North Italy - Lowlights

Ah yes. The lowlights. There have definitely been a few, although fewer than the highlights.

EasyJet Flight From Mallorca – EasyJet is topping the list of my least favourite budget air carriers. We were due to fly from Mallorca at 2pm, which would have left us a fairly tight schedule to travel from Milan to Lake Como, but not a ridiculous one. EasyJet, in their infinite wisdom, decided to change this departure time until more like 4pm. We received email notification that they were doing so and they were oh so, so, so sorry! But nothing they could do, blah blah. Oh yes – in order to compensate us they would grant us either a) a free transfer to another flight or b) a credit file. Credit file option? Utterly useless to those of us stuck on an island and needing to fly off the island sometime soon. A transfer? Great! We’ll have one of those please. We’d like to transfer our flight to be a day or two earlier (i.e. a flight that left at 2pm) so that we are able to make our way to Como without the likelihood of getting stranded without transport during the night. But sneaky EasyJet! The “transfer” is free i.e. you don’t pay a transfer fee. But they still wanted to charge us 55 pounds each for the difference between what the flights cost! We bought our tickets almost half a year ago, when they were very cheap. Now the flights are expensive. So we had to just stick with the originall flight, only now we were departing Malloca at 4pm, leaving us with an extremely tight transport schedule. On arriving at Palma airport we were informed that the flight had been further delayed, due to problems at Milan airport earlier in the day. Of course, the signs all said our flight was delayed but EasyJet was making panicky announcements about how anyone flying on our flight must proceed IMMEDIATELY to the late check in desk as they were running out of time! So we raced like maniacs through the check in process, hurtled through the airport and screeched to a halt at our boarding gate, just in time to find… nothing. We sat and waited for about an hour before some EasyJet employees appeared, full of the joys of their job. Everyone made a wild dash for the boarding gate. EasyJet’s chaotic boarding process leaves much to be desired. You all scrum for space, while an EasyJet employee shrills at the seething mass of frantic flyers before her “People!!!!!! People!!!!! I am NOT going to start the boarding until you all step back and allow the “SB” status flyers to the front.” Needless to say, every person in the seething mass knows that if they display weakness they will be swallowed up by the rest of the seething mass and likely be trampled to death. So they all continue to elbow and jockey and seethe. The shrill lady sulks and shrills ineffectually and drib by drab, the SB people board. Then the SA people fight their way to the front and then the A people, until just the B’s are left. At this stage, things get dangerous. You’re likely to collect a cracked rib or a chipped tooth as the snarling B flyers try to force their way to the front of the mass of other B flyers. Um, no people – you cannot push straight through me. I am solid flesh and bone and I AM IN FRONT OF YOU! I came very close to snapping. A couple of people do not know how close they came to getting a black eye. One more poke in the back and things might have gotten ugly.
We boarded the flight eventually, despite EasyJet’s best efforts to keep us in Palma. We then sat around for what seemed like another age. I don’t know what the crisis was, but they really messed us around. We were supposed to depart at 16:40 and land at 18:20 (give or take a minute.) When we got to the airport we were informed that our flight was delayed until 15:50. But we only took off after 19:00. We left Palma airport after we were due to have landed in another country! EasyJet was absolutely useless when it came to explanations and updates. We were all just left wondering what the hell was going on and when we were going to leave. When we did eventually take off, the captain apologized and made disclaimers about how it wasn’t their fault. Pah.

The airport bus between terminals took about 15 minutes to arrive (where was it? On a coffee break?) and dropped us at Terminal 1 JUST in time for us to miss the Malpensa Express train. We had to sit around for another half hour to catch the next train. We got to Saronno station late in the night, to find that the last train (for which we had tickets) had left 20 minutes ago. We had to sit in the station for over an hour and wait for the substitute bus, which arrived after 23:00. By the time we hit Como, needless to say all of the other busses had stopped running and there we were – stuck at the bus station with 50 kg of luggage. (I was carrying 24, N 25.5) How on earth have we accumulated so much crap? 50 kg of luggage and a map. *%#@ing great. So we walked. And walked and walked and walked. We walked through Como to the other end of town. We got there at twenty past midnight, to find locked gates at our hostel and a thoroughly disgruntled man, who had been expecting us at 19:00. I was exhausted and starving and my feet and hips incurred a lot of damage (which I am still struggling with) on that unhappy midnight tramp through Como. Thanks a bunch, EasyJet.

Being A Hobo – The next day we toured Como and ended up leaving later than originally planned. We trained back to Milan and then the plan was to train and bus out to Arco. N warned me while on the train back to Milan that he “might want to look about for an i-phone in Milan.” I said fine, but I did not want a repeat of the night before where we get stuck in a two bit town with no transport anywhere. We reached Milan. We wandered out of the train station. I saw a computer shop and we nipped in there to replace my laptop power cable (lost in Mallorca – looking back I am starting to develop somewhat negative feelings towards that island…) and to ask if they had i-phones. Well, I got a power cable (62 Euros – flipping well seven hundred bucks!) but no i-phones. They recommended N try “near Duomo.” So to Duomo we went. Fortunately we took the metro because by now my hips were trying to pop out of their sockets. At the Duomo stop, I waited with the 50kg of crap while N fled into Milan to run from phone shop to phone shop, getting nowhere. Not an i-phone to be found. After 40 minutes he returned to me where I had managed to buy the onward metro tickets and fall and twist my ankle in the process. (Well, you try lugging 50kg of backpacks through a metro station by yourself when you weigh less than 60.) I had also tried to open my last tin of sardines and eat it, because I was ravenous and heading into hyper-glycaemic shaky hands and light-headedness. Needless to say, the pesky opener on the tin broke and try as I might I was unable to bludgeon it open with a fork. So N returned to a shaky, light headed, sore ankled, sore hipped, starving, miserable me. We metroed to the central station in Milan, which is an extremely impressive building. Pity I was too miserable and broken to bother to take a photo. Pizza in the station managed to restore me slightly and we took off by train for Pescheria del Gardia, where we were going to catch an onward bus. Ha! Yeah right. We got there after the busses had stopped running. Bloody i-phone. It was pitch dark by this time (after 22:00) and the nearest camping was allegedly 5km or so away. Walking there with my 24kg was a physical impossibility. N cunningly suggested that we stash our backpacks in the bushes near the train station and walk without packs until we found a spot that was wild enough to camp and then return before light to retrieve the packs. Just as cunningly I declined to do so. I will not be leaving my pack in any bushes in an urban setting. If my pack is found somewhere it shouldn’t be, I want to be with it. Having spent R700 to replace my power cable and R300 to replace the day pack it was in, (and a bunch of other stuff still to be replaced) I do not feel like replacing everything else when my abandoned pack gets nicked. I also didn’t feel like walking anywhere, what with my hip bones grating in their sockets. So we slept in the bushes between the train station and the long term parking. I was a hobo for a night. It would have been fine, except that we (obviously) couldn’t pitch the tent. And so the mozzies attacked me relentlessly the entire night. I was chewed. I slept very little. I had a remarkably unpleasant night and was remarkably unimpressed the next morning, with life in general.

So you can see how Arco is a small paradise for me. After those two nights of awfulness, Camping Zoo feels like home. 

My other lowlight is the blisters. After a week of being unencumbered by a pack, my hip joints have 90% recovered the ability to rotate without seizing, but the blisters remain. And they get worse every day. I’ve had two days where the walk into town turned into about a five km walk, due to grocery and i-phone hunting. And two days of hiking and doing via ferratta. Last night I could barely hobble to the bathroom. So I threw caution to the winds and popped the blisters. All three of them. And then I doctored them with N’s tincture of merthiolate. Which stings like wasps sting. Hopefully they will now harden up and allow me to be fully mobile again, because I am looking forward to doing more via ferratta in the Dolomites in the next couple of days.

Ending off the lowlight post on a positive note, I am sitting under a tree in the shade. The wind is blowing. The day is pleasantly warm. I am eating salted sunflower seeds. Later (blisters allowing) we will walk into town for the last grocery supply and maybe some more ice cream. Soon we will be heading off to the Dolomites. Life is good!

Ps - discovered the best ice cream place! 5 Euros for half a litre of ice cream. We shared one the other day. Flavours – dark chocolate fondant, crème caramel, dulche de latte, grapefruit, tiramisu and fior de latte. Might have to have another half litre tonight before we depart Arco for good.
Pps - another highlight! Tonight Camping Zoo has advertised a "white yoghurt party." We are intrigued and looking forward to it.