Beside the Seaside

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In Which I Go Lala And Dipsy Over Po

August 16, 2008 by Mike

As I mentioned yesterday, I've been all over the shop in the last few weeks.

Clearly, so has the site.

But rather than take you on a whistlestop tour of Europe (when I hope you'd rather be taken on a tortuously stop-start, two-years-and counting, no bells or whistles motorbike tour of Europe) I'll try to fill in some gaps as we go along. If you want to hear about my views on the bureaucratic niceties of the British probate system you'd best email me separately.

For one thing, I haven't 'arrived' in Venice according to this site. That's a shame, because the coast road north to the city is very special. From the tourist blight of Marina di Ravenna it's but a hop and a skip to the infinitely more attractive marshlands around Comacchio followed by the divine estuary of the great river Po, which rises on the French border a couple of hundred miles north of Nice and is already a significant waterway when it dissects Torino, 450 kilometres to the west.

The Po delta was shining like a National guitar.

In fact, if some of the waterfront shacks had broadband, I'd be making a bid for them instead of tipping you all off about how desirable the area is.

Although other houses seem to take this besidetheseaside business a bit too far:

What villages there are here are humble and hidden out of sight, almost apologetic. Even the church steeples are short enough to disappear behind the nearest available dyke. The roads are small and thin, some dead straight as they race across dry land before the water remembers where they are, others linked by pontoon bridges that are every bit as rickity as you might imagine. Canals and cuts of water head off at right angles, some marked by a long, proud line of larches, others low and anonymous.

These days there's a bar at the Lanterna lighthouse on the Isola dell'Amore. Fair enough. But it's cut off from the rest of the world on a spit of land on the far side of a deep branch of the Po. A small motorboat will come and collect you if you stand and wave. I was tempted to check out the bar on yr behalf, dear reader, but that boat had already sailed when I got there. I cold see it chugging towards the lighthouse, and reflected on how much they'd love me if I called them all the way back so I could buy a small bottle of water from them and then can you please take me back to my bike now, thank you very much?

Clearly, you'd have to make your own entertainment in an area so cut off from the rest of the world. In Lincolnshire.. which looks a bit like this but without the sunshine.. they drive their souped-up Fiestas into the canals after drinking too much cider. Here, if you've any sense, you'd retire to the Roxy Bar in Ca'Zuliani instead. Which is a common-or-garden rural Italian bar.. bottled beer and ham'n'cheese sandwiches, two old men sitting there all day drinking coffee, you know the sort of thing.. but because it's called the Roxy I fell in love with it.

For one blessed spell, I was riding alongside a steep dyke.

There was a canal running parallel. And hovering overhead, carried on currents at a steady 25mph in the same straight line as the bike and I, was a hawk. A wonder of concentration, the bird didn't take its eyes off the canal. Perhaps it heard the bike, perhaps it couldn't care less. For several hundred metres we rode along in tandem, the hawk ignoring me (I forgive it) and me doing my best to remember to keep my eyes on the road and avoid becoming roadkill for the hawk and her chums to chew over.

North of the delta comes the Venetian lagoon. I stopped at the southern tip, a town called Chioggia, a mini-Venice with just a couple of canals to call its own. Bt I didn't want to spoil the full effect of Venice itself, glimpsed across the reed beds and behind a line of trees as I circumnavigated the lagoon before finding a grotty little campsite a bus-ride away from the city. Which, as you know from this jumbled-up set of entries, I've already fallen in love with, because all this happened several days and several flights ago. It's making me dizzy!

To finish: an Olympic cloud. Well, I reckon I can see a runner dipping for the finish-line:

Beside the Seaside

In Which I Go Lala And Dipsy Over Po

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