour of the small town at the harbor. For the rest of us, it took 45 minutes to reach the top of the town.

Now I must say that the view from the actual town of Capri was very, very cool. However, we only had about 30 minutes to look around Capri. So it was now about 12:30, and we had spent 4 hours in some form of transportation or queueing for transportation and 30 minutes of sightseeing. Chan, Michele, Steve and Debbie agreed that Tim made best choice as he wandered the little harbor side village.

When we returned to the harbor, we waited to get our next set of tickets for the hydrofoil to Sorrento. After we got those tickets, we were instructed to go to Pier 13 to wait for our 1PM trip. Did I mention the temperatures were now up to 95, and the sun was very intense, and patience was wearing thin? So, we trucked all the way out to the end of the pier and waited and waited and waited until the hydrofoil finally showed up at 1:30. Did I mention how rude European tourists are? They all forget what the learned in kindergarten and unabashedly push their way to the front of the line at every opportunity. There were particularly egregious examples on Pier 13.

After getting to Sorrento, we disembarked from the hydrofoil (remember it’s still 95) and waited for our tour guide who had to wait in a line to get tickets for us for the bus, as we waited in line to get on the bus. The bus trucked us up the rocky hillside to the center of town in Sorrento where we ate a very nice and well-deserved lunch. By the time we were done, we were left with about 10 minutes of sightseeing Sorrento, then it was back to waiting for our bus.

From Sorrento we traveled by bus to Pompeii (remember, it’s still 95 degrees and Europeans do not ascribe to the theory of air conditioning or cold things in general (e.g. drinks, including milk). When we got to Pompeii, we had to wait while our tour guide got our tickets and then we marched through the ancient ruin. This was actually a cool tour, but we were pretty frazzled since it was very late afternoon. I won’t go into all the cool things about Pompeii, but it was a difficult walking tour since the stone streets were very uneven.

Our tour guide was very, very Italian and proud of all things Italian and Roman. He didn’t seem to mind the time very well, and he wanted to tell us everything he could about Pompeii. Even though the tour was supposed to be done at 5:00PM so we could get back to the ship at 5:30 (the ‘all aboard’ time for the ship was 6:30 with departure at 7:00), our tour guide was still going strong leading us through Pompeii at 6 o’clock. We made it back to the ship at about 6:55PM and our tour group was the last to be onboard. Through it all, our tour guide was unfazed.

Our day of boats, busses and trams was a lot of travel time and a little sightseeing. What we saw was very cool, but we vowed that the next time we would not be so ambitious with seeing multiple sight in one excursion.

Our day ended with dinner, lounging around and watching Chan try to drink as much as he could so he could use up his pre-bought, unlimited drink package.