From our last stop, with Didit safely on board we moved on towards the Swiss town of Lugano. From there, Allah willing we will reach the fabled Y-shaped Lake Como.
George Clooney, Stallone, Madonna, Versace made home along the shores of Lake Como. In the movie Star Wars episode II, part of the Naboo scenes (with lake) were shot in Como especially the marriage of Anakin to Amidala. Suffice to say, it is one of the most desired place to stay in Italy or maybe the whole of Europe if you have cash to burn.
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| Autobahn |
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| travelling along the streets... |
This part of the journey was not well documented. I did not transfer the images I took regularly into the external drive, some of the images were scattered over a few SD cards. It is a mistake that still haunts me and I promised myself to be more diligent about it.
Anyway, the weather was gloomy. It rained all the way from the moment we left the alpine region and onto the zigzag road around Airolo (I think). All along the way sign was in Italian and I thought that we were already in Italy. It was then, our most senior and seasoned traveler...Abang (brother) Rashid mentioned that (one of the reason) Switzerland remained neutral in both World War was due to its multilingual state {they have 4 official languages. German, French, Italian and Romansh (not related to Romanian though)}.
So, we must be in the Italian speaking part of Switzerland then since everything was spelled in Italian.
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| Strada means street in Italian |
Strada di Fulmignano, sounds Italian..well it is. But that particular stretch of road is in Switzerland. It's also not far from the custom checkpoint at the Swiss-Italy border in a place called Gandria.
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| Strada di Flumignano (pin) and the Swiss-Italy border |
That also means that we are in the vicinity of Lugano. There's the Lugano Lake or Lago di Lugano (which I excitedly thought it was Lake Como...) Let me tell you...we arrived there when people were rushing to get home. So it was a slow drive but all camper van were within sight of each other. Didit, I can tell you....must be happily vaping away in one of the van.
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| slow traffic in the tunnel |
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| into another tunnel (or I got the sequence wrong) |
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| Lago di Lugano (Lugano Lake) |
The rain did not improve my mood. It wasn't that cold. Cold I can handle...but not to be able to stretch my legs was another matter. I did my best, but I prefer if we could stop by the roadside and to snap a few pictures. But the weather was not permitting and Lake Como was still not in sight. This must be the longest drive so far.
We were trundling along the road when I spotted this quite curios (to me, at least) structure. Dogana, means customs. Gandria must be the name of the location. This must be it! Border!!
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| customs checkpoint |
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| Good bye! Auf wiedersehen! Au revoir! Arrivederci! |
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| queue..... |
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| the Italian side of the tunnel |
FYI, there's no physical check at the border. Maybe they do random checks...but it was just smooth..travelling from one country to the other. No passport check whatsoever. We continued our journey passed Lugano Lake and SN mentioned that we were passing along another one..which is Piano Lake (Lago di Piano) not sure if there's any relation to the actual music instrument.
But we were losing daylight quite fast too. By 5pm, it was dark and drizzling. We carefully moved along the narrow road towards Como.
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this zigzag stretch of road is just before
reaching Menaggio |
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| narrow street |
Around 6plus or was it 7pm, we were in the vicinity of Lake Como. It took us another hour to locate the minuscule camping site around this area. All with drama of course.
Syibli and Hafiz drove the A1 van ahead to locate the camping site. But it was closed! Then help came in a shape of an old man. Seriously! An old man came up to the Naija camper van and Syibli asked the next campsite. What happened over the next 5 minutes was beautiful! Here we are, poring over a map, and the old man spoke in Italian; while Syibli in English..both trying to make sense to each other but a name was mentioned. A name of a tunnel (not in the map, mind you). It was purely an Eureka moment.
Syibli and Hafiz rushed to the next camp and we found a place to put up till the next morning. Alhamdulillah! (Thanks to Allah). OK, the old man left and we never saw him again (twilight zone tune..) but it was nothing out of ordinary (like floating or wearing clothes of bygone era)...he was just strolling around the area actually. A local, if you must know.
The campsite was a small one, but it's by the lake! The road was narrow and a few times we had to manoeuvre the camper van just to enter the site. The owner, a lady spoke with heavy Italian accent saying that there's no hot water! We were too tired to argue and the campsite had seen better days. But you want rarecation right? This is just rare, it's so rare you might as well call it fresh!!
It was too dark to make out anything out there and since it started raining heavily, it made more sense for the rest of us to sleep and wake up early to snap photos around the lake. Finally, we make extra sure Didit was with us..atleast with Radzi and off we go to Lala Landzzzzz....Aheh!
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