Days 7 to 36
1 July, 2024 – 30 July, 2024
Statistics:
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- Distance: 1030 km
- Ride time: 83 h
- Ascent: 5250 m
- Descent: 4650 m
- Duration: 30 days
- Average: 34 km/day
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Our plan through Europe was an average of 30 kilometers per day so that our bodies could slowly adapt to cycling. And Italy was a perfect country for that since we had over 700 km of almost completely flat roads. What we really liked was that there are A LOT of water fountains throughout the whole of Italy, so getting drinking water was not a problem. To find them, we used the website findtap.com (or their mobile application), and we also marked a couple of additional fountains. Despite the weird beginnings and ends of most bicycle roads, there are a lot of them, and they can span for many kilometers, so you can often easily avoid high-traffic roads.
But all that easy flat riding that we had came at a cost of repetitiveness. First, there were large vineyards everywhere around us, and later, they were replaced by corn or rice fields. Also, there are a lot of smaller and bigger cities in Pan Valley. In conclusion, every square meter of this land is used for either houses or farms, and this means that for us, it was very hard to find places to set up a tent through the night. Days soon started to look very similar; the only thing that separated them in our heads were the people that we met and interacted with.
We were very positively surprised by the hospitality and kindness of the Italian people. Especially in the first half of Italy, where we couldn’t simply sleep somewhere in nature. Every evening, we would drive around and look for someone outside whom we could talk to. Then, we asked if we could sleep somewhere near their house in a tent and leave early in the morning. And in 10 to 15 evenings, we got only 2 negative responses; everyone else gladly took us in, and most of the time, we even got offers of a shower, dinner, or something to drink. This was the best possible start of a journey because it showed us how kind and friendly people really are and it gave us even more motivation to go further.
But one problem that we had when talking with people is that we don’t speak Italian, and most Italians don’t speak English (especially older ones). We had a piece of paper, written in Italian, with who we were, where we were going, and that we needed somewhere to put a tent. For everything else, we’re good at pantomime. And that worked like a charm. But when we were out on a street and people approached us for a talk, we didn’t have that luxury. Then, a usual thing would be to just give up when you can’t communicate in a common language, but that’s not what Italians do, oh no. They continued to talk to us in Italian as if we would learn it along the conversation. Then, they would politely ask, “Capito?” we would say “No”, and they would repeat the whole thing one more time. As if that would help.
Further to Lake Garda, we had more options for stealth camping in nature, and we had fewer interactions with locals, but there were still days that we asked for a place to sleep, and our luck continued.
An Italian traffic is somewhat famous for being chaotic, and we got a few confirmations of that theory. From truck drivers that stick to the law of the stronger to normal cars that pass you as if they’re half a meter wide. We even got a middle finger from an old lady in a car who nearly took us with her. But there were also a ton of very nice drivers who patiently waited behind us when cars were coming from the opposite direction, then they passed us with a nice margin between us and a car. We even got some kind waving hands from a few drivers and a couple of motorbikers.
We were a little disappointed by the amount of trash that you can see in Italy. Most of the trash bins have piles of rubbish next to them. Especially in the bigger cities, we saw that on the outskirts of them. In nature, there are a lot of trash bags lying in the bushes next to the roads, alongside some old furniture or building materials. The only really big cities that we visited were Milano and Torino, and we didn’t like them too much. Especially in Milano, there were a lot of homeless people on the outskirts of the city, and we hated the strict line between poor and rich parts of the city. One more thing that we didn’t like throughout the whole of Italy was the high fences around every house. We asked people why that’s so, and apparently it’s something from the past that remains the norm.
Regarding the weather, we were really lucky. We had rain showers almost every night for the first 10 nights, but during the day, it was hot and we could easily dry out our tent. This also meant that the nights were not too hot, even though throughout the day we had over 35 °C. But this changed after Lake Garda. High temperatures during the day remained high, but in the evening it simply wouldn’t get colder. Every night we would have a sauna in the tent, and it was hard to fall asleep; sometimes it took us over an hour of just lying on the floor and cooling ourselves. We don’t miss those nights, but we’re sure that we will have them even worse.
Oh, and what about the mosquitoes? They’re a huge problem in Italy, for us and also for the locals. Because of the high temperatures and high humidity, they love it here. And it doesn’t help that there is a lot of water in the canals next to the road, used for watering the crops, especially the rice fields. There were days when it was easier for us to just slowly ride our bikes than to have a break because they would sit on us the moment we stopped. Long sleeves, pants, and Autan help only for a short time, then they simply don’t care about that anymore. There were mosquitoes in the morning, through the day, in the evening, and through the night, as if they would sleep in shifts to cover the whole day. The situation only got better when we reached the Alpes, where it looked as if suddenly there were no more mosquitoes.
Reaching the Alps improved our mood. We got tired of the same fields around us day after day, but when we saw the mountains, everything was worth it. Suddenly, there were so many new things that we could take a picture of; the air wasn’t that hot anymore, mosquitoes vanished, and the water was icy cold. We even didn’t mind the steep roads; we just slowly pedaled uphill, taking breaks in-between and enjoying the view.
Čudovito branje, kot da bi bila zraven 🥰🥰