Otranto

Thibault likes travelling by train. And very reasonably fancied a day off from driving. So he suggested taking the train to nearby Otranto, a seaside town on similar lines to Gallipoli. That sounded good to me, so we got up to get an early train out of Lecce with the aim of reaching Otranto mid-morning, and hopefully finding a boat trip to go on along the coast in the afternoon.

Ironically the train we caught was one to Gallipoli where we had been the previous day, which was fine as according to the timetable we had to make a couple of changes to get to Otranto, although it was only about 30kms away. We duly reached the station where we needed to change and indeed at that point most of the train decamped to a train on the neighbouring platform. A little disconcerting for those of us brought up on British stations where you cross platforms by bridges. Here you just troop across the tracks. But there isn't much traffic so it was fine. 

Our new carriage was, to be honest, rather worse than the one we had got off from, and rather infested with mosquitoes. But that wasn't our main worry. Thibault was following our journey online, and disconcertingly we were going in the wrong direction. A bit further down the line we stopped at a station,  the train conductor asked us where we were going and duly told us to change onto the train on the next platform, which would take us back to the station we had changed at. Amusingly, at that station we met an irate elderly English couple who were similarly deceived, but had the opposite problem to us.

You see, despite the timetable and the indicator board at Lecce, both telling us the train we first caught was a direct train to Gallipoli, it wasn't. So we should have stayed on the train we were on originally and not changed at all. The train we transferred to was the train to Gallipoli, which explained why almost everyone had decanted from the first one. And our irate fellow journeymen, who did indeed want to go to Gallipoli, were one of the few who stayed on the old train "knowing" that it was the direct train going all the way to Gallipoli. So they too had had to change to get back to where they had started from.

The upshot of all this was a very long wait for the connecting train to Otranto, resulting in us reaching the town just before lunch, after 3 hours travelling to get 30kms. Thibault reckoned he could have walked it in that time, if there were paved roads to do so.

So anyway, we decided to walk around the beautiful beach and marina (only about a ten minute walk from the station), and see if we could find a kiosk selling boat trips for the afternoon. Everywhere that does boat rips has a kiosk on the harbour. Everywhere but Otranto.

 

Having circumnavigated the marina to no avail I eventually went into a shop that sold diving gear which was next to a place that seemed to offer diving trips. A conversation with the lady confirmed that they did indeed have boat trips every afternoon, but not today as the weather conditions were not good enough. Well, they are the experts, but given blue skies and hardly a breeze we couldn't imagine how conditions would ever be better.

Defeated, Thibault went into overdrive to find us a nice place for lunch, and succeeded. At least for once he could drink as much as he liked with lunch. And Italian wines in the region were rather tempting.

After lunch we just explored a bit. It is a pretty town, although we thought we preferred Gallipoli on balance.

 We fancied stopping somewhere with a nice view and a drink, or an ice cream. I went for the ice-cream.

 Inevitably we would visit the cathedral, when it re-opened after lunch.

 It is particularly famous for its early mosaics. Entertaining but not perhaps of the highest technical quality. The sort of standard you get from primary school children which you stick on the kitchn and tell them is wonderful until they are old enough to bin it without hurting feelings. Although I guess mosaic is  tougher medium to work with than poster paints.

And finally back to Otranto station, for a less eventful return to Lecce. Back to the car tomorrow.