We awoke to the hustle and bustle of a very busy bay with tourist boats arriving every few minutes to take there passengers around the island, through the tunnel of Love or simply for day trips around the bay.
No one slept particularly well as the wind and swell were from the west and this bay ONLY offers protection from the north. So fellow visitors be warned. That said Elaine and I decided to venture onto the island and explore. Poor Ed still had back trouble, but kindly took us the 100 metres ashore by tender. The landing stage is public, but gets busy with tourist companies ferrying passengers to a from their pleasure craft.
This side of the island is much quieter and very much more civilised than the north, as you will hear further in this blog. We caught a local bus for €2 per person up the slope and to Capri. The buses run every 10 to 15 minutes and the road is barely passable when two opposing buses meet, but the managed it with a barely a fingers width between them.
We decided too leave the hussle and bustle of Capri and head for the ancient Roman ruins of Villa Jovis, the Roman palace of Tiberius. It was a wonderful walk through the tourist and car free narrow lanes. Wonderful local residential dwellings either side with flower and vegetable gardens and lemon and organ groves. This was only interrupted with the quite purr of very small electric vehicles delivering groceries and post.
Back to Capri and then the Funicular down to Marina Grande. Don’t go there… It’s very commercialised and even in May jam packed. We probably stayed about 10 minutes and then headed back up to Capri and took a bus back down to Marina Picolla. Ed picked us up and through quite aggressive waves made our way back to Arctura.
Once on board the rolling was terrible and we nearly moved off. But after checking the weather forecast the wind was ment to veer northerly which is perfect for this bay. This did indeed happen and we settled into a perfectly relaxing nights sleep to be woken to a perfectly calm bay.
A Woderful place to stop if the conditions a right.