Amalfi Coast

Wednesday 8th March was as much about the roads and the traffic as it was the scenery. 

The coastal road is cleverly engineered, historic, scenic and death defying. Buses in particular are scary, as the roads are narrow, twisty, and in many sections are barely suited for one way passage of scooters. How they fit buses around those corners defies physics, let alone common sense. When there's opposing traffic the clearance is barely the thickness of the paint. Definitely a 'must see' attraction so we hired a driver for a private tour. 

Sorrento was beautiful and as luck would have it is a town well known for the production of leather goods. The range was great and very reasonably priced so a planned sightseeing tour morphed into a very pleasant shopping trip. 

The day continued with sections of beautiful, tight, cliffside roads interrupted by picture postcard towns. 

Ravello in particular was clearly lovely , yet sadly obscured by heavy fog.

One of the local shops had a potential solution :

Coming home, some genius had closed part of one of the main roads in the Historic District. The last stretch to our B&B would normally take 15 minutes in rush hour, and instead took 2 hours. 

Mary adapted a version of Chaos Theory to the situation - it was outwardly chaotic because nobody obeyed either the rules or signs, yet everybody appeared to be disregarding the signs/rules in the same chaotic manner, hence it works. The only evident problem was when some idealist obeyed a rule, then the whole system broke down and everyone resorted to their horns to express their displeasure. 

Ambulances were the loudest. Heaven help any heart attack victim. If they survived the attack, the stress of the ride to hospital would likely finish them off. 

Just like India, albeit without the assorted animals, especially cows...