So That’s Where Rafa’s Pants Get Their Name

Disclaimer: I don’t actually know where Capri pants get their name. (Edit: Wikipedia confirms that they were named for the island! I win!)

As I mentioned at the end of my last post, I hit it off with three of the other students staying in my hostel in Sorrento, so we decided to visit Capri island together. And I was very fortunate that things fell into place that way, because traveling is usually a lot more fun with friends than by yourself.

Capri is an island located just off the end of the Sorrentine peninsula. As opposed to nearby Ischia island, which is volcanic, Capri is made of primarily carbonate rocks (like you care). So to get there, we got up nice and early and caught a “fast ferry” from the port in Sorrento. It was slower than the more expensive hydrofoil that ran more frequently, but still only took around a half hour. (The following pictures are of the path down to the docks, which were located basically at the bottom of a cliff from the town, and looking back towards the Bay of Naples from the ferry.)

The ferry arrived in the Marina Grande, the larger of the island’s two harbors. We had probably hadn’t taken more than ten steps off the ferry when a guy approached us trying to sell us a tour around the island on his tiny boat. While we were considering this, we weren’t ready to decide just yet and not sure we wanted to do it with this guy as opposed to the public tour on a larger boat. I think he took our hesitance for haggling, because he dropped his price a couple times and was ultimately a bit upset when we decided to defer our decision till later in the day and explore the island first.

So we walked from the harbor up a seemingly endless pathway/staircase up to the town of Capri, one of two towns on the island. At the top, we explored the town for a bit, just a neat little place with lots of shops. We checked out Cathedral of Capri and enjoyed the sun for a bit. The views back down towards Marina Grande were already pretty fantastic, but we hadn’t seen anything yet!

Once we had exhausted Capri, we got on a bus to head over to Anacapri, the town on the other half of the island. The bus wrapped around the side of a cliff, providing more awesome views.

Once in Anacapri we walked around for a while. The town was pretty similar to Capri, with some buildings of note that we stopped to look at. But the theme of this day was nature, not architecture, so we didn’t spend too long admiring the buildings.

Since none of us had done too much research on what exactly there was to see on Capri, we mostly decided where to go next as we went. After walking around Anacapri, we considered going to the Grotta Azzura, Capri’s most famous landmark, however a little quick research (hooray for phone internet!) revealed that it was a little too logistically difficult, expensive, and time consuming. So instead we jumped on a bus to Faro, a different point on the edge of the island with the lighthouse.

We walked down to the water and found an absolutely amazing spot to have lunch, right along the rocks and the water with the lighthouse in the distance.

After lunch we walked up to the lighthouse where we could look back down on where we ate lunch.

One of the other fun parts about Faro is that soon after we got off the bus, a really friendly stray dog started following us. It sat with us while we ate lunch and followed us out on the cliffs by the lighthouse. Everywhere we went, it would sometimes go check out other people, but it would always come back to us. When we got on the bus to leave, it ran out in the road and stared at us as we drove away. It was really sad.

It was starting to get later in the day, and we did want to do a boat tour, so we hopped a couple buses to get back to Marina Grande, where we got tickets and waited in line to get the best seats. Based on our observations and advice from the boat tour guy, we grabbed seats in the corner at the back of the boat on the right side so we could get the best views of the island and the grottos.

The boat circled the island, slowing down for some of the cooler stuff and backing up into the grottos. The ride was smooth and mostly dry, but we were definitely glad we didn’t get in the tiny boat at the beginning of the day because the waves weren’t exactly small and it would’ve probably been wet and terrifying.

Then we went through this arch. Woooo!

We had made it halfway around the island, where we saw the Marina Piccola.

We then got the Green Grotto, where the water glows because of the way the sun hits it.

Then we passed the lighthouse where we had been earlier. I looked out for our friend, but I couldn’t see him.

And finally the boat came all the way back around to the Marina Grande, where we sat on the beach enjoying the weather for an hour or so before we caught the ferry back home to Sorrento.

Our ferry is the big one at the center of the picture.

After a delicious, cheap dinner, we headed back to the hostel to crash for the night. Quite an adventure already, but I still had to do Pompeii the next day before returning to Milan!