Today was our first official day of walking through Tuscany and Umbria. Today was the day that we have been planning for some months, the start of enjoying another country's countryside, breathing in the air between the grapevines and olive trees, taste a little wine and cheese along the way and enjoy the nodding and greetings from local Italian villagers with "buongiorno" as we meandered past.
We had had a slight bit of bother on the first couple of days in Italy in relation to orientating ourselves to our locale and working out why we were finding ourselves totally lost in the city of Rome throughout an entire day, then replicating the same situation in Sienna the next day. In fact, we got lost in Sienna the minute our feet touched the Sienna earth as we disembarked off the public transport bus that took us there.
We had a map, with instructions. The map showed us the road the bus would drop us off and showed that our hotel was a mere 200 metres along from the bus stop. That should be easy, shouldn't it? Not.
We stepped off the bus and realised that we did not know whether we should walk left from the bus stop, or right. The map and instructions did not tell us whether the bus would be facing the hotel direction, or facing the other.
So, with our giant sized overweight luggage we stood on the busy pathway, looked at the map, looked at the street, looked back at the map, back at the street but were none the wiser as to whether we should walk the 200 down that way, or the other way.
So I asked a bus driver. Bus driver did not speak English. Nor did the bus driver want to be helpful. We were disappointed at that as everything we had been led to believe about Italian men was that they would be charming, delightful, helpful, gracious and gregarious. Except the Italian bus drivers.
There we stood, on a busy pathway with bus passengers rushing past us hither and thither and we still pondered, left or right?
Then we saw them. Or at least he saw us. This tall, well built fellow who looked distinctively non-Italian. He saw us trying to decipher our map and offered his map reading assistance. After turning the map around, and upside down and back the other way, he very authoritively and assertively told us he would direct us the right way. We were taken aback with his Kiwi accent. Hurrah, someone who speaks English but best of all a Kiwi, offering his assistance. How could we go wrong? We did. We took his advice. We thought he must know what he was talking about, due to his telling us he had been staying in this little town for the past three weeks. So we put ourselves in his hands.
Big mistake.
Ended up this 'helpful' Kiwi fellow sent us neither left or right, but insisted he walk us in a third direction to a busy town piazza from where he pointed we should head. Big, bulky suitcases and us. Pulling these noisily wheeled cumbersome things all over all the large and history-filled cobblestones of piazzas, alleyways, streets and footpaths, looking for the hotel he so assuredly told us we would find. So we walked. For miles. For ever. It did not take long for us to realise we were lost. Totally lost. And no one we asked could help us.
Well, the short of it all is, we eventually did find our hotel thanks to a concierge from another hotel who spoke English, was helpful and directed us perfectly.
It turned out that our much yearned for hotel was less than the 200 metres we were told it was from the original bus stop. Maybe 90 metres or less, and if that Kiwi man from Nelson had not interfered and misdirected us in the totally opposite direction, we would have taken a few steps one way and either found it or decided it was the other way and turned back and found it. Men, and maps, and directions, and knowing it all. Made all the worse by being a Kiwi male.
So today , two days later and in a medieval town called Montepulciano, we were happy this was due to be a day where we did not have to worry about being lost, about being sent in the wrong direction, about heart palpitations due to the fear of being lost, again. Today would be the most beautiful day of starting our walking journeys through vineyards, pastures and olive tree orchards.
Last night we had met Michael at our amazing B&B, Michael the contact person who had all our information for the next 8 days of Tuscany and Umbria experiences. Michael whose fabulous Italian good looks, tall and well built and bronzed Italian body with his beautiful Colgate white smiling teeth had both of us glued to him and his words, yet neither of us barely heard a word he said.
We think Michael informed us we would be picked up at 9.30 in the morning and taken to a lovely little Italian village called Monticchielo where we would be dropped off with our maps, walking instructions and let free to meander at will along the ancient paths of vintners, olive oil makers and goats. Without a care in the world.
At 9.30 this morning a pleasant Italian lady merrily drove us out of Montepulciano, through the Tuscany countryside, along the hot bitumen roads, over hills, down dales, over bigger hills almost as high as mountains, then to the village from where our walk would begin.
We alighted from the Fiat Bambina, she waved us goodbye, we tossed our day packs on our backs, grabbed our walking sticks and headed in the direction of the Directive 1 on our sheet of walking instructions.
We walk for ten steps, then faltered. We looked up the street, down the street, across the fields and back to our instruction sheet. Seems we had walked the wrong way for those first ten steps. So we retraced them and walked in the other direction, for five steps. Something just did not look as though it should have looked according to the instructions.
We were atop a hillock, with only one little village bar-café near us, nothing else but countryside and certainly no chain gate that we were supposed to have walked through as per our first instruction.
We visited the café/bar, where the attractive young lady behind the counter took one look at our map and instructions and informed us that we were not in the village of Monticchielo, the very village the map and instructions said we should be in, but we were standing in a village in the completely opposite direction.
Yes, of course we had our phones with us. And yes, we did have contact numbers to telephone in case of help required. And yes, some thick, but good looking Italian named Michael, had put incorrect telephone numbers on our information. Nothing matched, no matter how we reassembled the telephone numbers.
And there was no such thing as public transport, car rides we could hitch, nor lovely pastoral footpaths and tracks we could traverse to get ourselves back to our own town and B&B. We had no alternative but to trudge over the hot asphalt roadways, over all the hilly and mountainous roadways back to Montepulciano, in the mid day sun.
This was yet another sticky situation SOMEONE ELSE had got us into.
Some hours later we did arrive back at our B&B. Tired, weary and each one nursing a very sore knee from the hard asphalt, big hills and unbelievable hike back.
Tomorrow. Tomorrow we are going back for more. We have to. We paid for this luxurious, fun filled, hiking holiday some many months back. All this weather worn and despondency stuff is supposed to be making us bright and perky, looking forward to returning home feeling buoyant and refreshed from the break. We think, at the rate we are going, we may never find our way home at all.
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