April 30th: Praiano to Positano

Last night we we ended up going to dinner at La Strada, a short walk from the hotel. Lovely view out over the western Mediterranean from their second-floor terrace as the sun set, and good pizza for dinner: eggplant and smoked mozzarella for Shoshanna, and hot Italian sausage for me. We swapped slices, of course, which is one of the pleasures of being a couple: you get double the tasting pleasure without having to order twice as much food as you can eat. Here’s the sunset:
Praiano sunset

We had a quiet stroll home through the dark and a good night’s sleep. This hiking 5+ hours a day thing is great for ensuring that you sleep like the dead, which we did. Next morning, a delicious breakfast at Hotel Pellegrino. Our hosts made us small omelettes with good lean bacon, a really nice fruit cup, fresh-squeezed orange juice, and a pot of thick Italian coffee with steamed milk. Yummy, and good fortification for another long day’s hike.

Today’s hike started out with Yet Another Flight of Stairs: 965 of the damned things, to be precise, straight up the hill to the abandoned monastery of San Domenico at about 300 meters (more than 1000 feet) up the cliffs from Praiano. Here’s what this looks like from below (San Domenico is the tiny building with 3 arches at the top of the cliffs):
San Domenica of the Stairway

At the monastery, an enterprising local guy has established two tables for his guests next to the still-functional washroom, but he won’t let you sit if you’re not willing to buy some of his wares, and we weren’t. Our guidebook had warned us about the first 965 stairs, but not the equally long stairway from the monastery to the Sentiero degli Dei (the trail of the gods), which was to be the majority of the day’s hike. Eventually the stairways blended into most level trails, though with -- can you guess? -- more stairways. But mostly level trails, hugging the face of the cliffs, towards Positano. Mostly it looks like this:
Sentiero degli Dei

For the next 2+ hours, we wended our way along the cliff face, with sheer cliffs overhead and sheerer cliffs below. Our guidebook describes the trail as only occasionally vertiginous, largely because it’s a reasonably wide trail (usually 3 feet or more), so the dramatic plunge that falls away beneath one doesn’t seem nearly so threatening. Still, at more than 500 m (about 1600 feet) above the sea for most of the route, you do want to watch your step. Shoshanna noted that she’d like to tweet a picture of what I repeatedly referred to as “the vertiginity” (a word that should exist, so I created it). After all, a tweet can hold 140 characters, she noted. My reply: “You won’t need 140 characters: Falling! L-O-....” Did I say vertiginity? Here’s what that looks like:

Heading uphill to the Sentiero, we had the trails mostly to ourselves apart from a handful of other intrepid hikers making the climb with us instead of doing the sensible thing (i.e., taking the bus to Bomerano or Nocelle and avoiding the 500-m climb from sea level). Today being Saturday and the weather being beautiful (partially cloudy and about 18°C), the trail soon filled with locals come to enjoy the sun and fresh air, plus a vastly outnumbered cadre of tourists. (It’s still shoulder season here, so not as many tourists as there will be in a few months.)

Lots of lovely views despite the tourists, and occasional patches of shaded forest just when it feels like you’re having the last drops of water baked from you. And endless sweeping views of cliffs and the Mediterranean. At the midway point of the hike before you start back down towards sea level, there’s a tiny village named Nocelle, and you’re greeted by a kiosk/restaurant, with cheery staff. They offer lights snacks like bruschetta and drinks. Shoshanna opted for fresh-squeezed orange juice (spremuta), and I went for beer. Beer is a wonder of nature, with miraculous restorative powers on a hot day. Water rehydrates you; beer restores your soul.

From Nocelle, we began our descent into Positano. The first half an hour is mercifully stair-free paved road, but then you hit the outskirts of Positano and face nearly 900 more steps winding between houses en route to sea level. Clearly the theme music for this vacation is “La Scala” (the stairway), and pace Led Zeppelin, it’s not a stairway to heaven. I imagine the music is much like the theme song from Jaws. We’ve resolved that our next vacation will be to somewhere resolutely free of stairways, like Saskatchewan or the Netherlands. We’ll probably end up not learning from our experience and instead choosing the Dolomites of northern Italy.

Once we escaped the stairs (other than a few score of their wimpy domesticated urban cousins) and entered Positano, we found the streets flooded with tourists. There were regular human traffic jams in the narrow alleys on our way down to the seashore. Our hotel, Pupetto, is right through town and around a headland, away from most of the tourists. The advantage of this location is peace and quiet and a nice view of the Torre Clavel, an old tower at the end of our semi-private beach; the drawback is another 20 minutes of walking to escape the downtown core, which was more than we would have liked after nearly 6 hours of hiking. (Lesson learned: next time when we pick hotels, we’ll choose based on walking distance, not just “great location”.)

Tonight I think we really will stay at the hotel for dinner. We’re tired and footsore and probably won’t want to have to fight with the tourist hordes for restaurant space. Tomorrow we’ll be heading inland to Sant’Agata, which is nestled in an interior area far from the sea -- and, God willing, far from anything resembling thousand-step stairways. The original plan was to hike there from sea level in Positano, but it’s a long and demanding hike: close to 7 hours by On Foot Holidays standards, so likely more than 8 by our standards. (We stop more often than their route-vetters so we can soak in the view and take pictures, and as a result, we run about 20% longer than their time estimates.) I frankly don’t think I’m up for that long a walk, and fortunately, we have a good excuse: it’s supposed to rain fairly heavily tomorrow, and the first part of the hike is rated “hard” (we’ve found their “medium” hikes rigorous enough) and unsafe for our level of expertise and equipment if it rains. So we won’t have to do the walk.

Instead, we’re planning to take the bus as close to Sant’Agata as it will go: about a 2-hour walk away. The only gotcha (and it’s a big one) is that tomorrow is Primo Maggio (May day), and is both a Sunday and a holiday. So there’s only one bus, and if we miss it, we’re kinda screwed. So we need to get uphill to the bus stop early to ensure that we don’t miss the bus. The bus ride from Positano is only about an hour, but it would take much longer if we have to do the walk on foot; on the plus side, we’d be walking along the road rather than Up More Damned Stairs. The bus should drop us at Colli di Fontanelle, from whence we’ll hike through the rain to our first non-hotel stay, at the agriturismo (farmhouse B&B) Le Torre (“the towers”). We might also get lucky and have dry weather, since most of the rain will be around Positano and the weather may have cleared at Sant’Agata by the time we get there. We’ll be there 2 days, with the first day for travel and the second day for wandering around in the countryside on our own schedule rather than desperately attempting to survive the inescapable stairways that haunt the Amalfi landscape.

Will we succeed? Tune in tomorrow and find out!

May 1: Positano to Sant'Agata