You can’t miss it…

 

Travel info meter set to 72% Outrage/incompetence meter set to maximum.  Paolo, our host, is explaining how to get to town from their mountain paradise. He stretches out his arm and points toward Saturn and says “You go back down the road and turn right, and you’ll see the path going down and it will take you 20 minutes to get there. You can’t miss it”. If I hear that phrase one more time I will gnaw the person’s hand off at the wrist. Yes, of course I can miss it and those directions suck! 

First of all the outline of the town is a dot on the horizon and it’s 1400 feet below us altitude-wise.  It would take me longer than 20 minutes to get there in a helicopter! What could possibly go wrong?

Paolo has left for work and won’t be back till evening when we have arranged for him to pick us up in front of the train station and Isabella has left to take Mailys to school in France, just 20 kms away, and then run some errands and be back in the evening also. So we are left on our own accord and will trek to town, hit the beach, eat, drink, explore the 150 year old part of town and some new parts that are being refurbished by the Prince of Monaco. There is no more room in Monaco and he has decided to buy up large tracts of land and property in Ventimiglia.  It is a needed boost to this poor town and it’s inhabitants.

Carol is leading the way out the gate and we are heading down the road and within 50 meters have to make a choice of where to turn right. There is an obvious spot that even has a wooden signpost proclaiming Ventimiglia and an arrow to show the way. But the fly in the ointment is that the post has been removed from some unknown place and is just resting against a rock wall,  hmmmm….

We mentally flip a coin and choose to follow the arrow. You can see the town far, far below us but there are hills, olive groves, terraced  farm areas in between and the road that we have chosen has many, many twists and turns so it is impossible to see where it leads. In 20 meters it is a gravel pathway and another 50 meters it is a rough trail winding through ancient olive groves that rise and fall in dramatic fashion and looks like it bends ahead and goes up the mountain across a wide gully, hmm…  There are numerous wild boars in the area and while Paolo has assured me that they generally give people a wide berth unless a mother is with her litter and then they are extremely dangerous. They can weigh up to 450 lbs. , hmm… The path gets steeper and steeper and then climbs steeper and steeper. It has been 25 minutes and there is no sign of civilization in any direction and there is a rustling behind a rock wall nearby. The tallest thing that I could climb to escape certain death would be Carol’s  shoulders or tumble over a cliff and hope that my neck breaks and I can’t feel the savage beast chewing on my carcass. The rustling is a cat but we obviously are hopelessly lost (again dammit).

Our only option is to backtrack and after being gone 45 minutes we are only 50 meters away from our starting point and the heat is building and it is already over 30 degrees. We continue down the road again looking for a right turn and there are no turns for another 20 minutes but we are forced to dodge traffic as it goes both ways past us and the road is barely wide enough for a single car to pass. We have to be alert to the toot toot or we will become a grille ornament on some weather-beaten Peugeot or rusty Renault as nobody living up here is set for life and their shoddy vehicles bear witness to it.

We come to the only turn and it leads up a steep grade to the hamlet of San Giacomo and I can’t remember if Paolo said we should be here or if we are here than we have taken a wrong turn. This time  there are 3 choices of direction to make and nobody around to ask for guidance, besides only our hosts have any English language skills that we have encountered so far.

Usually with hand signs or saying the words very slow and loudly you can make some sort of communication work, but not in Italy. You approach them on the street and ask where a restaurant,  bridge, or bathroom is and their eyes glaze over and you can tell they’re wondering what the heck you are doing in their backwater part of the world. Italian sounds nothing like English and if they reply it is gibberish to my ears but I still nod and then walk away and then they yell more Italian at us and point in a different direction, but they didn’t know what we were asking them in the first place so how would they know we’re going in the wrong direction.

Anyways, I digress.  We make our choice, Carol’s eyes are fixed on our map and is leading the charge. The map is for mountain biking to Tuscany and shows little detail of use to us. Soon we are descending at a precipitous rate, so much so that I am sidestepping down the roadway. We go on for almost a kilometer like this and I’m hoping against hope that this doesn’t lead to a dead end because it would take all of our energy just to get back to point where we would have to make another choice of direction.

Well, shit, after numerous switchbacks passing no structures, let alone people, we end up in front of an 18th century stone building with a derelict car in front of it and I am crushed. It is indeed the end of the trail. There is no sign of the town or anything until savage growling comes from beneath the car and a vicious-looking dog squeezes out from under it and starts to come towards us… “are you freaking kidding me, how can this be”? The dog is snarling at us and barking and we’re slowly backing up the slope when all of a sudden a scooter shoots around the corner and stops in front of us and the dog stops barking. I don’t know what his reaction might be as he is wearing a helmet with visor and we can’t see his face. We plead our case, we are not trying to steal anything, we are massively lost, help please. Stony-eyed stare and no recognition of what we are saying, just gibberish for a reply from him and then we say “Canada” and suddenly the lights come on in his features and he understands our plight.

He motions to follow him and we skirt some bushes and suddenly  there is a steep stairway leading down to a tiny house that had been obscured from the trail and out pops his 4’2″ mother and he explains what is going on and she beams at us and offers us a biere or some refreshment via shrugs and words of few syllables. We are parched and overheated but we are on a quest and we have to reach the town. The son initially points back up the path which would be a disaster for us and then suddenly wheels around and points to his mother’s gate and says “Ventimiglia” and ushers us towards it and says something in Italian that must mean “You can’t miss it”.

We offer many a “grazi  grazi” and start past the gate and follow a goat path that winds down, even more steeply than what we had been used to and it leads past fantastic rock formations and vegetation that we hadn’t seen before and past more closed gates. But we are emboldened now as we can see the town finally, albeit still more than a kilometer away and the narrow trail goes out of sight over and over again up ahead.

I am not going to give up and if I had to get Carol to wrestle a wild boar I would do it just to make our goal a reality.

We reach the edge of town finally, 135 minutes after we began! We are baked, our shins are sore because of the incline they had to endure for such a great time, and we are thirsty and tired. But we are giddy from our adventure and from the remarkable sights that we saw and doubted many tourists had been down this road less traveled before.

Off for some food, drink, and onward to the beach.