The roads into Italy are not well maintain as those in Switzerland, cycled through very long and dark tunnels at the bottom of the alps, felt like pedalled for my life to get out of the dangerous tunnels.
Was easy to find place to stay in Domodossola – a guy cycle parallel to me while we were cycling around town looking for place to stay, he said follow him if we want B&B, we did and turn out to be very nice self service apartment, that’s was a quick sale!
Lake Como was beautiful, everyone dressed up very nicely and we were the but it’s surrounded by mountains, so its hard to cycle out of the city.
Camped in someone’s field once, because it was dark and we couldn’t find any other quieter places to camp, so have to sneak pass farmer’s house and camp on the corner can’t be be seen from the house. Obviously we went to the bar have a drink and wait until it’s dark to have courage to do that.
Got lost outside Bergamo and helped by an Italian cyclist, he showed us a nice and quiet route, and kept the lakes on our left, we followed a bit but somehow cycled passed a long uphill tunnel and very steep mountains, fortunately the downhill was really swift.
It was dark when we arrived in Vicenza. Saw Chinese bar, I went to talk to them and had very good food there, the owner seems pretty cool and said we can camp outside his bar after 2am. We couldn’t wait that long so we have move on after 11 and kept cycling, then a guy(Simone) on bicycle asked us where we going etc and offer us to camp on his garden, and showed us a nice and quite cycling route to next town.
Saw the sea for the first time in this trip, we abandon our bike on the beach and ran into the sea immediately after that, it felt so good to be able to swim again.
Was thinking stop at a small village for a snack, but there are very friendly locals chatted to us, we ended up drinking with them and followed the local drink rules – not sure how it works, but the idea is you have two hands and you need two drinks in hands all the time, and can’t stop drinking! From speaking to them, it seems the whole town and the near by areas are heavy relied on tourism and people only work a few months in the summer and still felt the impact from the financial crisis.