Optimistically (or, stupidly), we decided that it was completely possible to make it to the hostel and back in forty minutes - so long as we could catch a bus by quarter-past. We sprinted across to the bus stop and managed to jump on the bus as it was about to pull out. Unfortunately, it was the world’s slowest bus. We could have ridden on sloths and arrived back at the hostel faster. ‘Seriously. What the F@#!? The f@#!ing train will be in f@#!ing Venice before we get off this f@#!ing bus. YOU MAY AS WELL BE DRIVING F@#!ING BACKWARDS.’ We were so busy freaking out that we almost missed our stop. From the bus stop it was still about 500 metres up the street to JUFA, so we started bolting.
I’m no Usain Bolt (although, with my shell, I may very well end up with muscles like his), but I am a reasonably fit girl who runs regularly. After thirty metres, I was struggling hardcore. Kaitlyn was struggling even more, although this is the girl who once phoned me to say she had procured a stitch from running fifty metres to put coin in the parking metre. As I gasped for breath, I was concerned that I might be in danger of hacking up a black lung. We had already decided that when we got to the hostel, Kaitlyn was going to go and start getting all of our stuff from the luggage room, while I would go up to reception to see if it was feasible to organise a taxi and have it arrive and deliver us to the train station in time. Joey Tribbiani was manning the desk that morning, but eventually managed to organise a taxi. It was still going to be a close-call, so we hoisted our packs on and started running from the hostel and down the road. I say “running” but, with our packs, it was more an attempt at running which more resembled a waddle – a “robble”, if you will. The taxi met us about halfway down the street, and we didn’t need to speak the same language for the direness of our situation to be understood as our desperation was palpable. Luckily, he spoke fluent English, immediately understood our predicament, and promised he would get us to the station on time – other people be damned, apparently. He drove in bus-lanes, on footpaths; he drove 70 km/h in 40 km zones. I think he fancied himself as a bit of a Robert De Niro in Ronin and quite enjoyed himself. When we pulled up at the station, he jumped out of the cab and helped us with our packs. The man was an absolute legend, and we tipped the shit out of him accordingly. We robbled towards the platform and, as we rounded the corner, could see the train was still very much there. We made it. With four minutes to spare.
When we arrived in Venice it was hot. But, more importantly, we were starving. Due to the poor timing of our departure we had been unable to purchase snacks for the trip and, as such, hadn’t eaten a thing since our eggs at breakfast (EGGS!) - and we had certainly expended a tremendous amount of energy. Reaching our hostel involved a boat trip on a vaporetti (water bus), not the most backpack-friendly transport medium in the world. I see your death stare, old Italian lady, now let me employ my little bit of Italian genealogy and show you mine. Impressive, no? Upon arriving at the hostel we discovered two things: there was a pizza shop right next door, and Mussolini was still alive and kicking, working behind the counter at check-in. Although, as horribly tyrannical as he was, he must have liked us a little bit because we ended up in the sweetest room in the complex. Despite the fact bunks lined the hallways (literally, they were in the hallways), we managed to end up in a little, private room with four bunks, and a very-not-unpleasant view. Perhaps Benito liked my dimple. After throwing our stuff on our bunks and locking away our valuables, we high-tailed it next door and ate pizza slices the size of our faces. By the time we were fed and watered, it was quite late. As we only had a day to do Venice, we decided to have an early night so we could make the most of the following day.
I can summarise Venice quite succinctly: rain and wind. Drizzle, condensation, precipitation, showers, pouring, deluge, torrent, typhoon, monsoon, hurricane. When we awoke that morning, the Venetian view which greeted us was ominous. The dark, wild sky and choppy water more than hinted at the tempestuous weather ahead, but evidently our successful train-dash the day before had instilled in us a false-sense of security, and we departed the hostel after breakfast without even taking jackets. Although we could practically touch Saint Mark’s Basilica from our dorm window, our hostel was actually on the island of Guidecca, which meant that we had to catch a vaporetti over to the main island (or, main group of islands, I guess I should say). When we walked down to the vaporetti stop, we noticed that we had about twenty minutes until the next one came. In hindsight we probably should have used this time to go back and get our sexy Gore-tex jackets, but instead we wandered along Fondamenta Zitelle and explored a little bit of Guidecca.
The trip across was only a few minutes, but in those few minutes the weather deteriorated dramatically. By the time we arrived, it was so windy we needed to hold onto light-posts and rubbish bins to stay upright. Every time I stopped to take a photo, there was a real danger of my midget carcass being blown into the Adriatic Sea. We walked to St Mark’s Square and, by the time we were standing outside the Basilica, the heavens opened and we found ourselves battling thousands of tourists and tens of thousands of pigeons for elusive shelter. I don’t do birds, but I would have happily shared dry space with some flying vermin. Dripping wet and shaking from cold would probably have been the point at which most people would have found a cafe somewhere and waited it out. But not us. Maybe it was stupidity and stubbornness, but we weren’t going to pay €4,000 for a coffee in the Piazza San Marco, especially not when a trip to the hospital for hypothermia would have been covered by travel insurance.
Eventually we found a little cafe which seemed far enough out of the tourist hotspots to not be charging the equivalent of my HECS debt for a warm beverage. In my experience, nothing warms you up like a shot of vanilla vodka and Chambord but, given it wasn’t even 10.00am, we went with the next best thing: a proper, wog hot chocolate. As we sat across from each other at the table, I noticed something interesting – Kaitlyn was almost completely dry. Sure, she had been wearing a hat and I had not, but she was barely even damp, whilst I looked like Tim Robbins after he crawled through the sewer to escape from Shawshank Prison. Except there was no Morgan Freeman narrating my tale of woe. You could have wrung me out over the Gobi and turned it into an ocean, but you would have been lucky to collect enough water from Kaitlyn to make a Baby Born wee.
Once we’d collected ourselves, we decided it would be smart to head back to the hostel and deck ourselves out in appropriate gear. When we arrived back, I started to realise that hypothermia was a real possibility for me (not so much for Kaitlyn who was still comparatively desiccated), so Kaitlyn lovingly wrapped me up in blankets until the blood started returning to my extremities. It was the first time my desire for a hair-dryer wasn’t driven by vanity. We spent an hour or so looking for and booking a hostel in our next stop (Rome) and then, we looked out the window to see that the skies had cleared. Our second attempt at sight-seeing was a lot more successful than our first. We managed to see the city’s main attractions: Doge’s Palace, St Mark’s Campanile (the bell tower), Ca’ d’Oro. We even managed to sneak in a few token-tourist snaps on the Rialto Bridge with the Grand Canal behind us. Late in the afternoon, the sun even made a brief appearance, affording us the opportunity to sit by a canal and watch the gondolas float past while we munched on meringues and flat bread. “Gorged” is probably a more appropriate adjective.
And that was our soggy and somewhat anticlimactic Venetian experience. Aside from permanent parenthesia in my fingers, the thing which will stick with me most is Kaitlyn getting sea sick on the canals. True story.
Next stop: Rome – monuments, museums and muggings.
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