We Drop In To Beachy Head

Wednesday, 5 June 2019. We had tried to visit Beachy Head the previous night as it was literally about five minutes' drive away from the hotel. However it was shrouded in cloud and was so foggy that I turned round in a farm entrance and we came back down the hill.

So, a new day and a fresh start! A ferry is emerging from somewhere behind the white cliffs which are the famous Seven Sisters. We pass a few car parks and find the closest one to the spot. It may only be a pit of gravel at the side of the road but it does, but of course, have a ticket machine. We pay for an hour's stay and climb a small hill to find this view.

Beachy Head itself is easily identified by the crowd of people perched on top. I was surprised that on the approach and on top of the headland itself there is no fencing at all. The place, you have to admit, is very lemming friendly...

The lighthouse is far below. If you want to visit there is only the one obvious route from here - off the cliff edge which is a vertical drop of around 350 feet. It is, apparently, the third most popular spot for suicides in the world after the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco and the Aokigahara Forest on the flanks of Mount Fuji, Japan.

Judging from some of the antics we saw, there must be quite a few accidents as well occurring to people who think it wise to be photographed on the very brink. The name Beachy Head has nothing to do with the word "beach" as it was recorded as "Beauchef" in 1274, "beau chef" being "beautiful headland" in French. Corrupted by stages, it became consistently "Beachy Head" by 1724.

We are only parked for an hour so we take a last look westwards along the coast and set off back towards the car. It will be a day of bits and pieces. Next stop is a rather tall chap wielding two large sticks...

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The Monastery on Corfu

Tuesday, 5 May 2009. Ocean Village Two sails into Corfu, Greece.

It is our first time in both Greece and Corfu, but over the next few years we will join several cruises here.

The disks slotted over the ship's cables are put there to stop any dockside rats from running up the cables onto the ship.

We are doing an excursion today. It is taking us to several places in Corfu but we start off with a trip up the coast to a monastery. The coach passes by a gorgeously beautiful cove. I snatch a couple of photos from the window as we drive past, but needn't have worried. We will get time for a photo stop on our way back!

First stop is at this Greek Orthodox monastery with a small number of monks, one of whom greeted our guide warmly as we walked up towards the monastery. The church was quite small, but richly decorated. A large silver chandelier hung from the ceiling.

There were a lot of icons lining the walls, most of them gilded. Guid-i-poos is getting boring... We bob out of the church and race through the museum - huh? It contained mostly another collection of richly gilded icons. It did have some whale bones which were worth seeing - more interesting to me than the rows of icons, which to a non-Catholic become just so many portraits, mainly of old men sitting amongst immense richness whilst their "flock" live in abject poverty.

The monks were called to their various offices or meals, not by the ringing of a bell, but by a pattern of knocking rapped out on this piece of wood, hanging in a small courtyard. Fran was all for giving it a bang, but with the thought of half a dozen confused monks appearing and asking all sorts of questions in a foreign language, I thought it was perhaps not the best of ideas!

The monks who originally founded the monastery had certainly chosen their site well. It had some lovely views over the top of the cliff.

They had also created an attractive, pleasant and peaceful abode for themselves. It was much nicer enjoying the peace than listening to the droning voice talking about saints... I'm not a good follower of tourist guides I'm afraid.

The only inhabitants we saw though were a collection of scraggy cats, one curled up with some tiny kittens and a thin alsation dog. Another mystery...

Our last discovery before being called back to the coach was this ancient monastic cannon, used every second Tuesday during the 18th Century when the monks would gather to chortle and chant and blast the barnacles off every passing ship... We get back on the coach, unspeakably thrilled when guid-i-poos promises us another church to look at, in a tone that suggests she expects us to be thrilled.

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Amalfi - Who Are You?

Wednesday 24 August 2005. We take coach tour to Amalfi. The driver takes his time round the hairpins - far more comfortable than the frantic tear-arsing of the local bus that took us to Positano! There must be two distinct training regimes for public transport drivers in Italy.

On the coach driving training course they play Chopin and those soothing cheap CDs with the sound of waterfalls behind little tinkling piano riffs that go nowhere. They say things like, "Ok, here's a slight bend... Pip your horn to warn other drivers and slow right down before you turn or people may be forced to lean." On the bus driving course they play Deep Purple's Rock Hits and say things like, "Ok, hairpin ahead - you need a good run up to this, get your foot down and wrench the wheel....NOW!!!"

Along the way we pass a few of these tiny model villages at the side of the road, built into the cliff. They were built by the locals as fairy villages. Utterly charming. One even had flying fairies in a cave. Either they were dangling on string or they were real fairies, astonished at the sound of a warning horn coming round the corner so that they had to come out to see what it was...

It's a longer trip today and we actually stop for a while above Positano for people to take photos. Then it's back onto the coach and on towards Amalfi, stopping for a mid-morning coffee on the way at a roadside ceramics shop. As you do...

The coach went over a bridge at one point where the sea actually flowed underneath us onto a tiny triangular beach between a cleft in the cliffs.

Mid morning we arrive at Amalfi. The beaches along the Amalfi Coast were the location for the landing of the Allied armies during World War II. It is almost impossible today to imagine soldiers having to fight their way up through the towns. What's the first thing we see when we get into Amalfi? Correct, a Sita bus! I beckoned the driver to lean out of his window. "Talk to him, pal," I said, pointing to our relaxed and chilled coach driver, "he could teach you a thing or two!" "Piss-a off!" The Sita bus closed its doors on the ample rear of an Italian mamma who hadn't quite got on, due to the mass of humanity packed inside and screeched away from the bus stop. Wait - no, it was the woman caught in the door who was screeching...

The huge tiled map of the Mediterranean region on the sea front. The magnetic compass was invented at Amalfi and sailors traded it all over the Mediterranean in the 1200s.

We walked into the town and found ourselves looking at everything on two levels. Looking horizontally we could see the ground and the bottom half of buildings.

But it was only by looking up that we saw the true spectacle and majesty of the setting for these wonderful buildings. The front of the basilica is richly decorated, but the real beauty is high up over the entrance and in the columnar top storey of the bell tower.

The streets and alleys of the town are the same. The main street is so narrow that it is almost traffic free. The little three-wheeled cars and vans (as seen in the Pompeii entry) come into their own here, although we saw more produce arriving at shops on sack trucks than on vehicles. The buildings are several storeys tall and you even find that they are connected across the street by the upper storeys. Actually the valley that the main street occupies is so steep and narrow that the third floor as seen from the street might be at ground level to the rear!

The view above is often more rewarding as you find tiny pathways and alleys climbing up stepped streets and turning tight corners, buildings appearing to stack above each other, so close is the town to the rising cliff faces.

Despite the tendency for the narrow streets to get choked with people and the occasional entire family tree on a Lambretta nipping in and out with wild abandon, the shops and atmosphere are a delight.

Full of colour, noise, scooter horns pipping and two-stroke engines growling, fruit and veg and every sort of other goods are displayed in shop windows and on walls and on trestles set up in front of shops.

There are restaurants and café bars galore and if you just was a snack there are some scrummy pastries and breads and cakes to tempt you.

As I mentioned, it was here in Amalfi that the magnetic compass was invented and with such a nautical tradition here we are, of course, going to take a trip up and down the coast on a boat. First I'm taking a wander up the side alleys for a bit whilst Fran and Mum hit the souvenir shops!

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Boat Trip Around Capri

Saturday 20 August 2005. If you can remember back to the last entry from this holiday, we were on the island of Capri where Mum was bewildering the locals and anyone younger than 70 by singing a non-stop medley of Gracie Fields songs, interspaced with sayings like "Eeh, cum on, lass, sing along!" and "Hey up! Whatever's t'matter wi' y'all?"

We have moved from the island onto a small swaying boat and here's Gino climbing up to the lookout tower (well, alright, but he was climbing up to something ok?) to give us a running commentary of what we would see. Despite the notice, we are not going to see the famous Blue Grotto. We don't have long enough as the grotto entrance is so low that the viewing involves putting off all the passengers in ones and twos to lie down in rowing boats to go into the cave.

We pass by the harbour at the town of Capri, where we landed this morning.

There's a figure on a rock up ahead. I took it just for someone sunbathing at first, but on closer viewing it turns out to be a statue.

"Is-a where the sirens sat to lure the boats onto the rocks with their singing," explained Gino, looking sternly at Mum.

We might not be able to go into the Blue Grotto, but there are plenty of caves along the way to look at.

The boat captain backs us into a larger one and we can see the reflected blue of the sea on the roof of the cave.

I'm so busy trying to take a photo that when I take the camera from my eye and turn round there's a hard rock cave archway about an inch from my nose...

The trip takes us past some spectacular scenery. There's a soaring rock archway high up on this hillside.

And then we spot the Faglieri Rocks in front of us. Ooh! Will we sail between them? Er... hang on... er... he isn't going to... he is, you know... Yikes!

I was awestruck, thinking we were about to sail between the two rocks, but no... We sailed through the hole in the smaller of the rocks.

We have just sailed through the archway in the left hand rock. I was having thoughts of Poseidon rising to hold the towering rocks apart for us like in Jason and the Argonauts!

And just look at the sheer size of this cavern set into the hillside of Capri. You'd get a whole shedload of sirens sitting in there!

We come to the Blue Grotto. There are several boats waiting to transfer people into the rowing boats. There are two of them behind the boats in the foreground whilst a third is disappearing into the grotto just behind the driver with white shirt and white hair in the left hand boat. A steady stream of people are walking down the steps on the cliff, waiting for their turn to view inside. We slow whilst Gino tells us what we are missing and then carry on.

This is a low archway rather than a cave, but just look at the colour of the water! Now it's time for us to head back to the larger boat that will take us back to Sorrento.

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Sorrento Harbour

Saturday 20 August 2005. We walk from our hotel in St Agnello into Sorrento as we have booked a boat trip to the Isle of Capri.

The first sight of the harbour makes us blink a bit as it is a long way down a very steep street, that has to double back on itself a couple of times in order to get down the cliff. Our guide meets us at the bottom and ushers us onto a boat, sticking a small badge onto everybody. His name his Gino. The badges say Gino. "Hey-a you are all-a Gino today, yes?" he laughs.

The view from the water gives the best idea of the height of the cliffs. But more than that, it gives some idea of the sheer (whoops was that a pun?) beauty of the place. Before we arrived we had no idea of what Sorrento was like apart from it being where it was, on the Bay of Naples. Had it been the most horrendous place on earth, it would still have been a great location as a base for exploring the region.

To come, during this week are trips to Capri, which we are now setting off towards, to the Roman ruins of Pompeii and Vesuvius, a wild careening bus ride to Positano along the mountainous and beautiful Amalfi Drive, and Amalfi itself.

But for now, aaaay... it's-a Gino, introducing himself as our guide for the day's trip to Capri. Mum's already singing Gracie Fields songs and wallowing in nostalgia of "Ow-er Gracie" and already our fellow passengers are starting to edge away from us... Surreptitiously I hear the French girl next to me ask Gino whether the Captain has a plank that he could run out from the side... but there is no time, Toulouse, we are on our way out of the harbour!

The lazy beggars on the tall ship haven't even got the sails up yet as we round the harbour wall and sail down past a more romantic way of sailing. Ok... Capri, here we come...

We settle down to enjoy the trip with the sun beating down on us and my new trusty hat adorning my noble brow. "Are you going to wear that all week?" asks Fran worriedly...

Once clear of the harbour we turn along the Sorrento peninsula and towards Capri which can be seen, four miles from the mainland. Mum was humming Gracie Fields songs already. It's going to be a long day... Join us for the next exciting episode to see if she survives.

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