July 22

July 22
A long, fast downhill cycle took us from the campsite to Como Lago (lake), where we arrived already very sweaty. Apparently the thing to do in Italy is drink Café's wherever and whenever, which I can't fathom in this heat, so I stick to Coke or water. Anyway Eli is getting his Italy on, so he has the coffee. After that we headed up one of the hills bordering the lake in the funicular, a funny kind of slanty train. The view of the lake was obviously stunning, but the houses in the village were like little fairytales to me. All stones and hydrangeas and lizards flitting about, and dense forest as we headed higher up the hill, it was all so pretty! Back at the bottom, we took a ride around the lake and since I had my heart set on having a swim in lake Como, we carried on and on looking for somewhere it was allowed. Eli asked a few old Italian men where we could go, and the pointed us further along saying it was another 3km to go. Turns out it was a very steep 3km (although incredibly beautiful!), and by the time got there I had a splitting headache (probably from sweating out twice as much liquid as I was drinking), and they wanted us to pay 5 euros for the pleasure of taking a dip. We thought we would rather go find water to drink and trekked up the longest , steepest cobblestone pathway I have ever seen until we arrived at a little drinking fountain in a tiny piazza, where we downed about a litre of water each and lay down to recover. Luckily the journey back was mostly downhill back to Como, after which we wisely took the train back to the campsite.

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