Rambling About Europe: Positano

Positano is one of several towns located on Italy’s Amalfi Coast which, in turn, is famous throughout the world for its beaches and relaxing atmosphere. The Amalfi coast is in the southern half of Italy, and if you imagine the country as shaped like a boot, Positano is somewhere on the shin. But we hadn’t arrived in Positano just yet.

Dusty, sweaty, and constantly on the look-out for pick-pockets, we arrived in Serranto on the Amalfi Coast in the late afternoon. But our trek was not over; we still had to get from Serranto to Positano. And though it’s a mere 17 miles from one to the other, the road is straight up, over a hill, and very windy. Guidebooks promise that the bus ride, which takes nearly an hour, will be a memorable part of the experience. It was.

I don’t exactly have a flawless record with motion sickness, so I sat near the front of the bus. I sat against the window as well even though Jen thought this was a crazy move. She seemed pretty nervous, but I was too curious for my own good. As long as I wasn’t older than the bus driver, I would feel fine.

So our slightly smaller than average bus took us from Serranto to Positano on a windy little route. The road had two lanes – one in each direction, but if you’re turning sharp corners in a bus, you’re going to need both of them. To warn the others on the road, the bus drivers honk every time they approach a blind curve – which is at least once a minute. And as we coiled around the mountain side, I could often look out my window straight down a cliff to the crashing waves below. The two lane road just juts off the mountainside in places, and judging by the facial expressions, the clenched fingers, and the futile back-and-forth leanings of some of the other passengers, it made some people pretty nervous. Since you’re reading this, though, you can rest assured that our bus driver was qualified. We arrived in the beach town of Positano unscathed.

After our exciting bus ride, we walked downhill to our hotels. Jen’s and Reed’s hotel was not far from mine, but we weren’t staying in the same place. This portion of my trip was uncertain for a while, so I didn’t wind up booking far enough in advance to get into one of the very few cheaper hotels. And Positano is kind of a nice place; it’s not really packed with backpackers and hostels. So after searching the internet for hours in July, I begrudgingly booked a hotel that was a bit more than I wanted to pay. It was nothing ridiculous; the Oakland Marriot backed me into paying much more during the bar exam. But I was a little bit grouchy about it. It wound up being quite a very nice place though. Check out the pictures of the breakfast patio (breakfast included… score) and the view from my room. So it wound up being quite nice having a fancy hotel room to myself to relax a little bit. I’ll say it was worth the cost.

We didn’t do a lot in Positano, but that was kind of the idea. The first day, we spent our time walking through town (which doesn’t take long - but they did have my 26th church - excluding ancient temples) and going to the beach. Like the beaches in Nice, the Positano beaches did not have sand. Instead, they had a kind of very large gravel. It was nice not to have sand all over you, but it was not so nice to walk on the beach barefoot. Ultimately, Hawai’i still wins the contest for best sand in my book.

But I thought that the water in Positano was the nicest of the trip. First of all, for whatever reason, the Atlantic and the Mediterranean seem way saltier than the Pacific. Every time that I went swimming at the beach, the salt tasted very strong and stung my eyes a bit more than normal. Later in the day, I would see salt just sitting all over my body, and I’d have to try in vain to brush it all off. To me, Positano seemed less salty, and the water temperature was perfect. I swam a decent amount. It was great.

In general, Positano was quite nice. I’m glad I got to see the South of Italy, but I am not sure I would go back. The beaches in the North - like in Cinque Terre, for example - were essentially as good, and the towns were more quaint. I’d probably choose Cinque Terre over Positano. But who needs to choose when you’ve got nowhere to be? I’m still glad to have gone.

As I mentioned, other than going to the beach and sleeping in, I didn’t do too much in my 40-or-so hours there. Jen, Reed, and I had two nice dinners – one of which we put together ourselves from a small market because we were dying for some more fruits and vegetables and less bread. Then, I left them to head off to London on my own.

I was very excited to get back to London, but I wasn’t there yet. Getting out of Positano was as difficult as getting there in the first place, but I wisely booked a late-afternoon flight from the Naples airport. The night before, I realized that my only bus options tended to be quite early or barely early enough, so I erred on the side of caution. First, I had to walk back up hill to the bus stop to catch my safely early bus. With my whole life on my back and the sun beating down, this wound up being more exhausting than I anticipated.

Then, the bus was an hour late – so much for safely early. Now I had ten minutes to connect from the winding bus of death to the airport bus or I’d have to catch the second, barely-early-enough airport bus and hope everything went well. The concierge told me to get off on the second-to-last stop in order to find the hour-and-a-half airport bus from Sorrento. Why she told me that I may never know. I got off on that stop with 12 minutes to make my next bus and no buses or stations in sight. So for what was not nearly the first and likely not nearly the last time on this trip, I literally had to run around with this damn pack on my back. Finally, I found the tourist information stand, and after I tapped my foot anxiously at the person in front of me in line for about a minute, the woman at the desk told me that I should have waited for that last bus stop after all.

And I was off. It’s a run to the next bus stop shouting “Mi scusi!” “Mi scusi!” “ Mi scusi!” the whole way. Exhausted, but getting really good at running 40 pounds heavier, I found the bus about 30 seconds before it was scheduled to depart. I took that bus to the airport and arrived plenty early not to anger the very fussy and unforgiving discount airlines.

As I write this, I am sitting at a tiny airport in Naples waiting to fly to London. About every 11 seconds, a woman comes over the loud speaker to ask for our “attention, please” and to make another special announcement about a flight. The Italians don’t seem to realize that “Attention, please” over and over and over and over makes all of the special announcements less special. And it makes it hard for me to think as I type. (Sorry for yet another tangent, Maureen.)