Milan Airport, where I spent an hour or so in transit, was certainly not the most attractive airport I’ve seen, given that it looks like it’s been dug out of a giant quarry, but it was on arrival in Rome that the real drama broke out. I was there to meet my mate, Kylie; experience had shown, however, that it could never have gone to plan, especially when arrangements were required at both ends.

For my part, I spent almost two hours at the luggage carousel waiting for my precious backpack before eventually being told that it had been zapped into oblivion somewhere. I’d just finished filling out a dozen forms describing every lost item and its approximate value (as though the hair straightener isn’t priceless!) when out of nowhere my bag materialised - sheer relief!

As for Kylz, midway through my agonising wait I’d received the following text message: ‘Before you read this, laugh. Because there’s a train strike. Got confused, got on wrong train. Am approx. 150km away on express to Florence. Sit tight.’

A less than ideal start, admittedly. But the trip – and Italy – was to make up for it.

My first taste of Italy and its delightfully friendly inhabitants came when I accidentally clunked a nice gentleman square in the head with my backpack somewhere over Milan. Having lived in Germany for some time and thus grown accustomed to daily abuse from various members of the public for daring break some social taboo or other, I hastily made to profess my apologies but before my mouth could finish its dying fish routine, he was already on his feet crying ‘Mi scusi, mi scusi bella, mi scusi!’ and checking if I was okay. If I was okay: I, who had just belted him about the head. How delightful.

The second thing that amused me no end was undeniable proof of that famous quick Italian temper. I was flying with Alitalia to Rome via Milan on one of those teensy little taxi planes with only two seats on the left and just one on the right of the aisle, and I had the misfortune of being seated by the window (good) next to an elderly Italian man whom I shall henceforth refer to as Nose Hair (bad).

Anyway, Nose Hair had piled all his junk onto my seat rather than put it in the overhead locker, and steadfastly refused to kindly remove either it or himself so that I could get past. Soon enough, the flight attendant, a fiery Italian lass, scolded him heartily in rapid Italian and continued to do so as she shoved all his stuff into various lockers, slamming them loudly and wagging her finger at him furiously.

Still he wouldn’t budge, so the attendant turned and stormed off in a huff, yelling still more abuse at him as she went, and I was left to literally climb over him to reach my seat. (But don’t worry, I made certain to give him a deft kneecap in the chin as I passed.)

Once in air though (after Nose Hair had crossed himself a dozen times, tinkled his rosary beads, prayed audibly then wailed loudly) all was forgotten, because the view over the Alps was just spectacular.

I promised myself I wouldn’t post any you-tube vids on here that weren’t deliriously funny enough to make me wet myself at least a little. But this guy - hell, I don’t even know what instrument he’s playing - gives me goosebumps. It’s a street scene you come across on every corner in Italy…there’s some line in here about urban areas coming alive etc., if only I could be arsed to pursue it.

Having established that money is necessary for survival, and that we were running essentially on empty yet unequivocally intended on surviving, we made the prudent and timely decision to jump the first ferry back to Italy, where Kylie’s apartment awaited.
For a small town, L’Aquila has a bit of a problem with noise.There’s the 12 howling kittens that have made a home for themselves on Kylie’s kitchen balcony (born to the cat formerly known as Mario, hastily renamed Maria after the event).

Then there’s the new cathedral bell-ringing boy who has a bit of a problem respecting the whole Catholic notion of restraint – he tends to get just a little bit too inventive every hour on the hour and the whole town is forced to stop and clap their hands over their ears to drown out his exuberant clanging.

But worst of all is the anti-busker. He’s made a home for himself on the street outside Kylie’s apartment: his weapon of choice, a broken set of bagpipes. Dead painful at any hour of the day, especially at his chosen period of 2–5am each and every morning.

‘Basta!’ Kylz bellows down at him. ‘Enough!’ To which he simply continues playing with one hand and stretches out his other for silence money. Hence the term ‘anti-busker’.

We refuse to bow to the pressure simply because of the principle of the thing…but our resolve is waning.

It appears that bargain digs for backpakers really are the flavour of the month - perhaps we should have checked out this option from Budget Globetrotting: how to stay in convents in Italy to maintain that shoestring budget…

Having gotten all whimsical about Croatia, we then pissed off elsewhere. Not by choice though.

For months I’d been stressing at every turn about my impending bankruptcy, flogging the little jam sachets from cafes and staving off scurvy by living on frozen bananas and soluble vitamins.

Kylie, on the other hand, my travelling companion who was based in L’Aquila, Italy, for the year – and who could charitably be described as vague at best – suddenly felt it prudent to mention casually over breakfast one morning, ‘Oh, what do you know – I only have 376.42 euros left in the bank.’

‘When’s that til then? Next week? Mid-August?’ I ask hopefully, though my better judgement tells me otherwise.
‘End of Feb next year,’ she replies, not looking concerned in the least.
‘It’s no problem,’ she shrugs. ‘I’ve already worked out an action plan. I’m going to loiter in the main piazza around lunch time and rescue all the rotten produce they throw out when the markets close.’
‘You could busk, I suppose,’ I suggested charitably. ‘You could have the folks send over a gum leaf to play. It’d be a novelty.’
‘I could join an orchestra. They give you cash for that.’
‘You can’t play an instrument. And the triangle doesn’t really play a pivotal role in symphonies.’
‘Well, I could join the chorus in the local theatre.’
‘L’Aquila doesn’t have a local theatre. And the last time you sang was on the ferry from Ancona and six children started crying.’
‘I could be a garbage man – I mean, girl. I could be in charge of recycling.’
‘Kylz, L’Aquila doesn’t DO recycling. Remember, it’s fifty years behind the rest of the developed world.’
‘I could work in catering.’
‘You can’t cook.’
‘What about public relations then?’
‘You don’t like people.’
‘I could be a nanny.’
‘The last kid you babysat almost got hit by a truck.’
‘I could work in a bar.’
‘You’d drink more than you’d sell. Bit counterproductive.’
‘I could beg outside the church.’
‘They might recognise you from when we stole that crucifix at Easter.’
‘But I could take communion every day – who needs more than bread and wine to function?’
‘You’re not even Catholic! You’d have to go to confession straight after and admit to fraudulent behaviour and theft.’
Here she pauses for a moment, twisting a brown curl around her index finger.
‘I’m royally screwed, aren’t I?’
‘Little bit, yes.’

There are some places you just can’t get away from fast enough. Others, like Croatia, you find it hard to let go of. I’ll be the first to admit it; the place really got under my skin.

In Rudine, staying at English Mark’s place, the weather was scorching. We lay for hours on end on the verandah, unable to move. Every evening, an elderly village woman would drop by to see if there was anything she could clean or cook for ‘Mister England’.

We’d find ourselves playing in the dirt in the baking sun with four-year old Croats (only after we made them put the guns away) from whom we were attempting to learn Croatian. One night at the sole café in town, we had one of those surreal moments with the locals that you sometimes stumble across in a foreign culture and utterly transcend the language barrier (otherwise known as an ice-cream fight).

Our most active periods were in the dead of the night when the weather cooled down to a bearable temperature. One night we trekked down to the water in the pitch dark to sleep on English Mark’s boat in the hope of catching some off-shore breeze.

‘Now, I’m not going to turn the flashlight on,’ English Mark had said, ‘because that will ruin your night vision’. The night sky was amazing – ‘The first star is always the North Star – unless its Venus, and that can just bollocks things right up.’

It’s not that the beaches are perfect white stretches of sand (they can be pretty rocky) or the island settlements are perfect little gingerbread villages (they’re more tumble-down than anything). But something about the place – maybe the fact that you can hitch into town and dine at the same restaurant that the Croatian president eats at for like $8 Australian, or that you can bump into the commander of the Italian navy at the beach bar, as we did, or that you can fashion your hedge into the shape of Roger Rabbit and the village kids will love it even though they’ve never even seen the cartoon - that just gets under your skin.

Any English speaker who can justifiably call themselves ‘travelled’ knows that one of the key features of the ex-pat circuit is the immediate best-matery that springs up between two strangers who’ve not heard English spoken in some time.

In Croatia, we met and befriended English Mark. Predictably, English Mark hailed from England; ergo, we were instant buddies. We spent a week at his place in Rudine, a tiny village on Hvar Island that had been not just English speaker-free but also electricity-free, sewerage system-free and, not surprisingly, Mars Bar-free until very recently.

English Mark worked in property, making deals across the Balkans that may or may not have been legit; we never could really tell. His phone conversations, which we unashamedly eavesdropped on – and I openly took notes of – tended to go like this:

‘I’m sure it’s a beaut deal, Mr Tjyhgvgrybncjkvbic, and legal-ish, it’s just that I’ve never really known anyone before who owned a minefield…’ And later: ‘I know the church technically owns the land that the village people have been farming for centuries…but I just think that suing the Catholic Church is probably not that great for karma…’

English Mark has since married a ‘city’ girl (ie. form Split), which we were relieved to hear, because it always seemed more likely he’d be knocked off by a local father for tampering with their daughters than leave of his own accord.

Since I’m currently on about Croatia - and, to pre-empt my next post, which will likely feature the highly esteemed traveller’s practice of bludging accommodation - here’s a link to a failed attempt at doing so. A note to Girl Travels World: you should have been more forceful. Never let your well-brought-up sensibilities get in the way of free accommodation…

Lots of guidebooks – which, admittedly, are often known for their bum steers – advise that young females traveling alone in Croatia should exercise discretion as they may encounter (male) hostility. After a few days in the country we felt, though – history aside – that the Croats might need to work on their menace a bit. I’ve felt more threatened by a rolling pin.

Walking from the ferry port up to our rented apartment on the first day, we were feeling pretty disgusting. We’d barely slept in 48 hours (well, not comfortably), definitely hadn’t showered in as long, and were cranky, dirty and sweaty as we lugged our packs up a hill in 38 degree heat.

Suddenly a group of four or five local guys spotted us and started whistling and calling out the usual sleazy ‘bella’s etc (but in Croatian obviously).

I don’t know what reaction they were expecting but it sure wouldn’t have been the one they got. Having reached absolutely the end of our tethers, we stopped in our tracks, dumped our packs unceremoniously at our feet, and let fly.

The sanitised version went something like this: ‘Are you ****ing SERIOUS?! These legs have not been shaved since last summer! How bloody desperate can you BE?” The guys, who clearly spent their entire monthly wages on hair gel, looked taken aback for all of about two seconds then said “Oh. Do you need some help with your bags then?”

Instead we heaved our packs back on with as much dignity as we could muster and marched off grimly, stepping over dead cats and grubby children in doorways as we passed. So much for menace.