Should tourists go to North Korea?

So, now Americans can visit North Korea year-round (not just during the big showcase Arirang spectacle of creepily syncronized kindergarten kids). See: http://www.northkorea1on1.com

The real question is: should we be going at all? I am sure all visits will be as structured, regimented, and closely guarded as ever (a tourism variant on the old Potemkin Village), so would that stifle any of the potential benefits travel otherwise usually brings--a cultural exchange on a personal level in which people from both nations get to learn a bit about one another and, hopefully, foster a greater understanding. 

Or will it be more of the same story: tourists blithely contributing to both the piggybank of a repressive regime and helping further its propoganda machine. 

In other words, should travel to North Korea be boycotted, as it frequently is to other despotic countries like Myanmar?

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Good Night, Sleep Tight...And That's All

I'm a confirmed one-star hotel man. I get a quirky, self-satisfied thrill every time I snag a railroad narrow room with creaky wood floors, a wobbly chair and table rejected by a finer hotel back in 1963, a bare 20-watt bulb dangling on its wire from the ceiling, and a bathroom down the hall I have to share with the rest of the floor.

I downright revel in my thrift. I mentally lord it over people who can afford better hotels. In fact, I picture the poor saps shelling out three or four times as much for a room with TV and minibar in the three-star joint around the corner, and I think: suckers! Sure, they don’t have to put on pants and grab their keys every time they want to nip out to the bathroom, but I look at it this way: I could stay here for three or four nights at the price they're paying for one. (I say "could stay" because I can't; I've got to dash off to Modena tomorrow, Parma the day after that, then Milan...more than one night in a city is a luxury we working stiff travelers cannot afford.)

I stand there in my gloriously drab one-star room, stripped to my undies, smugly washing my clothes in the sink (even rooms without baths in Europe usually have a sink). As I round-robin my camera, Palm, laptop, and cellphone battery chargers though the single outlet available, I reflect on my wisdom for preferring one-star rooms—"wisdom" sounding so much better than the slightly more accurate term, "poverty". I am one who appreciates that a comfy bed is all one really needs from his lodgings; anything more is downright slothful. Or maybe avaricious. One of the Deadly Sins, at any rate.

So I am content with my view of the airshaft. I can tolerate the traffic noise filtering through the single pane of glass. I don't mind the lack of a phone that would allow me to go online—just a little intercom handset that connects only to the front desk (which is unmanned after midnight anyway). I can handle rough sheets on a sagging-spring cot.

But there are certain things at which I draw the line.

On reflection, it's a good thing I decided to keep reading the next chapter of my novel, when I really should have either (a) sat at the desk and caught up on entering my research into the computer, or (b) snapped off the 20-watt bulb and gone to bed early for once to try to catch up on sleep, which at this point in my whirlwind trip is becoming rather more important than typing up notes.

But, had I done either of those things, I wouldn't have been lying in bed with the lights on. Had I not been lying in bed with the lights on, I wouldn't have noticed, out of the corner of my eye, something moving against the white of the pillow.

It was a small brown bug. Well, such things happen. I was frankly surprised I hadn't had to go on an half-hour mosquito-killing rampage within the room this evening, as I have on so many prior occasions in a country where windows are left cracked open all day to air out the rooms. I flicked the bug off my pillow, and went back to my book.

Then, my eye caught another movement. It was another bug. This one was inching along the white bulge where I had thrown the sheets back, right up next to the wall, so I squished it against the plaster. It became a smear of bright red blood, like when you smack an engorged mosquito. Eew. Two bugs got me a bit nervous, so I put my book face down and lifted the covers.

Sure enough, there was another bug. I flicked it towards the edge of the bed, but it somehow managed to land right back on the sheet. I flicked it again. Same thing. I was inadvertently working the thing up towards my pillow, my disgust briefly overshadowed by amazement that the bug kept zipping back onto the bed every time I flicked it off into space, as if the white sheet were some kind of insect magnet. Finally, frustrated, I just pinched the thing. More bright red blood. By now, my hand was next to my pillow. Suddenly, I shuddered. I scooted my butt to the edge of the bed, then lifted the pillow.

Underneath were about six of the little brown bugs.

I leapt from the cot, doing a little frantic jig and rapidly burshing my arms, legs, shoulders, and torse down with my hands. What the hell was this? The Third World? The Middle Ages? How does a hotel in Europe get bedbugs in this day and age?

I didn't ponder such things for long. I was too busy stuffing my charging cords back into their case, collecting my laundry from the line I had strung out the window, gathering up my scattered books and papers, and jamming it all into my suitcase. I scooped up my shoulder bag, heaved the heavy suitcase, and stealthily made my way downstairs.

Why the stealth? Not sure. I think I was afraid I would get caught and forced to remain.

At the bottom of the stairs, separating the reception desk from the room access and front entrance, there was a metal accordion grate like at a shop. I had already scribbled a note in Italian: "That bed was full of insects. I am not staying!" I spindled the note and shoved it through the ring on my room keys, tossed it through the grate to land on the floor, and quietly let myself out the front door.

Where did I go? Why, to the three-star hotel around the corner, of course. The young guy who eventually arrived at the check in desk to buzz me in, blinking 1:30am sleep from his eyes, said they were all out of single, but he could give me a big room at a reduced rate. As I handed over my passport, I apologized for the late hour and explained what had happened. He looked up from the check-in form, horrified.

"But, where were you staying?" The Al Giaciglio, I told him. He shuddered and made a face like someone had fed him awful medicine. "Ah! Al Giaciglio. That place..." He trailed off, shaking his head as if to rid it of the foul name he had just uttered. "You didn't pay already, I hope." No, I told him. "Bravo," he congratulated me.

As he handed me the keys and a remote control for the TV, I got a case of the flailing arm willies that shimmy shook me from head to toe. "Sorry," I said. "I just... It's like I can feel them all over me."

He nodded, knowingly. Then, with concern: "You want a drink or something?"

Although I took a 20-minute shower, scrubbing myself all over repeatedly, I still keep feeling them: little tickles on my ankles, my shoulders, my back, my forehead, my neck. I keep compulsively brushing myself off every time a hair on my leg or arm moves. The early evening mosquito bites on my face and neck that had stopped bothering me hours ago are once again tingling, causing me to swipe at nothing.

So here I sit, in a wonderfully bland room in the Hotel Minerva, next door to Ravenna's train station. My laundry is hung all over the room to dry. The TV over on the table is keeping me silent company. My electronics are all snuggled into their outlets in the various corners of the large room, and I am about to use the phone line to go online and post this tale.

Oh, sure, I appreciate all these amenities and conveniences, and the neat lines of the otherwise indifferent modular furnishings actually help convey a sense of supreme cleanliness, for which, at the moment, I am supremely grateful. Still, I'm paying more than twice as much—and damned happy to do so—as I would have had I not snuck away from Al Giaciglio and its bedbugs in the middle of the night.

Despite tonight's adventure, I remain a one-star hotel man at heart—in fact, tomorrow night I'll be bedding down in Modena's youth hostel. But you can be darned sure that next time, before I agree to take a room, I'll be checking under the pillows first.

Up the Blue Grotto without a Paddle...or a Boat

It's the seventh wave that'll get you.

Oceans and seas across the world all craft waves the same way. They come in a simple sequence: each wave is larger and more powerful than the last. This sequence builds in a set cycle: the number of waves in each cycle is seven.

And it's the seventh wave that'll get you.

I've been counting waves for a good ten minutes now, and my arms are aching from hanging off the precipice so long, peering into the darkness of the tunnel. Is it my imagination, or is the sea getting rougher? I know the sun is getting lower and lower, and I can't hang around forever—nor, for that matter, can I hang on all that much longer, physically.

I can't figure out whether I'm psyching myself up or psyching myself out, but there is one thing the tiny rational portion of my brain is sure of: this is easily the stupidest thing I've done in quite a while. It's even stupider than two weeks ago, when I followed a goat path several hundred feet above the Grand Canyon floor past the point where even the mountain sheep were looking at me as if to say "Uh, dude? Even we don't try to go that way."

And to think, the emergency €20 bill folded up in my zippered pocket could have bought me the easy way into the Blue Grotto.

When most people arrive at the mouth of the Grotta Azzurra for the first time, few actually realize they're at the entrance to the world famous Blue Grotto of Capri. They're expecting to motor into a vast sea cave filled with unearthly blue light. Instead, the boat that brought them around the island from Marina Grande (€8.50) has stopped dead in the water, in the shadows of a high rock cliff, and is being swarmed by tiny rowboats. The tourists are then divided into small groups and genially forced overboard to clamber into one of the rowboats bobbing in the waves, where they are told they have fork over another €8.50 per person to the oarsman.

Each rowboat, loaded down with fleeced tourists, starts pulling toward a tiny gap in the cliff where the rocks meets the crashing water. Just to the left of this gap, a thin metal chain is anchored into the rock. The chain runs, horizontal to the water, into a dark hole no more than three or four feet high. As each wave crashes against the cliff and is funneled through the hole, the open space between the surface of the water and the ceiling of the dark tunnel shrinks to under three feet. Then, with the next wave, two feet. Then one foot.

When the seventh wave hits, the water claps together, spurts back out from the top of the tunnel, and the hole disappears completely.

At this point, the tourists in the rowboat look at one other nervously. If they knew that a trip to the Blue Grotto was going to entail threading such a dangerous needle in a frail little rowboat, they probably would have stayed back in Capri Town and spent that €17 on gelato and cappuccino.

As it is, the sequence of waves cycles back down, the tunnel reappears, and suddenly a series of rowboats comes shooting out of the hole, each oarsman leaning way back--almost flat on his back--and hauling on that chain to pull his boat through quickly. As soon as the hole is clear, the boats waiting outside paddle quickly up to the entrance. The oarsman in each grabs the chain, and shouts to his little clump of tourists, "Please to lie down flat on you backs so you don' bump-a you head." And with no further warning, he begins hauling on the chain, sweeping the boat through into the dark tunnel.

At least, that's how I assume it still works. I haven't actually been inside the Blue Grotto for years. I did it with my parents back when I was 11 or so, and again 12 years ago when I came to Capri with a group of friends. It was fun, it was neat, and I saw no particular reason to waste another $20-plus on it again—especially as you have to tip heavily in order to stop the oarsman from singing (poorly) Neapolitan folks songs while you're in there for the whopping two-minute audience that each rowboat is granted.

That's why I'm here now, clinging to two convenient handholds in the algae-slicked limestone, my bare feet balanced on a shelf of rock just under the water, leaning out to peer into the Blue Grotto's dark entrance, counting waves.

It's around 5pm, but that's just a guess. I left Villa Eva some time around 4:30 for the half-hour walk to the Blue Grotto, and I left everything, including my time-telling cellphone, back at the hotel. All I brought was a towel, which I left back up the path piled atop my shirt and shoes, into one of which I stuck a business card (to help identify the body—see? I'm a responsible guy). It's early October, the very tail end of the tourist season, so the rowboats have knocked off early for the day, and the entrance to the Blue Grotto is empty. Empty and quiet—except for the crashing of waves.

There's no one else around, which makes it that much spookier to be leaning out over the pitch-black mouth of a sea cavern. The solitude also makes it seem that much more bone-headed of an idea to think I can swim into the grotto, especially with such a strong current sucking in and out—I can feel it against my calves—and with every seventh wave swallowing the tunnel whole.

The main problem is that I'm on the right side of the tunnel, and that anchored chain is over on the left. It can't be more than five or six feet from where I'm balancing on the underwater rock ledge, but there's the whole sucking current/crashing waves thing going on within those five feet. I'm wary of trying to shuffle across on the bit of rock ledge, as once I were to leave the safety of the wall I would have nothing to hold onto, plus I know from past experience that black sea urchins nestle into the rocks of Capri just below the waterline, and that their five-inch spines can pierce right through your foot and come out the other side.

Distracted, it suddenly registers with me that the last set of waves nearly kissed the top of the tunnel, so I brace myself for that seventh wave, which sure enough comes along and swells the green water up to my chest. First it tries to force me toward the tunnel, then—after the splashback of water closing off the tunnel washes over my head, it changes its mind and tries to drag me away towards the sea.

Shaking water from my eyes, I suddenly gasp and let go of my left handhold, a piercing pain throbbing in my pinkie. I look into the hole where my hand just was, and see a mottled dark green crab with thick yellow hairs on his legs is waving an outsized pincer claw at me as if to say, "Go ahead! What are you wating for? Just you try to stick your hand back in my hole, buddy, I've got plenty more where that came from!" I hiss at him, and yell at him, and puff my cheeks to blow on him as hard as I can, and otherwise try to get the bugger to budge. He just fixes me with those beady, dead black eyes and waves that claw menacingly, refusing to back down. Grumbling, I find another, far less stable handheld, and turn back to the tunnel to start counting the waves again.

'OK, was that wave two or three of the new cycle?' I think to myself. Then, cross at the crab, and at myself for being so damn analytical about the whole thing, I say out loud "Ah, the Hell with it," and, during a trough between waves, launch myself through the air towards that chain on the other side of the tunnel.

It isn't until I'm about halfway across, a new wave surging up behind me and my fingers reaching toward that dangling chain, that the thought passes through my mind: 'I wonder if there are any sea urchins where I'm about to land?'

I splash into the water, my left hand closing about the chain, the forearm slamming into the rock behind it. As I vaguely register with relief that no urchin spines seem to be piercing my body, the incoming wave sweeps me along and helps carry me into the tunnel, the chain slipping rapidly through my palm.

Funny thing is, once I get inside, it's all much easier. I haul myself all the way through the tunnel and into the grotto itself, which starts to take dark, shadowy shape above and before me. I avoid looking back toward the bright entrance so as to better let my eyes adjust. I still can't see the far walls, but I can hear the scattershot echoes of the water splashing against them, under the constant, cycling roar of incoming waves, their sound amplified by the tunnel.

Ten feet or so in, the chain swoops up, away from the water, to anchor somewhere into the rock at much higher level, so I can no go no further and still use it as a lifeline. I tread water, clinging to the chain that's now a good arm's length above my head, and let my eyes continue to adjust to the darkness. I can begin to make out the pale stone of the ceiling soaring away from me and the walls widening to each side. The water, though—that famous glowing azure water—is dark. It's blue alright, but a shade of blue just shy of black.

Damn. I tarried too long. The sun's too low in the sky. The effect of the Blue Grotto has been turned off for the night. All that silly fear and senseless bravado for nothing.

Well, might as well get a little swim out of it. The current that was so concentrated by the narrow tunnel isn't nearly as strong even this short distance inside, so I steel my fears and let go of the chain to paddle a few feet further into the cave. Just so I can gauge how strong the current really is, I turn to look at the only fixed point of reference I know of, the tunnel entrance.

Which is when the true extent of my own idiocy finally hits me.

The famous glowing effect of the Blue Grotto is created by the daylight from outside refracting through the entrance tunnel and filtering through the limpid water. That is to say, you cannot see it if you're staring toward the cave-dark of the back walls. You gave to be looking towards the entrance.

As soon as I turned around, I realized I was swimming in liquid lapis lazuli. My arms and legs were windmilling around a field of pale blue so intense it looked fake, like the light from a neon sign. The effect was so shocking, it actually made my jaw drop (didn't know that jaw-dropping happened for real; though it was just a metaphor), whereupon, of course, I started shipping water down my throat. Once I get the coughing and sputtering out of the way, I scramble to unzip my pant's pocket and yank out the waterproof camera I had bought earlier in the day, and started snapping a few giddy photographs.

The waves and current weren't strong, but they were definitely present and persistent. After so much time spent hanging around at the entrance, and all that adrenaline wasted on worrying and getting myself in here, I realized my out of shape bod wasn't going to permit me to swim about and fight the pull of the sea for too much longer. Besides, the eerie, intense, impenetrable blueness all around my pale, flailing limbs was starting to creep me out.

Unbidden, the words "Monster of the Blue Grotto" floated into my mind—a local legend I managed to conjure up, just now, out of thin air as I treaded the glowing water, spooked by being alone in this sea-filled cavern. I could almost feel my invented monster grabbing my ankles and jerking me under the water. All they would find would be a shirt, towel, and shoes with some travel writer's business card in them. Silly, I know, but YOU try putting that sort of thing out of your mind when you're swimming around a giant, echoing, sea cave all by yourself, a place as sinister and dark above the water as it is bizarrely opaque and bright below.

I paddled back over to the point where I could lunge up and grab the chain again, and that helped calm me down a bit. I took a few more pictures, then treaded water, hanging off the chain, facing the tunnel, and started counting the waves again.

The seventh wave came. It filled the entire tunnel, blocking the air and the light, and then rolled over my head, raising me higher than the chain for a moment. When the tunnel reappeared and the water level fell to a deep trough, I started hauling myself along the chain, through the tunnel and toward the setting sun.

I passed the territorial crab, who set to waving his claw again when he saw me, and scrambled over the rocks to the little rowboat landing platform at the trail's end. As I hauled myself up to the platform's railing, I scared the hell out of a young French mother and her little blonde girl, who were leaning over to peer towards the tunnel entrance. They stepped back to let me slither up and over the rail, and I stood there, dripping and grinning like a maniac.

"Ehh… Bloou Gra-TOH?" The woman asked, hesitantly. Yes, I replied, wiping water off my face, this is the Blue Grotto. "The boats?…" She asked, and I explained that they left around 4pm. "No boats?" She asked again, seeking confirmation.

"No," I replied. "No boats." Then I smiled mischievously. "But you can swim in!"

She laughed a bit nervously, and stammered something about how the water was probably too cold. I was already bouncing up the trail toward my towel and little pile of clothes. No, I called back, the water was really just right.

Useful Tools

• The fine art of packing light (a.k.a.: always know where your towel is)

Outside Links

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• Hotel Villa Eva

The Dangers of Dinner in Sorrento

Sorrento is one of the very few places in Italy where it is easier to eat badly than well.

Mark it down to a constantly changing clientele—why bother putting yourself out to cook a great meal when the tourist you're making it for is going to be gone tomorrow, never to return? The food at Hotel Loreley was just a step above Boyar'dee. The grub at Taverna dell '800 was only decent. And there's one place, tucked into a cave halfway down the switchback road to the Marina Piccola docks, where I once got food poisoning—though my traveling companion, J, got it even worse; started throwing up on the ferry over to Capri.

This time, I'm wary, so I've reverted to an old habit picked up in seventh grade in Rome: scooping up the hard little pellets that have shaken out from between the tough petals of umbrella pine cones, staining my fingertips black with the layer of sooty dust on their shells. After I've collected a good handful's-worth, rattling around in my pocket, I find a quiet corner and a good sharp rock. It's a delicate art, cracking the thick shells of pine nuts without squashing the tender pinoli within. It's laborious (no wonder the suckers cost so much shelled), but the meat tastes so much sweeter when you have to work for it.

Since a man cannot live solely on pine nuts and fruit filched from low-hanging branches, I do have to find restaurants for dinner. The only place in town where I've ever had memorable meals is the massive La Favorita O' Parrucchiano—and even that one is quite touristy. Green waist-coated waiters keep up a brisk two-way traffic on the terraced staircases between the kitchen and the dining patio up top, carrying laden platters up and empty trays down, calling out table numbers and orders to a woman sitting at a lonely table to one side, scribbling furiously at an array of still-open restaurant checks spread out on the table to keep them up to date.

The food, at least, is of very good quality, and the jungle-like dining patio is lovely, hung heavy with vines, pomegranate and lemon trees, and other signs of Mediterranean lushness. Shame I can't do anything about the inevitable guitar-mandolin duo—though it's a sight better than the piped-in schlock at most Sorrento restaurants—who are strumming their way through the Play List of Approved Sorrento Songs for Tourists: O Sole Mio, Funiculi Funicula, My Way, Tu Vo' Fa L'Americano (a weird mambo number from the 60s poking fun at a Neapolitan who pitifully apes everything American), and, of course, That's Amore!

I swear to God, if the moon hits my eye like a big pizza pie one more time, I am going to go Audrey Hepburn on one of these guys and smash the guitar right over his head. Plus, I keep catching myself whistling Funiculi Funicula, which must be annoying not only to me but to anyone within earshot. Little wonder that one gets stuck in my grey matter; it was one of the world's first successful commercial jingles, commissioned to inaugurate the funicular (cable car) up Mt. Vesuvius.

Given how fully Sorrento has been given over to the mass tourism machine, I'd argue that it's really a place for folks who really don't want to be in Campania in the first place. They just want to check the region's Big Ticket sights (Pompeii, Capri, Amalfi) off their list, and Sorrento is the most convenient base from whcih to do it. Sorrento also happens to save folks from many of the little inconveniences of being in a foreign country.

This place is no tourist-friendly it's boring. English is without a doubt the first language in town. A ridiculous number of English-style pubs try to entice people in with blackboards promising to screen upcoming rugby and (British) soccer matches. Even the tourist office is installed in the entrance to the old Grand Tour-era Circolo dei Forestieri—the Foreigner's Club. OK, so I admit I always repair here in the late afternoons, in some pale imitation of Grand Tour style, in order to catch up on my notes and sip a Campari-soda while watching the sunset fire the surrounding cliffs, the night slip over the triangle of Vesuvius across the way, and the lights twinkle on around the Bay of Naples.

Sorrento is bursting at the seams with giggling German schoolgirls, Americans and Aussies teetering along under their impressively large backpacks, and British package tourists letting down their hair for a Mediterranean holiday—the women donning spangly skirts in showy colors, the men opening their shirts to the sternum to display pale or sun-reddened pecs. I don't mean to poke fun at any of these people. I just wonder why they came all the way to Italy, to one of its most beautiful corners, and then all ended up clumping together in this relatively uninteresting town, spending time in each other's company at the pubs, rather than seeking out some place more genuine, more Italian.

Instead, everyone congregates here to sip overpriced cappuccino or catch gelato drips with their tongues while having the same five basic conversations, with slight variations:

"Did you see that brothel at Pompeii? [giggle]"…"Oh, you simply HAVE to do the Blue Grottto. The boatmen even sing for you! (I know; the trick is getting them not to.) No, it's on Capri; you can just catch the boat over and be back in a few hours."…"Did you hear, Fred got pickpocketed at the Naples train station!" (Sadly, a likely story. Even more sadly, that's the one bit of Naples most of them ever see—and it serves Fred right for not keeping his valuables in a moneybelt). Then there's in inevitable debate on whether to ride to bus down the Amalfi Coast and back, or just relax in Sorrento tomorrow.

Oh, and: "Where are you headed to next?" (Most common answers: "Home" and "Paris.")

Not me. I'm in Sorrento for two days, largely to give myself a chance to recover from jet lag in a place where I won't be tempted to sightsee, go sniffing around for odd and interesting things, or otherwise try to get any work done.

Yeah, sure. That plan only lasted until my second morning.

Sorrento: Equidistant from Everywhere You'd Rather Be

Sorrento is a turnstile town, a gateway to other, far more interesting places. It's the place to catch ferries to Capri, trains to Pompeii and Naples, buses down the Amalfi Coast. It's a stopover to pick up your rental cars to get to your rental villa further out on the Sorrentine Peninsula, or hop the orange-topped launch back to your cruise ship docked in the deep waters off the headland marking the east end of town.

There's very little to the town itself other than the general Mediterranean lovliness that it shares with most towns in the area—citrus groves and grape vines, that clear and rich seaside light, fresh seafood, and warm welcomes. There's nothing wrong with Sorrento per se (other than a thick tourist veneer of souvenir stands and pricey cappuccini), but very little that's special, either—especially considering its massively more intriguing neighbors. In fact, a phrase we once used to describe Columbia, Missouri is just as apt here: Sorrento is equidistant from everywhere you'd rather be.

Sorrento is close and convenient to many great things, but it manages it without being all the great in of itself. It exists mainly to absorb the region's tourist influx, and it's been making a living off that role for nearly two millennia. This has been a middle-class resort ever since Imperial Roman times, when wealthy Romans built villas out here in pale imitation of Tiberius' imperial pleasure palace on the nearby island of Capri, barely visible in the smoggy haze today.

Sorrento, sitting in a pretty clifftop position 165 feet above the sea, became a fixture on the Grand Tour of wealthy Brits. In 1843, a sensory-overloaded Mary Shelley proclaimed "This is Paradise" and claimed to have found Italy, the real Italy, for the first time at Sorrento. Later, it became part of the scene for Italian celebrities (Enrico Caruso was fond of the place), and throughout, Sorento remained the favored regional base for tour packages and groups from Cook's to Rick Steves'.

But Sorrento has no great cathedrals and no great museums—just the usual small-town collection of second-rate baroque paintings and ancient artifacts, plus a new center devoted to the local artisan craft of wood inlay. It's not a charming fishing village or hill town, and it boasts no truly ancient quarters, just a grid of narrow lanes following the ancient Roman plan.

The city's most famous son, the poet Torquato Tasso, made his name in Rome, and its biggest cultural endeavor would appear to be the local "folk show" of costumed folks dancing the tarantella (about which I heard one American coo to her husband, "Ooh! Let's do that. I hear it's, like, the Italian flamenco!").

This town is on the Med, and it doesn't even have a decent beach, just a string of $10-to-walk-on piers built out on the breakwaters surrounded by green waters. There are a few scraps of black sand at the base of the cliff, but those get no sun and as such are ignored, left to collect the refuse tossed overboard by ferry passengers and folks crisping on the breakwater piers.

Sorrento does have a trio of churches providing a mild diversion (more on those later). But most visitors spend their time washing back and forth along the narrow Via San Cesareo—the old decumanus maximus of the Roman city—shopping for trinkets that aren't even local, like ceramics and lace, and scoring free hits of limoncello. These come from dueling purveyors on opposite corners of the cross street Via degli Archi, where young employees sling plastic shots of the lemony liqueur to a chorus of "Please, to take a taste," and proclaiming "No problem, is included in price!" When a browser knocks a bottle off the shelf and it shatters.

The bottles themselves are a riot of shapes and sizes: globes, mermaids, sneakers, pagodas, grapes, anforas, male torsos, pulcinellas, fluted columns, prancing ponies, the Italian "boot," violins, sailing ships, hearts, smiling suns and grinning quarter-moons, pineapples, beer barrels, and all sorts of geometric shapes. And what's in them isn't just straight lemon liqueur. There's the even tastier crema di limoncello creamy variation, as well as alcoholic infusions of peach, walnuts, fene3l, melon, mandarin orange, liquorice, chocolate, and bay leaf. (Yeah, I've had that last one before, and believe me, there's a reason you've never heard of it.)

Tipsy on free booze and wired from its high sugar content, the parade wanders on to the Sedile Dominova to take furtive pictures of the old men playing inscrutable and eternal games of cards at little wooden tables surrounded by 18th century frescoes. The men are members of the Worker's Society of Mutual Support—Italy, especially in the south, is full of these union-like clubs for retirees. Their communal living room is a high porch, raised above street level and open on two sides, built in the 16th century as the seat of power for one of the two ruling noble families in town. If you step to the far side of the little square and peek over the café umbrellas, you can see the 17th century cupola, tiled in shiny ceramic dragon scales of green and yellow and sprouting weeds.

That's it. A few hundred feet later, the trinket shops peter out, and most folks turn around to wander aimlessly back up the street again until it's time to go in search of dinner.

The Road to Sorrento

Delta did exactly zero things to impress me on my trip from JFK to Rome. The total waiting time from getting out of the car to striding up to my gate was 90 minutes, including 18 minutes shuffling up the sidewalk jut to get up to the front entrance.

Then, they stuck me in seat 42E, the very back row of the plane (the check-in desk never asked me "aisle or window?" just gave me a boarding pass). Problems with the back row? Noise from the galley behind you, folks waiting for the bathroom (also behind you) abusing your personal space and leaning on your headrest, and the seats only recline about 1.5 inches. Also, Delta hasn’t yet invested in those plane seat headrests with the little adjustable wings that help sandwich your head in an upright position for a slump-free and crick-less nap.

The only saving grace was that I had the whole row to myself. Huzzah! I never manage to sleep sitting up on planes, so for the first time in about 40 overnight flights, I would be able to stretch out across three seats and actually doze off a bit. Then, just before we taxied onto the runway, some guy got out of a middle seat ten rows up. As he picked his way down the aisle, the already strapped-in flight attendants sternly called out (apparently not for the first time) "Sir, you have to stay in your assigned seat until after take-off. Once the captain has tuned off the seatbelts sign, you can look for another seat."

"Screw that!" He spat at them in a self-important tone, settling into the other aisle seat of my row. "I’m not about to sit in a middle seat!" He then proceeded to arrange all his worldly belongings in fussy piles taking up the entirety of the empty seat between us.

I sent hate-vibes at him during the whole, sleepless nine-hour flight.

Fiumicino had, in its infinite wisdom, decided to open only four passport control windows to handle the dozens of incoming morning flights. The line stretched the length of the immigration room, around the corner, and down the corridor to the base of the escalators down from arrivals. It took nearly an hour to get through.

Then, the doors on the shuttle train from the airport to Termini closed on my foot as I put it on the first stair in order to clamber aboard. I yanked out my abused shoe, the doors snapped shut, and I watched the train pull away. Damn. Half an hour until the next one.

Luckily, at Termini I managed just to make the InterCity train to Naples, and was delighted to discover it was one in the old compartment arrangement. In this era of straight-through carriages that always make me feel more like I’m commuting than traveling, I revel in this throw-backs where you get to investigate a microcosm of six people crammed uncomfortably close for a few hours.

Across from me, in the other window seat, sat a hulking teenager with a do-everything cell phone permanently attached to his right ear by an umbilical earbud. Like a first true love, he ignored the world to pour all his attentions and devotion into this slab of plastic and microchips. First he played video games on it, then used it to chat with friends, and later fell asleep listening to tinny mp3s. In the seat by the door, a raisined little Italian man in a salt-and-pepper beard and cheap, threadbare, but scrupulously clean clothing carefully worked his way through four different newspapers over the course of the ride to Naples. Across from him, a dumpy Korean tourist clutched her purse on her lap and darted her eyes constantly for the full two hour trip, as if she suspected us of being the pickpockets she had been warned about.

Just as we pulled away, a nice older couple from the South Island of New Zealand arrived, panting and sweaty from having dashed for the train (which had switched arrival tracks at the last moment), and collapsed across from one another in the center seats. They were clearly excited to be in Italy, en route to Pompeii, and had a remarkable knack for looking out the wrong window at the wrong time—staring at a bleak suburban wallscape, for example, when the Mediterranean was glittering out the other side of the train.

I took it upon myself to catch the woman’s eye periodically and silently point to the other window at appropriate times so they wouldn’t miss things, starting with those oh-so-Romantic broken, weedy stretches of ancient aqueduct arches that parallel the tracks through farmland of the Castelli Romani. (Unlike the Acqua Vergine and other Imperial Age aqueducts that still run fresh water into Rome from the Appenine foothills to the east, the aqueducts south of the city weren’t kept in good repair by the popes, and long ago gradually crumbled to create scenes straight from a Piranesi print, complete with milling sheep.)

By the time we were in the Campania heartland, the woman broke our compartment’s silence, first to ask politely if I spoke English, then why we kept passing water buffalos? I explained about the mozzarella, and they broke into delighted grins. A bit later she asked "And are those olives?" No…but those are, with the dusty silver and dark green leaves. As we fell to chatting, they bemoaned having spent so long waiting in line at the Vatican, so I told them about reserving Uffizi tickets, and later, in Paris, to buy the Carte Musées et Monuments in order to save money and skip lines.

Occasionally, the little red cart with from the bar car would slide past our compartment, its pusher tinkling the bell occasionally and merely glancing quickly into the compartment to see if anyone showed interest. Much more proactive was the Old School itinerant drinksman. I thought these guys had disappeared, chased off by the now for-profit railroad and its exclusive license with Chef Express to provide crappy food and overpriced drinks on all the trains. But no, here was a small-time entrepreneur, trolling the corridors, swinging a heavy plastic bag at the end of each hairy arm, calling out a patter of "Caffe, caffe…bibite, aranciate, coca, acqua, birra…bibite!" Later, a barrista in Sorrento confirmed that the only bit of the entire national railways he knew of that still featured these bibite (drinks) guys was the Formia-Napoli stretch, where they were so entrenched and so much a part of tradition that no one seemed able to get rid of them.

At Napoli Centrale, I wished the Kiwis luck and hauled my bag down the station platform. I was about to take the stairs down to the basement and the long, twisting corridor leading to the private Circumvesuviana train line strung along the Bay of Naples, when I thought, "Damn. They’ll never find this on their own. No one does." Grumbling about the continued short-sightedness of Neapolitan authorities in not putting up a big sign for tourists saying "POMPEII"with a giant arrow pointing down the staircase, I backtracked until I found my Kiwis—looking, as expected, vaguely lost. I accompanied them down into the warren of underground tunnels, showed them where to buy tickets, and warned them about not accidentally getting on the Metro—the turnstiles for which are, confusingly, directly across from the Circumvesuviana ticket windows even though the Circumvesuviana tracks lie several hundred yards away, down more twists and turns of tunnels.

Waiting on the platform, I extended my adopted circle of tourists to a quartet of backpacked Americans by stopping them from hopping on the first train that came along, as it was headed for Sarno and they (as I) wanted the one for Sorrento. They squinted at me, unconvinced by this stranger offering advice. I shrugged and explained that, on this train, they’d end up clear on the wrong side of Vesuvius, wondering where the sea went and what all the buffalo were doing here. (I left it to my Kiwis to explain the buffalo-mozzarella connection.)

Aboard the correct train, I pointed out the gypsy family working its way through the car—mamma with an infant slung at her breast and small child in tow, little girl squeezing an accordion in a semblance of music as a distraction—and motioned everyone to keep their hands on their wallets. Then I left the tourists alone and got to finishing off my mystery novel as the ancient train shrieked and clattered its interminable way along the southern crescent of the Bay of Naples. It stopped every two to five minutes in identikit suburban towns to disgorge loud packs of schoolchildren sausaged into too-bright, too-tight clothing. I bid the Kiwis goodbye at the Pompeii Scavi stop, advising them not to miss the frescoes in Villa dei Misteri, and stayed on until the end of the line: Sorrento.

I shuffled along with everyone else down the platform stairs—the last line I’d have to stand in for the trip, hopefully—and muscled myself and my bag through the turnstile. I jounced the bag along narrow, red-cobblestoned sidewalks to the eastern edge of town and a small pile of dusty pink cubes clinging to the cliff's edge 200 feet above a little swimming pier. The black paint of the sign at the top of the main building's walls was flaking so badly it was almost impossible to make out the words "Albergo Loreley," the full name continued on the next building "et Londres."

I dropped my bag in room 15—hideous pea-green modular furnishings, no TV, A/C, or phone, but drop-dead views—and, while the light was still good, snapped a few pics of the room and its bougainvillea-lined balcony with the panorama of the sea and busy Marina Piccola port below. Stuffing the camera into my waist bag, I quickly soaped my hands and face to wipe away the grime of the road and weariness of a sleepless night, and headed right out the door again before the bed could tempt me to crash.

As I turned the simple skeleton key twice round in the lock, a smile spread across my face. Somehow, that did it. Sliding the deadbolt into place on the first of dozens of new hotel rooms that would crop up every night, that slid me into the groove. I was back. Back on the road and back on the job. Pocketing the key, I trotted down the stairs, poking my head in the slightly ajar door of room 6 for a peek and some mental notes on the decor, wondering if I'd make it to the curving, bamboo-shaded terrace in time to get an antipasto misto and plate of pasta alla Sorrentina before the chef knocked off for riposo.

Coming to Terms with the German Wine Thing (and the Viewless Rooms Thing)

I decided to skip the most famous town on the Romantic Road, Rothenburg ob der Tauber. Last time I was there, dragging the boy scouts through Europe, I ended up in a shouting match with a giant tour bus. Well, the bus mostly just shouted, "BEEP!" It was one of those double-high jobbers where the passengers sit way up, leaning against tinted windows, their feet dangling well above the heads of people trying to walk around the thing on the ground. I wasn't trying to walk around it. I had planted myself firmly in front of it, and was yelling at it.

While it kept repeating "BEEP!" I gave a long and, I thought, very cogent series of arguments regarding the definition of "pedestrians only," what this particular brand of mass tourism has wrought upon the beautiful places in the world, and how driving such a monstrosity right into the postcard-quaint cobbled town square lined with its half-timbered buildings spoils the very postcard view the people on board came to see.

The bus just kept shouting, "BEEP!"

Its driver was adding something of his own, and though I couldn't hear him through the soundproofed glass, his vast vocabulary of hand gestures got the point across. Some of the tourists on board apparently decided I must be part of the "local color" and took pictures of me. A few of my boy scouts thoughtfully dragged me away before I could get arrested, and to this day, every once in a while, one of them will say "Hey, remember that time Reid got in a fight with a German bus?"

So I skipped Rothenburg.

Instead, I pushed on west and north toward the Neckar Valley and my final castle, the Hirschhorn. The swift Neckar River winds through the southern reaches of the Odenwald Forest. It is lined with half-timbered villages and castles like a mini-Rhine, but suffers a mere fraction of the tourists, and along much of the river the trees still march right down to the water's edge. However, the forests blanketing the hills did look a bit odd. Generations of systematic logging have left it to grow back in overlapping, mismatched, rectilinear patches, not always aligned, so the greensward is covered in a network of subtle seams and slight color variations like a much-patched road.

Still, only modest swatches of the Odenwald had been permanently shaved away to make room for villages and small farms along the riverside. As I approached the Neckar and began twisting along its length toward the castle, I even saw grape vines strung up on one hillside. "Oh, no!" I said to myself. "Not again!" Sure enough, my guidebook described this as a "…small, but high-quality, wine-producing area."

And on my last night in Germany, too.

The thirteenth-century Schloss Hirschhorn overlooks a bend in the Neckar where a little waterfall dam provides a pleasant white noise background of rushing water to the chirping of sparrow hawks wheeling below the high walls of the castle and the tolling of bells in the little steepled and red-roofed hamlet by the riverside. I spent the afternoon on the castle's popular terrace, set like the prow of a ship at a panoramic point with sweeping views down the valley, and whiled away the time contentedly arranging my notes and working on my hotel reviews while nursing a few chilled beers.

As the afternoon light turned pale orange, I realized dinnertime had arrived and that the folks sitting around me were clinking forks to plates. I raised the dregs of my last beer, silently toasted the view, and drained the glass. I called for a menu and ordered the set-price feast. It opened with melon and ham, followed by beef strips, then a platter crowded with a tiny steak, a pork chop, and a medallion of, well, a different cut of pork. All of it drenched in sauce. Oh, and potatoes. Mustn't forget the potatoes. Ah, well. It's not like I came here for pizza. Suggested to accompany the menu was (yep) a local dry white wine. Well, when in Germany…

I ordered the full bottle.

Just before 9pm, the hotel manager came out and sat at the table nearest the back of the terrace but still against the cliff wall so she could see the panorama. I nodded to her in greeting and went back to reading my book. The waitress brought out a tall mug beer for her boss, and the manager just sit there, along with the middle-aged American couple and the middle-aged German couple, and me, enjoying the sunset, which was reflecting rather spectacularly off the clouds on the other side of the river.

After a while, she was joined by her husband, the chef, who stripped off his apron and poured himself a glass of red wine. She clinked it with her beer stein, staring him in the eyes with a smile in silent toast. They sat for a while, talking in low voices, drinking their beer and their wine, until the sunset faded from the clouds and the sky darkened to navy, then indigo.

I decided to retire early—I had a flight out of Frankfurt in the morning, and still needed to finish packing. I worked a crick out of my neck, marked my spot in the book, and headed back to my room. Before I set about packing, I took a minute to gaze out the window, because, for the first time this trip, my room had a view.

I saw a grassy lawn spilling steeply below the stone of the high castle walls. Sparrow hawks wheeled on the thermals beneath my window and keened to one another as they hunted in the dusk. The grassy slope was bordered by crumbling castle walls that stretched right down to mingle with the red-roofed village below. Beyond, past the vineyards, the Neckar curved silver into the forests of the night-dark hills.

A Tall Frosty Mug of Real German…Wine?

The Rhine is one of Germany's wine-producing regions. So was the Mosel, two nights ago. So will be Franconia, two days hence. Sometimes it seems every Teutonic nook and cranny has been declared "one of Germany's best wine-producing regions." That is all fine and well as far as it goes, but it means waiters are always trying to foist off a Riesling or Gewürtztraminer on me.

Now, one nice thing about Rieslings in Germany is that, unlike the bulk of that gets imported in the States, many are actually troken (dry), not "sweet as syrup," which is unfortunately what "Riesling" usually means in the USA (the same way a decades of spurious 'oaking' tactics by second-rate California wineries have come to make "Chardonnay" translate as "tastes like hamster bedding").

That said, I did not come all the way to Germany to drink wine—and certainly not at eight bucks a glass. I came for beer, for crying out loud! I came for a country where every town has its own local brewery and its own proud tradition for mixing fermented hops and barley. I came for frosty mugs made of thick glass where ordering a "small" gets you half a liter, and "large" means ein Maß—a liter.

Every time I try to order ein bier in a restaurant, though, it gets me a condescending look—almost a sneer. Beer, it is implied, is for slobbering in a tavern with the working classes, not for accompanying such a fine dinner composed entirely of pork products. Everyone else in the restaurant is drinking wine, and having a beer is obviously trés declassé. I usually end up caving into peer pressure (and the waiter's impending disapproval), and whenever I open my mouth fully intending to order ein bier vom faß (whatever's on tap), I find myself instead asking for a wine recommendation. So I spend most dinners ruefully sipping at a half-filled, $8 glass of mediocre white wine, poking at my slab of pork in a pool of mustard sauce, and thinking wistfully of the lucky slobs in the taverns gulping down their $3 Maßes of beer.

That's why I've taken to grabbing my beer furtively, in places where it won't be frowned upon. I'll have lunch in a tavern—which I know means my choices will be wurstel and saurkraut, or this other kind of wurstel, also with sauerkraut (or perhaps with a virulently yellow, terribly sticky, grapefruit-sized ball of gelatinous starch). But at least I can hold my frosty mug up high and proud and say Prost! to the fellows at my table (when you toast in Germany, you have to hold eye contact all the way through to the sipping of the beer). And one day, as I sat at an Internet cafe in Coburg, I noticed that there was an incongruous bar wedged into the back room, so I ordered up a glass of the wonderfully named Frankenbrau, though it was only 12:30pm, and happily drained it whilst deleting spam from my Webmail inbox.

I can't, however, bring myself to break that old Puritan taboo of drinking alone in my room. That, as I know from after-school specials on alcoholism, is just one step away from sneaking in the kitchen at night and slurping vanilla extract to get a fix, like Tom Hanks did in that guest spot on Family Ties. (Of course, the first thing I did upon seeing that episode was go to my mom's spice cabinet and take a giant swig of the vanilla extract, because it had never occurred to me you could do anything with it other than put 1/4 teaspoon into recipes for baked goods. I don't know if you've ever tried to drink the stuff straight, but it tastes exactly the opposite of how good it smells. That one experience, more than any sit-com moralizing, has convinced me never to become an alcoholic. Yes, despite my parent's best efforts, 70s and 80s TV really did play an unhealthily large role in my upbringing.)

That is how I ended up with this can of miXergy, which I bought on a whim at a gas station, because I figure it doesn't count as "drinking" alone in my room, as it is merely a form of soda. In fact, the label heralds it as "bier + cola + X!" I popped it open as I sat down to write this part, took a sip and, once the involuntary gagging was over, glanced at the side of the can to see what, exactly, they meant by "X." The can was of little help, other than announcing the alcoholic content, so I can report only that it is composed of 3.1% alcohol and 96.9% oh-my-god-that's-nasty.

It’s enough to drive a man to Riesling.

As for me, it drove me down south, to Germany's bastion of beer: Bavaria.

Would You Like Some Pork with That?

Most menus in Germany are suspiciously similar: a half-dozen variations on the schnitzel theme swamped in a creamy mustard sauce, some veal (usually subjected to the same inundation of sauce), a steak or two, venison stew with wild mushrooms, and whatever the local wurstel is.

Each dish is accompanied by any of a number of preparations of potato or a dense dumpling made from a starch-based food so cooked-down it's impossible to tell what it started out as, plus some form of sauerkraut. It's hearty, it's filling, and it's fairly obvious, after a few days on this diet, why there are so many Italian restaurants in Germany. French, Chinese, and Greek ones, too. Yesterday I passed one called "Ristorantisches Zagreb," proudly offering Balkan cuisine. It was packed.

Don't get me wrong: a platter of wurstel, a side of roasted potatoes, a salty bretzlern, and a liter-sized stein of bier to wash it all down is great fun and terribly tasty. But a steady sausage diet can get real old real fast, and there are some varieties of wurstel...well, let's just say the sheath of pig intestines into which the filling is stuffed is by far the least offensive ingredient involved.

Plus, it's all meat-and-starch, all the time. As a general rule, I care very, very little for sauerkraut. But here I find myself attacking the piles of slimy, pickled cabbage with a relish, egged on by a primal need for something resembling a fruit, a vegetable, or, really, just anything containing vitamins.

Schnitzel, too, gets pretty boring pretty quickly, especially when it's invariably protected under an armor of fried bread crumbs and hidden beneath a creamy sea of mustard sauce. I know it's just me, but every once in a while, even when it's well-prepared, in the midst of forking my way through yet another platter of schnitzel, the whole thing suddenly looks and tastes exactly like a Hungry Man TV dinner. That's when I know it's time to order another liter of beer.

Still, I grimly plow on through the many and varied regional preparations of cholesterol and polyunsaturated fats, my perverse sense of travel correctness keeping me from even glancing askance at the menus posted outside the dozens of pizzerie, "trattorien," and restaurants named after famous Italian cities and islands. I have to stick to the local specialties, even if it kills me (here my arteries would like to voice their opposition to this rule).

My vague rule of thumb is that you have to spend at least two weeks in a country before you're allowed to cheat and get a pizza. There are exceptions, of course. London, like NYC, is home to a globe's worth of interesting exotic options. In Prague, French cuisine ranks a close second to Czech in local popularity. The nineteen-course Indonesian feasts in the Netherlands are incredibly tasty and perfectly legit, given the country's colonial history in Southeast Asia.

Even Germany has an exception to the rule: they have now reached the critical mass of immigrant Turks necessary to make Turkish food a legitimate local option. Therefore, for the occasional lunch you are allowed a dönnerkebab, a split piece of flatbread stuffed with carved slices of spicy roast lamb with lettuce, tomatoes, and three kinds of sauce, one of which burns off your taste buds. Otherwise, though, it's wurstel and schnitzel all the way, baby.

Still, there are plenty of opportunities for the weak-willed to cheat, to take the coward's way out of arterial sclerosis. On most German menus, even in the most heuiriger (cozy) lilttle gestätte (tavern), if you look closely enough you'll find an escape clause, a dish such as "currywurst mit pommes frites," or "hen-flesh strips" prepared Orientischer art (Oriental style) with a pepper/cashew sauce, pan-fried veggies, and rice. But frankly, I have yet to meet any chef but an Indian who can apply curry to a dish in an appetizing manner. As for Orientichers art, if God had intended the Germans to stir-fry, he would have had them invent the wok. Instead, He apparently blessed them with a surfeit of pigs.

I've only been in Germany a few days—well shy of the two-week mark—and I already used up my lunchtime get-out-of-schnitzel-free dönnerkebab, so I'm finding other little ways to rebel. For instance, I am writing this bit in the Rhine village of Bachrach at a table in the Weinhaus Altes Haus—a half-timbered structure of red beams and white plaster that was apparently saved right in the midst of falling in on itself, so all the walls are at odd angles and from the outside it looks like a spritely illustration from a book of Grimm's fairy tales. I am awaiting the delivery of my carefully crafted light meal, to consist of a large mixed salad, a cheese sampler platter, and Apfelstrudel with cinnamon ice cream for dessert. I plan thusly to run an endgame around the "main courses" part of the menu—which promised schnitzel in a cheese-potato sauce with French fries, boiled beef in a berry sauce with potatoes, and something unfortunately translated as "Beef broth with stripes of noodle bags."

I am making amends for having ordered a modest bill of fare by padding my meal with not merely a glass of wine (which is the most that the largely abstemious Germans will drink with their meals—and which insanely always costs at minimum €2.50, usually €5 to €9), but rather a full bottle of the 2000 Toni Jost Reisling, grown on the slopes just outside of town.

What? Wine? In Germany? What happened to the massive mugs of beer? Tune in next post…

The Bane of the Solo Traveler

I just checked into a hotel installed in the medieval gatehouse of mighty Burg Reichenstein, overlooking the valley of the Rhine River from on high. I was handed a room key, lugged my luggage upstairs, and opened the door to my third parking-lot view in a row.

Chalk it up to the old "single rooms suck" law, which is aimed at punishing those who dare to travel without companionship. I may be here to write an article on sleeping in German castles, but what I'm really becoming an expert on is what medieval castle parking lots look like. To whit: gravely, littered with rental cars parked at odd angles, and amazingly, precisely, just a tad too small to turn around in properly. Most of the guest rooms in these German castles come with a panorama of the local river valley, vistas over unspoilt forestland, or at the very least a peek at the red roofs of the timeless village that grew up around the castle's feet. All of these fall under the category of views that my room invariably lacks.

The trend started with my very first castle of the trip. I had crossed the lower Rhine at Bonn, where the valley widens and pancakes into vast flatlands peppered by Germany's twin pinnacles of tradition and progress—church steeples and factory smokestacks—above which white gliders wheel on the thermals. Once across the plains, I turned south to join the parade of weekend motorcyclists slaloming down the turns of the Ahr River Valley, whizzing through evergreen forests that stand on tall stilt trunks.

The forestland soon gave way to the Eifel, Germany's largest volcanic region. Save for the giant, lazily spinning Mercedes symbols harvesting wind on ridges and hillsides, the bucolic scenery was straight out of a 19th century painting. A fertile land of green-gold fields unrolled in between the little Christmas tree farms planted in neat Teutonic rows, and the strings of eyelet lakes filling ancient volcanic craters. Hay was harvested into seven-foot-tall rolls placed just so around stubbly fields. The fields were being mown closer still by sleek muscular horses, round piebald cows, and roly-poly sheep freshly shorn for summer. Congregations of fat, contented-looking silky-maned blond ponies standing placidly in the dapple light of woods’ edge alternated with flocks of fat, contented-looking children with corn-silk hair romping in the pineshade of riverside campsites.

This fairy tale of forest and farmland was occasionally interrupted by half-timbered villages built around rocky promontories topped by craggy castles. Some of the ancient fortresses were roofless and shattered beyond repair, their stone walls yawning apart. Others looked comfortably lived-in, with steep slate roofs and tan stucco-cemented walls picked out with brightly painted shutters in heraldic red or blue stripes against white.

Luckily, my castle on that first night, the Kurfürstlishes Amtshaus, turned out to be of the latter type, a bastion of creamy yellow walls trimmed in dark red and topped by ranks of dormer windows clad in dark, mossy slate tiles, and its stood next to a white-steepled church above the bustling market town of Daun. Christa Probst, the owner, was genuinely surprised when, while I was completing the check-in form, I told her I was an American. "How did you find this place?" She marveled. "No Americans come to the Eifel!" She gave a nervous, disturbing little laugh. "This is an empty region. A poor region."

Frau Probst elaborated. "In 1850s, many people went away—to America, mostly. Sometimes their descendants come back to look for family, but it has been so long. Too long. Everyone is gone. This area is only good now for walking and for bike riding." And motorcycles, I pointed out. She gave her disturbing little laugh again. "Yes. We Germans, we love the motorbikes!"

I finished signing in and tried to express the idea that Americans might like to come precisely because the Eifel is not full of factories and other signs of modern commerce. It's simply farmland and forests—and very pretty ones at that—along with the odd reminder of the region's volcanic heritage, like mini Old Faithful-type geysers, giant smooth boulders plopped in strange spots, and those lovely little eyelet lakes. She stared at me bemused, as if there might be something a bit wrong with me, and handed me a set of keys.

My room had a lovely view of my rental sedan.

I got the same panorama from my lodgings at Castle Liebenstein the following night, another Romantically crumbling Rhineside fort, so I abandoned my digs and watched the sunset from the ramparts and chatted with a couple from Montana while their 13-year-old daughter and her cousin clambered around the castle ruins in little black chiffon capes and baseball caps, popping in and out of view as they discovered hidden passageways on their determined ghost-hunt.

And now, the vista from my new digs in Burg Reichenstein: gravel lot, lots of cars. Well, at least it's a proper room. A corollary of the "single rooms suck" law states that any space in the hotel that was once a broom closet, storage room on the airshaft, or substantially sized bathroom may, in a pinch, be converted into a single room. I've stayed in all of those, plus a few worse. Once I was put up in the little manager's office off the hotel lobby, sleeping on the night watchman's cot wedged between the wall and the comically oversized hotel safe (that was in Enna, Sicily, where despite my copy of a months-old faxed reservation they insisted the hotel was fully booked).

Another memorable time in Marostica, a town famous for its biennial chess match on the main piazza using costumed people as pieces, another lost reservation meant I had to set up housekeeping in a little windowless room of the basement parking garage, most of which was taken up by the building's central heating/cooling unit, which would periodically roar to life, popping and squeaking and clanging, at irregular intervals throughout the night. In Germany, at least, I was getting actual hotel rooms. Just tiny, crappy ones.

However, as a consolation, my crappy castle singles do always come with the entertainment of watching folks try to execute 42-point turns in a tiny parking lot at the wheel rental car they're not really that used to. Since many castle rooms don't come with TVs, this is about as exciting as my evening gets. But since everyone now seems to be in for the evening here, the fun's over and I figure it's time I stopped putting it off. It's time to go rustle up some dinner.

All Wet

I am staring at the reflection of my passport photo in the windshield. I'm on a road winding through the forested northwest slopes of Mt. Etna, and every time I pass from the treeshade to the sunlight on a curve, there it is: my face, with a silly grin; my signature, in Sharpie; the bold words USA (in frills), PHILADELPHIA (where I was born) and New Orleans (where the thing was issued, but which European hotel clerks always assume indicates where I live, so that's what they write on the check-in form I have to sign).

My passport is there, up on the dashboard, staring at me accusingly, because it needs to dry out. It needs to dry out because I took it swimming with me this morning, breaking a half-dozen of my own iron-clad travel rules in the process.

As my Brazilian friend Daniel would say: lemme 'splain.

When I left Taormina this morning town, I followed the same twisting road winding down to Giardini Naxos that Jay and took on scooters seven years ago (on which ride, if I recall correctly, I bent my right thumbnail back almost in half flicking the starter, which still ranks as my one and only scooter-related injury). I followed the valley of the Alcantara Torrent inland to the point at which it issued from the tall, narrow basalt walls of the Gola di Alcantara, which means Alcantara Gorge but actually translates literally (and more poetically) as the "Throat of Alcantara."

South of the Taormina promontory, all of Sicily is Etna-formed territory, and the Throat of Alcantara is one of its most striking features. The volcanic basalt here cooled into long, geometric columns ranging from pentagons to octagons -- geological cousins to Giant's Causeway in Ireland and Devil's Tower in the States -- all fitted together in giant woodstacks and pipe organs. These formations have subsequently been lifted, twisted, and turned by volcanic convulsions, carved into a narrow, twisting slot of a valley by the Alcantara, and polished to a smoothed, gleaming leaden gray by millennia of water flow.

The effect is remarkable, and in the wide valley floor where the close walls of the Throat open up, allowing the Alcantara to braid itself into several streams rushing around low, pebbly island flats, Italians by the dozen were strewn out, raisining themselves. Their kids, too impatient to lie there roasting for hours on end, were splashing in the shallows or wading up to the opening of the Throat, where the water swirled above their heads in a deeper pool and they could haul themselves up onto some rocks and challenge each other to jump in.

I, of course, stripped off my shoes and socks, zipped off the legs of my convertible pants (momentarily becoming more interesting than their sunbathing to the surrounding Italians), undid my belt with the camera bag on it and slung it over my head and one arm like a bandoliero, emptied my pockets of cell phone, wallet, and change and stuffed them into my shoulder bag along with the pants legs, took my shoes in one hand, and started wading across to the far shore of the braided streams and as close to the Throat as the dry land went. There, under a scrubby tree, I broke another major travel rule. I put down my shoulder bag -- which contained several thousand dollars worth of electronics, my irreplaceable notebook, and various and sundry other items -- took off my shirt and left it on top, and then walked away from it all, around a corner and well out of view.

I waded into the deep pool at the Throat, holding my camera bag and belt way up over my head, and sort of breast stroked/doggy paddled to the slick rocks at the entry to the gorge. One of the Italian kids, a morbidly obese little guy of about 11 called Tancredi (it's nice to know that some names from Sicily's early medieval Norman dynasty survive down to today), saw me and called down for me to hand up my camera to him so I could use both hands to scramble up the slippery rocks.

I thanked the kids, left them to dare one another to jump off the rocks, and continued wading up the now much deeper waters inside the Throat, taking pictures and fretting endlessly about the camera over my head and the unattended bag way back on the beach. I got several hundred yards in, just before the turn where the Alcantara rushes down over a series of waterfall rapids, when it became too deep to go any further--not to mention too cold. Tancredi had told me the water temperature was about 14 degrees (57 degrees Farenheit). "In the afternoon, it gets as high as 16 degrees, but now, it's about 14. Maybe even 13!"

By the time I got back, it was getting on lunchtime. The little pebbly beachlets were clearing out, and the kids were gone. I managed to slither down the rocks, swim/wade back to dry land, and located my (thoroughly unmolested) bag. In wading back across the stream braids to the far shore -- at some point I had lost my Molefoam, and the sharp river pebbles were murdering my heel blister -- I even managed to find a nice souvenir stone with just the right leaden color and smoothed geometric form to recall the geology of the gorge. I sat on a rock to dry out a bit, reassembled my pants and footwear, and hobbled back up the trail to the cafe-cum-car park at the lip of the valley.

It was when I went to the bathroom and unzipped my fly that I realized there was one precious item I had not left unattended in my bag on the beach. My moneybelt was still safely clamped around my waist under my clothes, and it was dripping wet. Inside it was a small Ziploc-type (and, apparently, not waterproof) baggie filled with folded-up twenty-dollar bills, and a soggy, lumpy roll of some kind of cardboard that turned out to be my passport. Cursing, I took it out, flattened it as best I could, and placed it on my dashboard when I got back in the car to hit the SS 120, the old back road towards Cefalù.

Breaking the Rules and Wasting a Morning in Taormina

I must be seriously out of shape, mentally. This trip started with me breaking a trio of travel rules right off the bat: (1) I picked up a rental car at the airport (which always incurs an extra fee), (2) merely to drive it into downtown Palermo (never drive in a city--especially not an Italian city; and especially not a Southern Italian city--if you can avoid it), and then (3) paid for it to sit, parked, for two days whilst I traipsed about town on foot and by bus (always pick up the rental on the day you leave the first big city on the trip, that way you avoid paying for those few days of a needless rental, for the parking, and for that airport pick-up fee).

Another disturbing indication of my mental flabbiness occurred during the drive from Palermo's Punta Raisi Airport--now renamed (though not all road signs have got the memo) Aeroporto Falcone-Borsellino after the two crusading anti-mafia magistrates assassinated in the early 1990s. During the ride, I started getting really aggravated about all the slow, timid, and downright stupid drivers all around me. It was while I was accelerating to weave through the traffic, throwing Italian invectives and complicated hand gestures at other drivers, that I realized what was wrong with this scenario. One does not find European drivers to be slow and timid--especially not Italian drivers, and especially not Southern Italian ones.

That was all a week ago, when I first arrived in Sicily. Yet my mind has still, apparently, not gotten itself back into whack. I managed to infringe upon yet another travel rule before I even woke up this morning. Yesterday, when I checked into the Villa Gaia in Taormina, I asked the hotel clerk if there was anything exciting going on in town--concerts, spectacles, or simply anything new to see or do that hadn't been available seven years ago on my last trip here.

Turns out that, as with all the other ancient Greek theaters in Sicily that have been rehabilitated (and spoiled, visually, with ranks of aluminum risers where the stone seats have crumbled away) to serve as summertime stages for all sorts of entertainments, I managed to pick the one week out of the whole summer during which every single one of them is "between series."

Segesta had just finished a run of classical Greek plays and was gearing up to start classical concerts next week; Siracusa was taking a breather between experimental modern theater and a schedule of ancient dramas; and Taormina had just ended one set of theater and art shows and now had a team of workmen scurrying around trying to turn the 2,500-year-old Sicilian stage into a sheet of ice (on the day when local temps hit 100 degrees) for a revue of skating prowess that was to take place two days hence, which was to be followed the next day by a concert by Diana Ross (whether or not the Supreme would also be required to wear ice skates was not clear).

At any rate, I was out of luck in terms of actually getting some use out of the visual eye sores represented by the intrusion into these glorious ancient spaces of modern seats and scaffolding-pipe erector sets serving as grandstands and to hold lighting arrays. However, the hotel clerk told me, Isola Bella was now open to the public. I had only ever been able to admire from afar this tiny, gardened islet cupped in one of the pocket-sized swimming bays on the coast below Taormina's promontory. Yes, the clerk said, this summer they were ferrying the public to the island on tours at 10am and 3:30pm every day. I knew I had to take off next morning (in order to go swimming with my passport, then drive to Cefalù), but this sounded like a worthy diversion, so when she asked if I'd like for her to call and book me a spot for the next morning, I said sure.

Travel rule: Never rely on a hotel clerk to provide some service you can do perfectly well on your own. At worst, the clerk's going to turn out to be all rotted out underneath the smiles and language of deference and will end up scamming you into something shoddy and at an immense profit to themselves. At best, you're relying on someone else's ability to recall a passing promise made to some stranger from New Orleans they're trying to get to sign the check-in register so they can go back outside and finish that cigarette your arrival interrupted.

What I got was the "at best."

I duly slept in a bit later than I had planned to do when I had planned on an early start. I took breakfast in the garden, where I taught an older American woman sitting near me to ask for "Hag" if she wanted a decaffeinated espresso. Then I watched in horror as a newly-arrived middle-aged Australian man abused first his girlfriend, who showed up a few minutes after he did, then was nasty to the hotel clerk and ordered her to take away the "nasty pastries" and go inside and bring him some sliced bread instead--"Can you do that, d'ya think?" he sneered--which he proceeded to slather with avocado and slices of raw tomato he produced from a plastic shopping bag. He then ordering the clerk back inside to bring him a phone, whereupon he called his boss (who was apparently staying down in the beachside resort community of Giardini-Naxos) and suddenly turned all oily sycophancy, bitching crudely about this "god-awful little town" and eagerly arranging to go down to Giardini-Naxos to see the boss's hotel and make arrangements to stay there instead.

In the face of his maltreatment, I put off bothering the put-upon clerk about my Isola Bella arrangements until about 9:15, at which point I inquired politely. She blanched, said "Scusi!" and dashed back inside. A minute later, she returned, apologizing that it was no longer possible to take the 10am tour, as I would have already had to have left to take the gondola down to the beach. "Do you want to do the one at 15:30?" I sighed inwardly, smiled outwardly, and said "No. Unfortunately, I have to get on down the road."

Still I tarried in town (more on that in a moment), and spent 45 enjoyable minutes wandering the back streets where Taormina's annoying, polished resort air falls away. Laundry flaps on balconies, street corner shrines support tiny vases of dried flowers, and an itinerant fruttivendolo (fruit and veggie seller) operates out of the bed of a teensy three-wheeled ApeCar pickup, selling his produce to a small clump of local ladies of a certain age and with each sale gallantly offering to carry her purchases back to her house.

Thin Walls

You name a noise, the guy in the room next to me is making it. It's 2 am, and he has been at it for the better part of an hour now. In fact, I'd wager good money that the body of the man in room 28 of the Hotel Pratic in Paris is emitting every sound possible outside of actual speech.

It began with a prolonged session of rat-a-tat's, a queer sound that would start off grouped into two long burbles, then repeat as a short burst, pause for several seconds, then start in again with the double long burbles. At first I thought it was some kind of weird Morse code. Then I realized it was snoring. Oh, great, I thought. He's going to snore at me all night.

Oh, how I wish he had merely kept it to snoring.

The man in room 28 soon took to harumphing and clearing his throat. He took to sniffling, snorting, and blowing his nose quite triumphantly and repeatedly. He took to wheezing, hacking, and making little strangling sounds, rounded out by a good stiff bout of coughing (which ended with the inevitable hocking of lugies; this popular pas de duex was encored several times throughout the evening). At one point engaged in a single, memorable sneeze that I don't think the residents of this Paris neighborhood will soon forget.

Then, at a certain point, he grew weary of the nose and throat division and began to explore the whole range of noises that upchucking afforded. First came the wet, squelching streams of vomit, splatting against the aluminum of what I can only assume is an identical copy of the tiny dustbin in my own room. This was followed by a protracted session of systematic, cyclical retching. Almost hypnotic. Almost rhythmic enough to lull me back to sleep. But then he had to go and finish it with a staccato series of irregular dry heaves. And just to be sure I was still awake, he ended with one large, reverberating — and somewhat relieved sounding — belch.

You thought it couldn't get worse, eh?

To top it all off, running like a melodic theme throughout the freakish aria that has become my evening's aural torture was his resounding, boisterous, earth-shattering, powerful, positively monumental flatulence. We're talkin' the sort of grandiose emission of noxious vapors that wakes up the neighbors (case in point); that registers on the Richter scale; that causes flowers to wilt. When this guy broke wind, it was a meteorological event.

He farted with great fanfare and with wild abandon. Sometimes it was a high pitched, fluttering whine that lingered before lilting up at the end like a question mark, sounding like nothing so much as the mating call of some odd and (thankfully) extinct bird. Sometimes it was an old fashioned Bronx cheer, sputtering along strongly for a good long moment before trailing off smoothly; other times it was an antique locomotive engine letting off steam, whooshing out and hissing angrily. Occasionally it idled: a souped-up motorcycle at a stoplight. The worst was when it started as a low muttering growl in the distance, then crescendoed steeply to roll like a mighty thunder across the landscape, finally to recede and end with a short — pffft—.

Well, all misery must at some point come to an end, and eventually the one-man orchestra in room 28 ran out of orifices with which to create sounds. He drifted off with only the occasional sniffle, cough, or fart to mark his journey into sleep. He didn't even bother to start snoring again. It was wonderful. It was glorious. I could stand such occasional noises. I could stand the muffled zoom of the odd car out late on rue de Rivoli a block away. I could stand infrequent drip-drip that my room's sink makes every night no matter how hard I twist the faucets shut. I could even stand the oddly regular creaking of bedsprings that was emanating from the wall on the other side of my bed, coming from room 26.

Oh, no.

And so, the woman in room 26 began her long, slow, loud, and none-too-shy-about-it ascent to orgasm. It was not to be her last of the evening. Her lover must be a stallion. It is a shame I shall have to kill him in the morning.

Copyright © 1999 by Reid Bramblett