Tag Archives: Pisa

Homeward Bound – one final sight

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Saturday 20 June 2026 – As hinted at earlier, we had to get under way quite early in order to have any kind of chance of presenting ourselves for the 11.05 flight back to London in any kind of good order. An 0630 departure from Bonassola meant that we didn’t have the luxury of a hotel breakfast; we’d picked up their packed offering the evening before. I suppose their intentions were good, but I question the wisdom of including a hard-boiled egg. Trying to eat one of those without upsetting everyone within a 10-foot radius would be a non-starter, so we carefully took those out and left them behind.

As you might expect, Bonassola at 0620 was not busy.

It would have been dead quiet were it not for the bin men doing their thing. Our final ride in that dreadful bus got us to Pisa airport shortly before 9am, and we walked into a bustling terminal. In pre travel discussions among the group, given the possible, nay probable, disruption caused by the UK no longer being part of the EU, we had wondered whether this was leaving enough time to ensure we’d complete all the formalities. In the event, the timing worked out pretty well. We found the BA check-in area, which was closed but which opened pretty soon after we started queuing, so evidently BA thought that the standard 2-hour window was adequate.

Having checked in and been allocated seats that were almost hanging off the tailplane, we then set about getting through security. This looked like it could turn into the stumbling block we’d feared.

About half way along that mass of humanity were the gates that allowed one into the security area. However, it seemed that this was entirely normal for your average morning in Pisa airport; the staff seemed quite relaxed, and only had to call out one flight for urgent prioritisation. People took the queue in their stride, and we inched forward, eventually forming a line into security, and thence to the border. Those with EU passports could take the e-gates, and most of the Brits queued up for the old-fashioned “stamp your passport” desks. Jane and I actually tried the e-gates in case they were (a) quicker and/or (b) of the modern EES type, but they weren’t either of those things. Our passports let us through but were then stamped anyway. Our next trip is not for a couple of months and is to Portugal, which has adopted EES and thus will be a different travel experience; let’s hope they’ve sorted out any wrinkles before we get there.

I might have been in cramped seats in the penultimate row of the plane, but I had a window seat and accidentally looked out at just the right moment.

So I got a decent view of the famous Leaning Tower and the rest of the Piazza del Duomo, much better than the fleeting glimpse we caught as we travelled out to Bonassola the week before. Finally, an aerial view! We’d been to Pisa the previous year and I had got some early morning photos around the Piazza that I was pretty pleased with, but it’s a No-Fly area for drone photography (of course! grrrr!) so I missed out on an aerial shot then. This one is not ideal, but I was glad to have caught it.

The rest of the journey was uneventful and, to quote John Cleese, relatively crash-free, and we were home and lashing into a mug of Twinings finest Earl Grey by 2pm. Although our week had been hard work at times and I continued having difficulty with staircases for a few days after, it was a very fine trip – spectacular photography scenery and a lovely bunch of people, with whom I rather think we will keep in touch.

So: Cinque Terre, eh?

It was lovely to see the villages and to get such brilliant views, but it was hot, hard work.

Why is Day 1 always the bastard, eh? Eh?

The raw figures make the walking look easier than we found it. The temperatures didn’t help, and neither did the crowds on some walks. But particularly, the terrain was tricky in places – rough patches and quite large steps up and down among the rocks were commonplace. But it was absolutely worth going and I would recommend it as a short break for anyone.  As we toiled up and down the hills, I formulated some guidelines which might help others considering a visit.

Cinque Terre Rules

  1.  If you like walking, you’d better like quite tough walking – there are no easy routes. Walking poles recommended.
  2. If you are going to walk, then mid-April to mid-May, or last week in September/first week in October are good times to go.
  3. These are the best time to avoid the crowds in the villages as well.
  4. If you don’t want to walk, then an afternoon ferry ride along the villages is a great way to see them at their finest.

HF Holidays did a very fine job of presenting us with a well-organised, rewarding week and I would recommend it to anyone, particularly if walking is your thing.

Our next trip will involve rather a lot more walking, though I’m expecting it to be less arduous despite being much longer. Unless something spectacular happens, therefore, my next entry in these pages will be in late August and I’d be delighted if you were to join us on our next travels.

Getting there

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Saturday 13 June 2026 – In the opening salvo for our Istanbul trip, I inveighed at some length about the horrors of an 0230 alarm call and how I never wanted to suffer another one.

Well….

Our alarm was set for 0330 in order to get us to Heathrow for our 0700 flight to Pisa.  Our taxi was due at 0430; 0431 came and went, and we were, of course, immediately worried that Someone Had Blundered and that we would have a frantic dash to an overpriced airport car park. But the taxi turned up only about five minutes late, and he still managed to get us to Heathrow before 0500, mainly by displaying a fine contempt for speed limits.

Terminal 5 was busy – largely because we were there a few minutes before the bag drop actually opened… 

Despite being lumped in with hoi polloi at the back of the aeroplane, I thought my hard-foughtpaid-for Bronze membership of the BA Club would get us through the bag drop process (once it opened) quickly, only to discover, as we jumped from queue to queue in a vain attempt to find one which actually moved, that the cattle class bag drop was entirely deserted. So we waved goodbye to our bags there and headed for security.

My backpack was laden with cameras, power banks, backup drives, cables, adapters and other technical paraphernalia, and so I tend to expect that mine is the one that will attract attention as it passes through the scanners. It was actually Jane’s backpack that got picked on this time, because of the suspicious, nay subversive, items therein – spare (plastic) ferrules for our walking poles. That little setback aside, we were on our way with 90 minutes to spare before our departure, so a stop for coffee seemed a good idea.  I peered over the edge into the mosh pit of Terminal 5’s departure lounge

and it suddenly seemed a good idea to find a sit-down restaurant for our coffee. We took our seats in the Giraffe “Feel Good Food” restaurant and donned our cloak of invisibility for the obligatory 10 minutes until someone decided that our custom might be worthwhile, and ordered coffee-and-Danish, seated in front of a screen telling us that information on our departure gate would be vouchsafed to us in 40 minutes or so.  In the meantime, Google (via our boarding passes in our Google Wallets) had told us not only what our gate number was but also promised that the flight would be on time. It’s a fine philosophical point this – is this prescience on Google’s part an impressive victory for the power of technology harnessed for the good of humanity? Or is it just a tiny but creepy? Just like the fact that, towards the expiry of a bank card, it knows the details of my new one apparently before my bank does and certainly before my bank tells me. I mean, I’m only the customer here. (Of course, since I don’t pay for my banking and therefore the service is free, it means I’m the product, not the customer.)

Anyhoo…coffee and Danish consumed, we went to our gate. While we awaited our summons for the flight, a chap in a green HF Holidays shirt and sporting a name badge came over and asked us if by any chance we were with the HF Holidays group. Something about us (maybe the Merrell footwear or the Craghopper trousers) had clearly marked us out in Trevor’s eyes as being candidates for his group of Cinque Terre visitors. And so it was that we met a significant fraction of the (delightfully) small group with whom we’d be spending the next few days. The group is just eight people, plus the very genial Trevor, who, having introduced us all round, pottered off in search of the remaining group members. This was our first introduction to the HF Holidays universe – many of the group had been on multiple HF Holiday gatherings, which boded well for the rest of our week.

While all this was going on, BA personnel were prowling the area looking for people with large bags so that they could sorrowfully tell them that because the flight was full, the bags would have to be checked in to the hold. In the event, there were empty seats on the plane (some of them, delightfully, beside me) and so I wondered why they were being so pre-emptive. Anyway, the flight pushed back early and arrived even earlier, which is not quite the good news that it might be, as it meant that Pisa Airport weren’t ready for us with sufficient buses. But after only ten minutes or so of standing in bright sunshine and 25°C temperatures while dressed in our 4.30am trousers and fleeces, a bus arrived to take us to the entry point to the terminal.

I say “entry point to the terminal” with a slightly hollow laugh. Under a canopy obviously specially erected for just this circumstance, this is what we were faced with,

courtesy of the brain-damaged decision by 51.89% of the Great British Voting Public to leave the EU. For some moments, we inched forward as people at the front of the queue painstakingly had their fingerprints and mugshots taken, before the Italian authorities decided “bugger it” and reverted to the previous arrangement. So we shot forward into a delightfully cool terminal, past the now-redundant machines

(in their defence there four more on the other side of this partition)  to

more queues. The irony of the poster beside this second set of queues was not lost on me.

The process of getting through immigration took about an hour, but it did mean that our bags were waiting for us as we clustered around Trevor in the baggage hall; he then led us off to meet our bus driver who was called, I think Jeremiah. He was in charge of a vehicle which had enough seats to accommodate us, almost enough luggage space in its boot to hold all our bags and absolutely no bloody legroom for anyone taller than 5′ 6″. It also had a suspension system designed to cope with much more weight than it was laden with today – it was a bumpy, uncomfortable ride for 90 minutes as we headed to Bonassola, which was to be our base for the week.  Trevor tried to distract us by pointing out Things Of Interest as we went; we caught sight of the roof of the baptistry building on the site of the famous Leaning Tower, for example. However, since we’d spent considerable time at the site only a year ago, not getting a better view wasn’t an issue.

Eventually we left the high-speed but bumpy motorway for the low-speed and twisty roads that led to Bonassola. Every so often, we could get a glimpse of the very attractive-looking coastline, and then we got our first sights of Bonassola itself.

Before long we had reached the limit of where the bus could take us – the pedestrian area of the town

which is very clearly a seaside resorty sort of place.

Waiting for us there was Rebecca, Trevor’s accomplice from HF holidays, who pointed us towards our hotel, the Hotel delle Rose, 

a short suitcase trundle away where we were welcomed with smiles and great efficiency, so that we were in our room within minutes and the aircon switched on. 

One of the attractive aspects of this walking holiday is that it’s not a place-to-place-to-place affair like a Via Francigena or Camino; we’re here for the week, so could completely unpack and make ourselves at home. So we did that, and then went out to get something to eat, it being by now quite a long time since the 0730 BA flapjack had hit our digestive systems. Fortunately, hard next door to Hotel delle Rose is Caffè delle Rose,

which apart from being a gelateria artigiana, does a mean focaccia panini and salata vegeteriana. And beer. So we availed ourselves of those and were joined by Jenny, one of our group, giving us the chance to get to know her a little better.

After lunch, we rested for a little while at the hotel before joining a short walk round Bonassola,

to enable Trevor to show us where the important things were in the town, particularly places where we could buy packed lunches, since (sigh) we might be short of coffee bars to rest at over the course of the next week.

The tour was, of necessity, quite short, because Bonassola is not a big place. Along one side of the main street is an embankment which was originally the support for a railway built in Victorian times

and which provided both a bulwark against the worst of the sea weather when it was bad and allowed tunnels through so that people could get access to the beaches.

It’s a charming place, particularly in the sunshine, which we’re due to see a lot of during the week we’re here. As I write this, I’m glad to see the lovely weather. Come back and talk to me as I’m toiling up the steep valley sides in 30°C heat later on in the week and I might have a different attitude, but for now it seemed like a nice-a place. There were some lovely décor touches as we walked around.

In the main supermarket in the town we had another striking “small world” encounter. The keen of memory among you will remember that we were in this neck of the woods (but somewhat south of here) a year ago when we walked the Via Francigena. In a place called San Quirico, we bumped into a Dutch lass who we’d first met the year before in the Antarctic on M/V Hondius. Today, as we queued up with our bananas, the lass in front of us was none other than Agnese, an Italian girl who we’d first met on M/V Kinfish at the other end of the earth, in the Arctic. She it was, along with Karlo, her chap, who participated, along with other people of questionable sanity, in the Polar Plunge as we navigated alongside the glacial coast of Bråsvellbreen, and now there she was in the same Italian shop as us; she and Karlo had come to visit her mum, who has a place in Bonassola. The first coincidence was pretty unusual; the second was, frankly, astonishing.

We were a bit short of Euro cash, and needed to find an ATM. The one that Trevor knew about was no longer active, but back at the hotel, Rebecca pointed us at the Post Office. To find it, she said, we had to walk past “the old men”. It was quite clear what she meant;

a sight quite common in Southern Europe – the menfolk of the town sitting round in the shade and shooting the breeze, presumably to the great relief of their spouses, who will be glad they’re out of the house.

Back at the hotel, we had a welcome briefing on the hotel’s rooftop terrace over a glass of (a very decent) Prosecco,

during which we started the process of getting to know each other better, and, importantly,  found out what awaited us the following day (a choice between a shorter or longer walk, which they accidentally kept calling the easier or harder walk). And then we finished off the day with dinner at a local restaurant, Si Và, just round the corner. This was to be our regular dinner restaurant, as the hotel kitchen, alas, was not operational because the chef had retired and, as yet, no replacement had been found for him.

The food was very good, but the restaurant suffered from the serious flaw which afflicts so many Italian restaurants in Italy – such is the expectation that diners want wine that they don’t have any gin.  Sigh….well, a Campari spritz will have to do. We followed dinner with a final cuppa back on the hotel terrace.

Thus ended our journey to the outskirts of the Cinque Terre. Tomorrow we get the chance to explore at least one of the villages and work out for ourselves exactly how hard the walking is going to be (by all accounts, quite hard, incidentally). Stay tuned to see how much we suffer, why don’t you? 

 

 

 

 

A Lucca Round

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Saturday 10 May 2025 – On paper, the day’s schedule was quite relaxed, starting with a 10am transfer to Lucca. However, I wasn’t done with Pisa; I wanted to take a photo of the tower and baptistry in the morning sunshine. I thought that if I got there early enough, I might be the only one there and so could get a photo of the tower with no crowds. I was very nearly right.

I woke up shortly after 6am and decided that I would walk up to the Piazza del Duomo, so I arrived there well before 7am. The site was, indeed, very quiet. But, right bang in the middle of the shot I wanted to take, was a couple who had obviously got up really early so they could get their own shot at a classic view of the site,

except, of course, they were doing fucking selfies! And they were taking their time about it, too, so, rather than wait for them to finish, I walked around the site to get a photo of the baptistry in the morning light.

On the way back to see if my shot was clear, I passed another, clearly serious, photographer setting up with his big camera on a tripod, only to realise that he was doing fucking selfies, too!

Anyway, I got the shot I wanted in the end.

I really wanted an aerial version, too, and I had the drone with me. There was a sign on the site saying “no drones”, but I thought that maybe if I launched from just off the site, I could sneak a quick shot with no-one to notice.  Sadly, DJI’s software had already thought of this, and declared the area an “Authorisation Zone” – I would have to get a special code even to launch. Not only did I not know how to get this, but I realised that if I did, They would know that I’d taken an illicit shot. So, with a sigh, I packed up and walked back to the hotel.

Pisa looked very fine in the early morning light,

which made me feel extra glad that I had made the effort to get up early.

Our 10am transfer went very smoothly, with an entertaining driver who got us to Lucca in about half an hour, and deposited us at the Hotel Rex

whose staff seemed somewhat disenchanted to see us so early and bade us come back at 2pm to check in. They did allow us to leave our bags there, so we did that and wandered off into a lovely sunny day.

Embarrassingly, I had never even heard of Lucca before we planned this trip, but when I mentioned it in various conversations, people cooed about how lovely the place was; I’d seen a photo of the cathedral and heard about the walls, but that was about it. According to Wikipedia, “Lucca is known as an Italian “Città d’arte” (City of Art) from its intact Renaissance-era city walls and its very well preserved historic centre.” The hotel lies just outside these walls, and so we went with a plan to walk around them, as Jane had confirmed that this was A Thing. We first had to find a way through them

and soon found a path that led through a tunnel

and up into a delightful area. There’s a well-developed and wide path that completely circumnavigates the walls, allowing for walking, running, cycling and

the cycling equivalent of pedalos, which are for hire at many spots round the walls. The route is tree-lined and very pleasant to walk along.  It offers many a great view of the city and its buildings,

all the nicer for it being a beautful sunny day.  The round trip is around 4km, and we covered about half it before diverting off in search of a coffee, which we found in the Piazza del Amfiteatro. Jane had mentioned that there were maybe a couple of restaurants there, and actually the whole amphitheatre area is rammed with restaurants

and featuring a market in the centre.

We chose a place at random (OK, the first one we got to) and passed a pleasant hour over coffee and drinks before completing our circuit round the walls, a process which took us to just after check-in time.

En route, we passed the very pleasant Piazza San Frediano

which gets its name from the Basilica which stands on one edge, a building with a very striking facade

which features a fabulous mosaic image at its head.

It was open, so we went in, and found that the interior was every bit as striking as the outside.

It’s “Chapels’R’Us” down the sides of the nave

and there are many interesting details – lush decor and frescoes.

An extra side chapel has, among all the other splendours, a wonderful ceiling,

and, all in all, it was a very worthwhile detour. We carried on round the walls, past more splendid edifices

and, for reasons not entirely clear to us, a giant panther.

I mean, obviously it’s something to do with the Giro D’Italia cycling race, but exactly what we don’t know.

The hotel was more welcoming when we arrived at 2.15pm, and checked us in smoothly. Behind the reception is a neat floral display;

the shape of the walls, made out in hydrangeas – as can be seen in the track of our walk.

Having checked and settled in, we then mounted an expedition to find lunch, which is where we struck the first (minor) obstacle; all the serious restaurants had clearly shut their kitchens. We stumbled about until we found somewhere that could provide us something better than a packet of crisps, and had a relaxed time over focaccias and salads. There seemed to be a few hen parties in town, and one passed us whilst we were at lunch.

They were clearly having a good time, as were we.

We repaired to the hotel for a restorative cup of tea and, as the sun was going down, ventured out again, this time in search of gelato. It amazes me that we’ve been in Italy almost a week and this is the first time that ice cream has featured as part of the plan. So we headed back towards the old town, taking the opportunity to pass the cathedral, which has a very impressive facade.

We then blundered about a bit, ending up by the Piazza Napoleone. We had wondered, earlier, whether there might be restaurants here.

Yup.

It’s-a nice-a place; we may well end up having lunch here tomorrow. Jane also found a highly-recommended gelateria for us to sample – Caffè Casali, on Piazza San Michele. This is a civilised ice cream parlour

which also serves cocktails and pastries. It made for a pleasant coda to the day.

Tomorrow is the last chance we get for a leisurely schedule; after that the hard walk starts. There are a couple of towers to climb and maybe a couple of churches to visit (no shit, Sherlock – Ed). So stick with us and you’ll find out how we spent our last non-walking day.