Day 33 - Wednesday 5 June - Bari to Naples

Wednesday 5 June

I woke just before midnight, and watched us pull into the northern Greek city of Igoumenitsa.

 We were up early, because clocks changed, and it was obvious that lots more trucks and people had joined us.

 Glad we didn't catch that one.

We docked at 10:00, and got a taxi into town. Since Bari is the resting place of St Nicholas, I decided that we should not race off to Naples in a hurry, so we dropped our bags in the station, and caught a local bus back to the old town.  We wandered its crazy laneways for a little while, then found the basilica we were looking for, and which a small crowd of tourists had also found.  We photoed upstairs and down, then went across to the shop to buy a Christmas tree decoration,

 

 and it was there that David realised his wallet was no longer in the front pocket of his trousers.  Italy is famous for its pick-pockets, and in less than 2hrs we'd been got.

There wasn't much we could do.  The money would be gone, and the rest dumped.  But there were a couple of local police officers, so we told them, just to give them another case to add to their list.  But they insisted we accompany them to the cop-shop and complete a report.  So off we went, David and the 2 in uniform, and me stopping here and there to take photos.

 A nativity scene I found along the way

 The city wall / castle, from C 13

 
But once there, we waited and waited, over 30mins, until we finally convinced them that our bus was more important, so at last we left.  We hurried to the station, got our bags, found our way under the train lines, and missed the bus.  But another was due in 40mins.  It had wifi, so we were able to message our airbnb hosts that we would not be in Naples when we'd said.

 

They were at the station to meet us, very sympathetic to our plight, and took us to their unique apartment.  We tried to contact some of David's banking card people, but they all wanted us to phone, and we had no credit.  The SIM card we'd got in Greece was out of money, so all we could do was to wait until morning and get a new card.

Welcome to Italy.

 Our stylish apartment, with mezzanine.

The super stylish shower - made me think of Ponpeii