A series of articles chronicling a hotel-based holiday in Sorrento, Italy in 2005. We had taken my mother with us which made steep hills (and wishing wells...) more of a challenge but a good time was had by all.
Each article can be accessed by clicking or tapping the appropriate photograph and link below. A link at the end of each article will return you to this index page, or simply use the [BACK] key.
Tuesday 22 May 2018. We arrive into the Port of Naples at 7:00am. We have an excursion so the alarm was set for silly o'clock.
We were booked to take a boat ride to Amalfi, but apparently there was only one other couple wanting that particular tour. I did suggest they either got a smaller boat or we would just spread out, but to no avail. Instead we transfer our booking to one doing both Sorrento and Amalfi by coach. It will be a long day and most of it will be spent on the coach...
Norwegian Eric is dogging our footsteps... Right on top at the back is a climbing wall. You'd have to be seriously deranged wouldn't you? We board a coach and settle down for the ride to Sorrento. We spent a week there once and have plans to invest in a bottle of Limoncello, that wonderful lemon-based liqueur so beloved of.. er... me... But what's this? We have made a stop at a Limoncello factory! I want to drink it not watch it being made! But that's not a problem as it's still so early in the morning the factory isn't actually working yet. However we still get the talk and tour. When we reach the shop we gasp at the prices... Our plan to buy in Sorrento does not change... Having wasted half an hour out of our day we get on the coach and waste another 20 minutes as the guide tries to find another bored couple who have left the factory to sit on a hidden bench in the factory garden...
A photo stop above Sorrento. This is "above" in the same sense that Blackpool Tower is "above" Douglas on the Isle of Man. Sorrento's harbour is the one against the cliff dead centre of the photo, not the one in the foreground.
Being familiar with Sorrento we decide we will duck out of the guided walking tour. Especially when we find that we have just one hour ten minutes and the coach has to stop well outside the town so there will be a 10 minute walk both in and out. I'm not sure what the guide showed them, but none of them seem particularly thrilled when we catch up with them later.
I suspect they may have had time to buy a drink but not to sit and take their time over it. Which is pretty much what we did and then went in search of our bottle of yellow nectar.
The little market streets of Sorrento are interesting and fun places. At night the locals promenade here, all dressed to impress and to meet friends and socialise. We find lots of places with Limoncello at much less than factory prices. Strange that...
Then there's literally 5 minutes to do whatever we want before we see the guide and coach driver legging it back towards the coach park and we head back too. One of the passengers is limping and supported by his family, obviously in pain. We were quite worried, but he seems to be alright after a bit so perhaps it was a turned ankle or something.
It takes ages to reach Amalfi. The roads are so narrow that in many places they are governed by men with stop/go signs. They don't seem to have any way to talk to each other. I think that they just turned the sign to "go" when there was a break in the traffic. So it leads to scenes like this halfway between the two signs where we meet other traffic and one vehicle has to reverse to a slightly wider bit of road. Miss Franny watches a wing mirror pass by literally one inch from her window. It doesn't look quite so dramatic on the photo but believe me... one inch...
Our total time in Amalfi was two hours. Again because we had been here before and knew the town, we ducked out of the guided walking tour (we are real rebels, aren't we?) and surprised a restaurant barker by accepting his entreaties and taking a seat to order a pizza. Pizza margherita in this part of the world is as good as you will taste it anywhere in the world.
We didn't have a great deal of time for a detailed sketch so I kept it to half a page (so roughly A5 size) and when a few drops of rain started to fall we headed over the road to buy an ice cream. Again, ice cream - gelato - in Italy is something to die for. We got into the shop just as the young serving girl dropped a large metal tub of ice cream sideways into the space it had come out of and then struggled to get it out again. As the owner looked at me and raised his eyebrows, she got the giggles and there was a moment that severely tested my rudimentary Italian but was very funny! We left with our ice creams and a pat on the shoulder from the owner. I glanced back and the girl was grinning at me with mischievous eyes through her fringe. Dammit, when did I get so old...? Miss Franny grasped my ear to help me safely across the road.
It was a long drive back to the ship. Out of an eight hour day we have spent over 5 hours either on the coach or at the Limoncello factory that we didn't want to visit. Ah well... We repaired to the Squid and Anchor pub on Deck 7 and a pint of Guinness disappeared quite quickly!
It was quite overcast but very warm and we sat on our balcony until it was time to sail away. A fine figure of a man...
I read until the harbour wall started to slide past as we got under way which was our signal to get ready for our evening meal.
We spent a week in Sorrento in 2005, but this morning, Wednesday 3 September, 2014, we awake aboard the Thomson Majesty, look out of our cabin window and breathe a sigh of contentment at one of the most majestic panoramas of the world.
I took the photo from the Promenade Deck once we were up, showered and dressed. We had an early morning coffee on the top deck before breakfast. Whilst the coffee cooled, I trotted up to the very top deck and took several photos of the ship - the next but one article will be all about Thomson Majesty itself. Tomorrow will be, in fact, our last day before returning to Corfu for our flight home.
The evening before had been a trifle rough as we went through a storm force 7, combined with rough seas. Even Miss Franny succumbed and we spent much of the evening sliding down the bunk or up onto the pillows and reading. The captain had expressed some doubt about Sorrento, which has no harbour large enough for a cruise ship and therefore requires a tender boat operation. The alternative would have been to moor up (sorry! "park") at Naples across the bay. But here we are with a magnificent view of...
"It looks a bit like a volcano, doesn't it...?" a fellow passenger remarked to me as we gazed across the water.
"It's Vesuvius!" I spluttered, a little incredulous that someone could come to Sorrento and not know what the huge mountain with a crater just across the bay could be.
The view from the other side of the ship. Sorrento sits on a cliff face that enters the sea in a vertical drop with no beaches. The locals have made up for this lack of sunbathing opportunity with wooden jetties on top of piles of rocks that they call "beaches" and these come complete with sunbeds for hire. One of the ship's tender boats is returning to the ship from the harbour at the foot of the cliff.
All ships tend to prioritise their excursion customers in any tender operation and solo or independent travellers are asked to wait until the waiting coaches have been filled with their passengers. Knowing this we left it a couple of hours before joining the queue, which still climbed the stairwells for a couple or three decks. People were going down to the gangway deck via a lift only to have to climb back up to join the end of the queue.
Eventually though we step off the tender boat and arrive at Sorrento.
We spent a full week here, laboriously trekking up and down the cliff in zig-zags. Now they tell us there's a lift... It's signposted "Acensore" and to reach it you have to follow a very narrow trail of wooden gangways at the foot of the cliff. No wonder we hadn't found it on our own...
At the top we have a great view of Thomson Majesty sitting at anchor in the bay. Vesuvius is on the extreme left. The ruins of Roman Pompeii are on its right hand side as we look towards it.
Near the top of the cliff, just where we come out of the lift are several small narrow streets, lined with cafe bars and tourist shops as well as food and clothing shops by the score. It is picturesque, busy, exciting and tempting all at the same time. We made our way up and down, stopped for a while for a morning coffee, watching as two teenagers on a scooter were given a lecture by a patrolling policeman.
We called in at one of many shops selling the delicious lemon-flavoured liqueur, limoncello. Smiling, the old lady who was shopkeeper poured us a sample and pointed out some bottles aimed at the tourist industry, small and medium novelty-shaped bottles. She smiled even more when I picked up a larger more traditionally shaped bottle that I could be more certain of how much it held. We paid and said our goodbyes and came out into the main street running along the coast.
This is the Piazza Tasso where the coast road, the Corso Italia, is joined by what seems like three streets from inland. In reality the Viale Enrico Caruso is split into two lanes, each a one-way street for traffic. The confusion comes because the Via Fuorimura runs between the two lanes of Viale Enrico Caruso, taking bus traffic... Incidentally Caruso, the famed opera singer, came from Naples rather than Sorrento, but was obviously well thought of!
Walking up Via Fuorimura, you come to a great cleft in the land. There's a huge ravine here, where two rivers meet. It is around 150 feet deep and contains its own micro-climate. There are a couple of factories at the bottom, a sawmill and a flour mill, the latter of which remained in use into the last century. The ravine itself was created by massive volcanic action between 35,000 and 37,000 years ago, give or take a week. The ravine is known as The Valley of the Mills. Romantic, picturesque and so deep that taking photos is extremely difficult because of the huge difference in light levels between street level and the gorge interior.
You just come on this out of the blue. The depth takes you by surprise the first time you see it. It needs treating with respect. A young British tourist lost his life after falling down it at 3:00am one morning in 2011.
Back at Piazza Tasso we are now looking down on the zig-zagging road down to the harbour. We climbed this several times during our week here in 2005. It's easier to go down but the don't underestimate the effect on your knees! There's also a shorter route...
Yes... we really were that stupid... Mind you we did come down, not up, the staircases. Even going down you end up out of breath...
We did a bit of admiring the view (an activity also known as getting your breath back) before getting onto the tender boat. This waited until its space was needed by another tender boat coming in and then the boat captain (driver) pressed the starter and chug---chug---chug-----------chug.... nothing...
Several crew members opened a hatch and looked at the battery, but they weren't looking hard enough because even after all that staring, it refused to start the engine. We swapped to the incoming boat once its passengers had got off...
Just down the coast a little is Sant'Agnello, bordering onto Sorrento. It is where we stayed in 2005 and is a quieter place than Sorrento itself. Mind you, the entertainer chap in the next hotel was awful!!!
We had our usual cruising afternoon, snug in a comfortable chair with a drink to hand and our noses in our books. Then a shower and change of clothes before our next meal and we went up onto the Promenade Deck once again for a last look at Sorrento, Vesuvius et al. The last tender boats were still ferrying passengers from Sorrento. We watched as they were winched aboard. Er... that's the boats, not the passengers...
One of the things I best remember about the week we spent here was the beauty and tranquillity of the Bay of Naples in the late afternoon, right through to some spectacular late evening sunsets. We wouldn't see the sunset here tonight, but this view across the mouth of the bay towards the islands of Capri and Ischia gives some idea of what I mean. This is a view for the souls of poets...
We waited until we had started to move and then went back inside the ship and down to our favourite eatery, the Four Seasons restaurant. The day had one more view to show us. As we tucked into our starters, I looked up and saw the unmistakeable silhouettes of Capri's Faglieri Rocks through the window. If you look carefully you can just make out a small opening at the bottom of the middle rock just to the left of the darker fold of the net curtain. In 2005 we sailed through that hole on a launch!
Wednesday 24 August 2005. It's our last night in Sorrento.
Night time in the market streets of Sorrento. Whilst colourful by day, at night they have a special atmosphere! It's a place to see and be seen.
Whilst most holiday makers are dressed casually, occasionally a couple, a group of girls or an Italian housewife will stroll by, dressed to impress.
There were a large number of folk with rather familiar accents too - snapping up tiny bottles of Limoncella lemon liqueur, saying "Eeh, George, let's take some o' this back for our Florrie!"
In fact we've still got a couple of said small bottles gathering dust on the shelf, contents separating and looking not quite as appealing as it did when we bought it that night...
Eventually even the ladies had had enough of the markets and shops. We started to head back towards the hotel, past this little park which looked completely different to how it appears during the day.
The hotel next door had a DJ playing loud music until the early hours. The DJ was indistinguishable from an English DJ actually. "Verberve buh vebberrev, ha ha ha! Beverber ha ha! beebussy cooooobah! Hey ho! Ha ha ha!" Yep... just like any DJ in England at weddings, in pubs, clubs, etc...
The next day we have a few hours before the coach picks us up to take us to the airport. The ladies make back straight for the market streets, so I have a wander inland and find I'm walking over a bridge across an immensely steep and deep chasm.
At the bottom are the ruins of a large factory and to take the photo I'm shooting almost vertically down from the roadway bridge. A quite awesome viewpoint.
Further inland I find some of the old city walls. I hadn't even known that Sorrento had a city wall until I wandered up this far and passed under the gate in the photo.
They are fairly solid chunks of masonry though as you can see. And these lengths of wall that I saw are so complete and seemingly in such good condition that I had to conclude that the rest of the city wall was deliberately demolished, probably to allow the town to expand.
I couldn't really work out what the three corner corbels would have supported... The wall above them is unbroken so they are hardly likely to have held a fighting platform - which would have been more use on the inside of the wall anyway. Perhaps they had some extremely large hanging baskets?
Then as the heat grows, I head back towards the market and harbour and find somewhere cool to wait for Fran and Mum. The little open space here looks like they have set up for an open air concert of some kind for tonight. Typical - the day we go home! Ah well...
Ahhh.... yes, that'll do! And that's about it. Now we are whisked off to Naples airport where my battered hat gets stuck in the X-ray conveyor to be eventually thrown out to a bemused person who couldn't remember putting it in... I forgot all about it until I was on the plane when I suddenly said "Where's my hat?" but it was far too late! And probably far too battered to make me care all that much!
And by way of coincidence, as I finish writing about our Sorrrento holiday, my mate Clive is about to set off on his Sorrento holiday, so have a good one, bud!
