We started with breakfast on the deck just looking at that view. Need I say more! We caught the hotel shuttle into town and tried to get some information at the post office about sending a box of goodies home, but when we paid €2.00 per postcard to Australia, we figured that we might wait until we get to Rome and can communicate a little clearer (hopefully).
We sat down for a coffee, (a tea for me as I am discovering espresso and my brain don’t mix so well), and then jumped on a ferry north to Colico. The first stop on the way was Menaggio, and it looked really good so we decided to hop off and have a look around before the next (fast) ferry came along. We wandered along the main road and found a very neat little clothes shop that had a big sale on – Mark ended up with a pair of Billabong shorts and I got a nice little top. We walked a bit further and came across the marina, which had a lovely view back out across the lake.
We only had about a half hour stop before the hydrofoil to Colico arrived, so we high tailed it back to the jetty to jump on board. It took about an hour from there to arrive at Colico, and so we sat at the front of the boat to watch the sights glide by. All along the lake is dotted with small clusters of towns, each one very pretty in its own right. If we were there for longer, we would have liked to have explored all of them! We went past Varenna, and it looked fabulous, and so we have decided we will take a look around there tomorrow.
We arrived at Colico and jumped off to find ourselves in a very serene, very peaceful town, surrounded by mountains. It was very easy to imagine this place during winter, when all the mountains would be covered in snow. It was very quiet, and there were a few cafes and restaurants along the shoreline, but there weren’t many people at all. This is getting really close to the german border, so all the cafes had Italian and German menus, I don’t think they had too many Aussies visiting this neck of the woods. The marinas of these small towns are the inside of a ‘C’ shaped jetty and so we walked over to the Colico marina and watched a man feeding all the ducks and swans. They were pretty happy ducks and swans, needless to say, and there was a mother duck shuffling her babies along to make sure they got their fair share of the bread on offer.
We were getting hungry (it’s hard work all this sight-seeing!) and so we sat down at one of the cafes on the foreshore and ordered bruscetta and pizza. You just can’t go wrong when ordering bruscetta and pizza in Italy! This was no let down either, only it was just too big and so we sat there eating for just over an hour. After lunch, we went for a walk around the top end of the lake – it seemed that was where all the locals were coming from, and there was a little beach around there and some windsurfing happening.
We had to be careful of times as there were only two ferries back in the afternoon, so we walked back to the terminal and grabbed a gelati to sit down and enjoy while we waited. The hydrofoil arrived and we jumped on and enjoyed the quiet ride back to Bellagio. We had decided to go to a restaurant that was advertised on the map (every hotel has a little local map that proves indelible in every way), and so we climbed the steep streets of Bellagio to get to it. We were the only people in the restaurant all night – we weren’t too sure if that meant that it was a bad restaurant, or if it was just too early for the Lake Comonians (like that word?) to be out and about eating. The food wasn’t bad though, so we decided it was the latter. I got a crème brulee that came out flaming, so at least it was an entertaining meal. We had impressed the waiter with our Italian again (we can now say “I would like…”) and he spoke about three words of English – so it was another one of those nights of pointing and smiling and nodding. We have discovered those sorts of nights generally end in the freebie rounds of Limoncello, and this was one of them. We stood at the bar with him, and pretended we could understand each other – discussing how many tourists there were in Bellagio – at least I think that’s what we were talking about. Maybe we were talking about how many tourists there were NOT in Bellagio due to the quiet restaurant. Who knows, but the one thing I can guarantee, was that the Limoncello was goooood!
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