Moonlight Cruise to Limone

Wednesday 30 June 2003. We are on the fifth article already of this holiday series about our trip to Lake Garda and we are still on the first day!.

We had joined a Leger group, though we had flown out from the UK to Verona instead of going all the way by coach. Tonight after our evening meal we were going to have a moonlight cruise on the lake. The moon wasn't quite out yet but it would be later...

Limone is the first ferry stop south of Riva, although many ferries call at Torbole first on the opposite top corner of the lake. We were not on one of the usual ferries this night though. We are on a fast boat - Speedy 1. Speedy 2 is picking up another Leger group from somewhere... Between Riva and Limone is this small inlet where a river flows down from the mountains into the lake. When I say "down" I mean it falls in a dirty great waterfall not far into the inlet. However it is so dark in there that you are lucky to see it. So I've brightened up the bit with the waterfall in it on this photo. Even so I wouldn't blame you for not being able to recognise it as such...

Limone sul Garda is half built at the bottom of the cliff face and half excavated out of it! Its name comes from the crops of lemons that are grown and harvested during the summer months. There is a summer population of 10,000. In winter with no visitors and very few lemons, this dwindles to just one thousand.

We landed and are to have a stop off here for an hour or so. A chance to explore and also a chance for it to go dark and for the moon to come out! Speedy 2 arrived so then there were two groups of us frantically trying to find our guides and/or members of our own party...

Half of them seemed to have wandered off anyway and either some of them had become very fluent in Italian and German or some residents and random tourists had intermingled anyway. Time to shrug shoulders and find our own way about! No sooner were the shoulders shrugged than a lost French couple interrupted us to see if we knew where they were meant to be... I pointed helpfully to the opposite side of the lake.

This was the excavated bit. A street of shops had been hewed out of the rock at the foot of the cliffs. This place had a rather weighty ceiling and we walked quickly just in case...

There was of course, a fair amount of climbing to do also! We had been told there was a church and for some reason decided to find it.

In any case I wanted to climb up a little in order to get some photos of the lake and lights of its towns from a position slightly less populated by other people taller than me!

We found the church and began to regret walking up the hill as it turned out to be decidedly uninteresting and closed. The locals would be very unlucky if a horde of vampires suddenly descended... Are vampires repelled by dress shops? Or is it just me...?

We climbed as high as we felt we had time for and lo and behold here is our guide. She had charged off up the hill to get away from the more stupid half of Speedy 1's passengers who, no matter how many times she had told them before landing, followed her to ask "What time do we have to be back at the boat and where is it?" When no stupid questions came from us she was quite happy to take our photo!

And before long it was time to find our boat again. There were now two of them of course and Speedy 2 looked identical to ours. My trained eye however spotted the name Speedy 1 painted in large letters on the bow of the boat and we climbed up to the open top deck to get to know a few of our fellow passengers a bit better.

There was Kell and his wife Denise who were teaching in England for a year on an elongated stay away from their home in New Zealand and a long-haired genial chap called Andy, a few years older than us with his wife Margaret. He somehow got us into a conversation about the 1950s/60s comedian Freddie Frinton who I just about remembered from childhood. Freddie's act saw him playing a most convincing and hilarious drunk on-stage and he had a prop cigarette which was broken in the middle so that it dangled downwards and swung about from his mouth as he talked.

It was by now pitch dark on the lake and at the front of an open deck on a speedboat, we were just a tad from freezing to death. So by the time we were back at Riva it was with a bit of relief that we got back onto terra firma and headed for the hotel.

Lake Garda and Northern Italy, 2003 Index