Friday in the Park with Czechs

16/06/07
On the road again. I left Praja this morning, and am now on a train to Reggio di Calabria. Yesterday was another good day. Originally, I was told that there was another group that was going to go rafting, so I was going to tag along. However, the plan got changed to an off-road Jeep tour, which ended up being splendid! I had thought that Martina had told me to be ready to leave the hostel at 9:00, but as she handed me a bowl of cornflakes at about twenty till, she said, "you've probably already missed your train by now." So I wolf down the cereal, grab my bag and start hoofin' it to the station. As I'm rounding the first bend that overlooks the sea, a car stops beside me. I'm thoroughly sketched out at first, but then I see the driver is Martina's father! He's driving a friend downtown and offers to drop me off near the station. So I get there in plenty of time to catch the train to Scalea, the next town over. I call Oreste, the guy who runs the rafting/Jeep adventure group, and he says that a Jeep will be over in ten minutes. When it arrives, the driver introduces himself as Francesco, and we chat as we wait for Oreste to bring the other group. They arrive, a family of six that I assumed must be German, and we split up between the Jeeps to get ready to start. I'm in the covered Jeep with Francesco and the grandparents. Pretty soon, we're into the farmland, and then a broad, shallow river. Yes, into the river. They really do mean "fuoristrada". We meander through some beautiful and striking scenery - farms, forests and mountains - with Francesco sometimes driving a little bit off the path to give us a 30°+ angle thrill. We stop and take a short walk up to a waterfall - cool, clear and refreshing. Then, Oreste picks a long blade of grass and loops it up to show us how to catch a lizard. He gets one hooked and plays with it for a while before letting it go. We drive back down, then, and stop by a botanical garden, where there are all the different trees of the national park, except the one that symbolizes the region. I saw a picture of it later - a gnarled, old curmudgeon that grows in the rocks at the mountaintops and lives for centuries, if not millennia. Imagine that. And then as contrast, there are tiny little trees marked with plaques that commemorate the birth of every child in the local town.
We then head off to a mountain town where Oreste, Francesco and I each get an ice cream as the family (who I'm beginning to suspect are not German - their language sounds more Slavic, but Russian doesn't seem right, either) continues to document their whole experience with two video cameras and other still-photo cameras. We ascend to a little grotto with a Madonna statue, and then another hillside takes us to a giant cross with a fantastic panorama. Heading back, I'm in the open Jeep with Oreste, the grandparents and the father, and we are then joined by one of the two daughters. And after a journey of about three hours, Oreste brings me back to the station. The whole time he and I had been using both English and Italian to communicate, but then he said something to me that I couldn't understand. Catching himself, he says, "ah! Now I'm speaking in Czech to you!" So, that's where the family must have been from! Oreste knew probably just enough Czech to say "let's go!" and tell them how much they owed him (which I later found out was more than what I paid - Martina made sure that I got a special rate).
After returning to Praja, I decide to find the church in the mountainside before heading back to the hostel. It takes a bit of wandering the back streets of town, but I finally spot the stairs leading up to the sanctuary - a church that is literally housed in three connected, spacious caverns. I spend a short time there by myself and then descend back down and walk to the hostel.
In the evening arrives Josh, a cute 29-year old who has been spending the last couple of months traveling in Spain and Italy. He, Grace and I have dinner while Martina has yogurt (I swear, I can't deal with these girls and their weight/eating issues any more) and we discuss all the dubiously legal ways that one can extend one's travels around Europe beyond the three months that your traveler's visa allows. Grace and Martina were fine with the idea, but Josh seemed like too much of the classic good Jewish boy to want to risk it. I probably wouldn't, either. Grace still can't walk very well, but the other three of us went out to use Martina's grandmother's dial-up internet, and then we end up in the main square where there's a dance performance going on with a stage decorated with images from Alice in Wonderland. They all seem to be local performers, and some of them aren't too bad, including the girl who was the Alice character, who Martina said was her best friend. We mill around a bit and meet the new mayor! He seems friendly, and Josh was in a bit of a shock to have met the mayor hanging out in the piazza. But, that's just how it goes in an Italian town of 6000 people. It was an interesting place, and Martina's an interesting girl, but now it's time to move on to see what these next few days have in store.