Over the border

Friday 7 October

It's interesting how you can drive for a few minutes, from one country to the next, and all of a sudden, although the landscape is similar, everything looks really very different.

It was like this when we drove from France into Italy. We started at St Tropez, and drove only a hundred and eighty kilometres down the coast. And yet the barren-looking craggy hills of France, all of a sudden were transformed into places where every available space was taken up with growing something. The Ligurian hillsides (cliff sides, really) are covered in gardens and greenhouses, clinging improbably to the sides of the mountains.

Getting through those mountains was a bit of a hair-raising experience for the driver (and the navigator). The road from the Cote d'Azur down through the Italian Riviera is simply quite an incredible engineering feat. I'm not even interested, usually, in that kind of stuff - my eyes glaze over when Sandy checks the progress at the Puhoi motorway - but honestly, this road is something else. It's the autostrada (or autoroute, depending on which country you're in) so cars and many, many trucks are barreling along at a minimum of 130km/h. The road winds along the edges of the peaks that hug the coastline, so on one side you have high hills and cliffs, and on the other valleys and the sea. To get through, the road is basically a combination of huge viaducts - some of them nearly 1000 metres - and tunnels. Soooo many tunnels. We reckon the first day we probably went through 30; on our second day of driving it would have been more. (I counted on the way back: 35 tunnels in a distance of 45km. When you think that some of these tunnels are a kilometer or more, it’s a lot of time underground!) The longest one was around 3km. It makes for very tricky driving conditions - sunglasses on, sunglasses off, slow down, speed up, keep out of the way of the trucks, etc etc.

It was a stressed Sandy and Niki who arrived finally, after a series of navigational issues (new country, no map, impenetrable or nonexistent road signs) at Alassio, a small beach town. It looked like a good destination on the map, at about the right distance. But we had no information whatsoever on it, so we basically parked, wandered along the beachfront and tried to find somewhere to stay. Luckily we happened upon the Hotel Eden; a small, family-run hotel which had one room available. It was small and had a teeny tiny bathroom, but the windows opened on to a vast stretch of Mediterranean. We were happy. Even happier when we discovered the town was hiding secrets, like a bustling centre full of shops where everyone came out to promenade in the hour before dinner. And we discovered when you order a drink at a bar in Italy, they bring you yummy little free antipasto. Molto civilised. I don't actually know any Italian apart from food words. We've quickly learned essential restaurant terms (il conto, vino bianco, etc). But it's amazing how you can get along.

Gabriella, who owned the Hotel Eden, told me that I would like the food in Italy better than the food in France. She said, "In Italy you can go even in a very small restaurant, and you will eat good". I suspect she was right. I intend to spend the next little while finding out.