Italy - Thursday 7th June

Sleep in!! We never do this, but we were feeling crazy. Breakfast was out on the patio under the grape vines, this was a pretty impressive breakfast – home-made cakes, yoghurt's, fruits and home-made croissants served toasty warm. Apparently Salvatore is a bit of a pastry master as well as a hotel manager. Disappointed with the coffee though, didn't really have a good coffee the whole time in Italy which was a shame.
 
An attack of the food guilt's came on after Lou participated in croissant eating so the decision was made to do some exercise. Our hotel was actually located on the edge of the popular walking trail called the ‘Sentiero degli Dei’ (Path of the Gods). So we decided to give that a crack and began climbing up the path. We basically climbed up for about an hour and a half so you would hope that that cheeky croissant got burned off. We saw some spectacular views, and it felt nice to get out and about in the countryside. And then the highlight of Hamish's holiday, we saw a black snake about 3 foot long. Scared the life out of Lou, but not as much as when Hamish immediately started trying to pull it out of the hole it slithered into Steve Irwin styles. Needless to say the ear full Hamish got from Lou had enough venom in it to make Hamish stop trying to catch it.

We got back to our villa in one piece, sunbathed for a bit (on a side note, as the sun isn't as strong as it is in NZ & Oz, it's nice to be able to sit in the sun with factor 20 applied only once in the day and not get burned). Next on the plan was to drive down to the actual Positano harbour and try and get some cheapish lunch, we were literally about 10 mins away from leaving when there was a knock on the door and Salvatore was there with a big tray of food and wine and he said in his broken English that he had just cooked lunch for his family and he had a lot left over and did we want it?

Now we have had some experiences where you got offered things overseas and you think they are for free and then you find out later that you got absolutely ripped. There was an internal battle going on in Lou's mind about this, but the food looked so good so we couldn't help but say yes (and the happy ending to this story was that he didn't charge us a cent!).

He set up the table on the balcony for us, a feast of pasta with calamari, octopus and tomato chili sauce, fresh bread, and whole sardines that had been gutted and salted, and white wine. It was so good, Lou especially enjoyed the sardines, they tasted pretty fresh!

After our meal we headed down to the village, and wandered through Positano. It was so gorgeous, almost every house and bright purple bougainvillea growing around it and the sun was excellent. The beach itself wasn't fantastic, pebbly and a bit grubby, but it was nice enough. We cooled off in the sea again (2 swims for Lou this summer already! must be a record), and people watched and got jealous at the amount of money some people had. A lot of super yachts were moored off Positano and there was a continual streams of little speedboats dropping families off from these yachts to the village. Well jel.

We in Rome...

The rest of the evening was pretty uneventful, we had planned to just buy substantial snacks from the local shop for dinner as we were still pretty full from lunch. Unfortunately the local shop seemed to keep its own hours and was randomly closed. We joined the locals waiting for it to open (they didn't seem to think it was weird that it was randomly closed in the afternoon), but we gave up waiting after about half an hour and had to get back in the car which was a pain.

Anyway we ended up with a spread of breads, cheeses and meats (again) but this time with the addition of super tasty strawberries. I am even going to go as far as saying that they were better than the infamous strawberries of Madrid 2010. Big call I know.

Lying in the sun all day makes you pretty tired so bed time wasn't too far after that.

Highlight: The views from our big climb followed by a tasty lunch.
Lowlight: The local shop opening times, what's up with that?
Interesting Fact: Patricia Highsmith based the little port of Mongibello in "The Talented Mr Ripley" on Positano. The town is also where parts of the film adaptation were filmed.