Saturday's bus problem

Saturday 11th May, continued

After a thorough investigation of the necropolis we strolled back into Tarquinia town. There had not been many people at the burial site but it was even quieter here. It seems that between 1pm and 4pm everyone stops for a (delicious smelling) long lunch and / or a nap (this is one of the things that most appeals to me about living in a Mediterranean country. Everything was shut now - happily apart from the ice-cream shop - it must have been low season as even the bars and restaurants appeared to be on a break. So we refreshed ourselves with a gelato: coffee + pistachio for Matt and cinnamon + orange for me. 

Nature report 3

• Tarquinia has embraced the concept of a park for dogs on one side of the road and a park without them on the other side. I greatly approve of this type of canine apartheid. 
• We saw someone training a duckling (or maybe a gosling) in their front garden. At least this was the most plausible explanation of what they were doing. 
• Amazing lizard spotting today.
  
  Including some big green ones and one with a green body and brown tail. They are very camera shy.
• Like Cannes, Tarquinia is pleasingly free from seagulls (it's not very far from the sea) but it does have a pigeon issue. They seem to enjoy living in nooks in old walls. Fortunately we both avoided getting pooed on (although apparently this is lucky so maybe we weren't so fortunate after all.
• In the three hour shut down the only notable homo-sapien nature we observed was the occasional passage of a Boy Scout or Girl Guide (or whatever the local equivalent is) and an elderly man singing loudly outside a church. I don't think he was drunk, just happy. I think I would sing loudly too if I lived somewhere as lovely as Tarquinia.

We wandered in the town a bit more. It was one of those lovely places with an old building or beautiful view around each corner. I think I got an impression of what Italy would have been like in the 1950s, only now there were more parked cars and fewer mopeds. 

As the afternoon wore on we decided that we should make our way back to the ship. There would have been much worse places to be stuck than Tarquinia but we didn't fancy our chances of catching up with the ship in Corsica. The lady in the tourist information explained that we could get the small bus at 1700 or the big bus at 1620. It was 1615 and for this earlier bus we would have to buy tickets in advance at the tobacconist (they may be advanced with dog division, but not with bus ticket provision), so Matt waited at the bus stop to hold up the bus should it arrive and I dashed off to buy the tickets. By 1650 the bus had not turned up. We mused over the possibilities:

• this was one of the rarest of occasions in Italian public transport and the bus was running ahead of schedule
• the bus driver had overslept during his (or her) nap and/or overeaten (or possibly over drunk) during his (or her) lunch break
• the bus didn't actually exist at all and was merely a racket to make unsuspecting travellers buy tickets for journeys that will never happen.

At 1700 the big bus still hadn't turned up and we decided to cut our touristical Euro losses and get the small bus (that turned up on time) back to the port.