It was 7:00 in the morning and I had been up late eating, drinking, talking, and listening to Giovanni and others play and sing songs (so many talented people). It was a great time except I may have had too much of the mineral water bottle wine that Giovanni provided. Let me explain. I didn’t see it, but there was a place downstairs that would fill up plastic 1.5 liter mineral water bottles from a large vat of wine. It was a little too easy to drink and maybe a little too plentiful and now my head was fuzzy and my bed was feeling too comfortable to leave. But, I had to get up if I wanted to catch the ferry to Capri.
I went with my new Canadian friends Max and Jeff and almost missed the ferry. We left in a rush and didn’t avail ourselves to Giovanni’s hospitality and I ended up having overpriced coffee and an industrial pastry on the ferry and that didn’t make my already queasy stomach feel any better. The rocking of the ferry helped even less. Fortunately, I survived long enough to see the lovely postcard view of Capri emerge from the morning mist.
We met up with seven more people from the hostel on the ferry and decided to pool our buying power for a boat tour of the island. We had our choice of paying 19 euro for a tourist packed boat over to the blue grotto, so we could then wait for 2 hours on said boat before we could go into the grotto, or we could rent a bigger boat for two hours for our group to all the way around the island, visiting many other grottos, but not the blue grotto, for only 15 euro a person. We went for the latter of course and were very pleased with our choice. Our squat, leather skinned boat captain, had 700 years of family history on the island and was quite adept at maneuvering the boat well into grottos that seemed much too small for us to fit. He pointed out every rock formation that looked like something—that one looks like the virgin Mary, that one looks like an African elephant, and so on. Some were obvious others were a stretch. He also showed us the island homes of the Ferrari family, the king of Sweden, and other rich/famous people with too much money. In some of the grottos you could hardly put your hand in the water without touching one of the millions of jellyfish; this did not bode well for swimming later.
We got off the boat and hiked from the marina up the mountain to the actual city of Capri. At the top of many series of stairs we emerged into the surreal world of cruise ship tourist land. The overpriced shops and restaurants were teeming with middle-aged and older camera laden trinket shoppers. There were of course some high end shops for the people with serious money, yet most places sold the standard overpriced mementos. We took a detour down a side alley and found a much more interesting winding path through a residential neighborhood with lovely gardens and lemon trees close enough to the outer wall that a person could “borrow” one of the deliciously scented fruits. I know what you are thinking. I did not steal a lemon. But I did take a photo of someone stealing a lemon.
We had enough of the city and headed back down to the beach. There were a number of people there but for some reason no one was swimming in the clear blue water. An inspection of the water confirmed, that yes, the jellyfish were here too, not in the same numbers, just here and there. Finally we saw a few people swimming and they neither screamed nor twitched convulsively, so we headed in too. I touched one swimming in the shallows to see how the sting felt; it didn't seem so bad, it just burned a bit. The water was warm and beautiful. After everyone got stung and/or cuts on their feet from the rocks we had had enough. One girl got stung on her thigh and had long and painful nasty looking welts. We told her that peeing on it to deactivate the stinging cells of the jellyfish only works if it is someone else's pee but she would not go for it, so she had to wait it out for about 4 hours. Max tried it and said it worked great (his own pee), I did not get stung badly enough to warrant urinating on myself (oh darn!). The rock puncture wound on the ball of my foot was more on my mind.
We headed back to Napoli with suntans, sunburns, and the great travel memory of getting stung by jellyfish on the island of Capri.
