Ciao America

Novalja, Pag

So I will start off from where I left off. We made it to Novalja, Pag and completely lucked out at the only hostel on the island called the Big Yellow House which was located right on the water. The picture above is the view from our room. I must admit that the actual town of Novalja is not the classiest. I don't think a lot of Americans make it over to the island either because a lot of people were shocked we made the treck over there. Near Novalja is a beach called Zrce Beach that is basically the Ibiza of Croatia. We went to the beach on a bus that played blaring techno the entire way there.

 After spending a few days enjoying the beaches (interestingly enough the best beach was at a campsite), we decided to take a kayaking trip in Zadar. Lizzie and I shared a kayak. While I believe we both individually could kayak in a straight line, our poor coordination skills caused us to zig zag down the river. We still were very pleased at the end of our trip because we got to jump off a 45 foot waterfall and I kayaked down a 12 foot waterfall.

After Croatia, Lizzie and embaraked on a 24 hour journey to Naples. Naples was errr ok...but after talking with some people at our hostel, we decided to take our trip elsewhere. We made some friends in the hostel and a group of us headed to Sorrento the next day to try out our first camping site. Right when we got to Sorrento, we dropped off our bags and headed to Pompei, the town that is in ruins from a volcanic eroption. Pompei was very cool to see. It really amazed me that there was still wood in the buildings from such a long time ago. After Pompei, we went back to our campsite and headed down to the water with our new friends from Naples. We decided to ignore the sign that said the beach closes at 7 and made our way down the hill to the rocks on the water. After enjoying some delicious wine and cheese (that we shared with some seagulls), we took a dip in the ocean and headed back up to our cabins. We learned that the beach really does close at 7 since they had lock the gate to the campsite. We made our way out after some intensene climbing up dirt hills and a whole crew of Italian children to help us escape. We were quite famous at breakfast the next day among the children. We took a ferri to Capri the next day. First, we heckled with many boat owners to get the best deal to take us around the island. We finally found a descent deal from an American women and scheduled to return later that day to start our trip. We waited for quite awhile to get on a bus to Anacapri. The roads in Capri are tres tiny and our big bus zoomed along sharing the road with other buses and driving along a veryyy steep cliff. We got to the town in one piece and made our first stop at a Pizzeria where we ate the most delicious margherita pizzetes and enjoyed a view of a mansion overlooking the water with a vineyard (basically my dream home).

We shopped around and I bought a pair of sandals that were specially made to fit my foot. There are little shops all over Capri for this and they make the shoes in 20 minutes.

After shopping and sampling quite a bit of limoncello, we set out on our boat trip to cruise around the island. We swam through many grottos, went cliff jumping of course, and even got in the blue grotto which was amazing. It is a cave all light up in a luminous blue color. Capri might have been my favorite day of the trip. Once we returned to Sorrento, we cleaned up and enjoyed a farewell dinner with our new friends where there was a band playing American songs in very Italian accents.
 

Boating in Capri