After exploring Vietri sul Mare we took the bus to Cetara, a super tiny village, just a few kilometers away from where we were. Once we hopped off the bus it took us roughly 15 minutes to get acquainted with the place.
Cetara is a charming fishermen village that consists of several streets, a few restaurants, a grocery shop, a bar, a kiosk and a bunch of other small stores. And, of course, a beautiful, secluded beach which boasts its own sighting tower built around 1500.
Cetara is also very famous for the local production of ‘colatura di alici’: dripping of salted anchovies. It was in my to do list to try it with a portion of spaghetti but I had such a strong migraine that I could only eat something as light as only the fresh fried fish can be. I guess the degustation of la colatura will be postponed until the next visit.
Everything was perfect until we decided to go back to Salerno. The bus passes every hour and we had decided to take the one at 15:45. Too bad there was only one place in Catara that sells tickets and it was closed for lunch break from 12:45 to 17:00 (this sounds more like lunch, nap and beach time break to me but whatever). The locals suggested that we bought the tickets on board paying a surcharge. This was perfectly fine for us. But it wasn’t for the driver. Not only he arrived (and left) 7 minutes before schedule but he told us that he doesn’t sell tickets, he doesn’t care and that this was not his problem. And he left us behind.
This meant that if we wanted to travel regularly we had to wait until 17:45. Thanks but no thanks.
We then approached the traffic cop who we saw was browsing up and down the town in his car, apparently with nothing urgent to do, and asked him if he could drive us, but he couldn’t. He, instead, talked to a couple of locals ad handed us the number of the one and only local taxi. Peitro, the driver, told us that he could take us to Salerno but not before 18:00 as he was in other coastal town at that moment. Yikes!
We also tried hitchhiking but it lasted around three cars. I think we need to be more desperate in order to do it efficiently.
At the end we did what we should have done with the previous bus. We got on without tickets and without saying anything to the driver. Half an hour later we were back to the civilazation in Salerno.
For the future I will definitely know that I need to buy everything in advance.
A presto, Cetara! Next time you won’t fool me!
What a beautiful place to be stuck at?! Amazing photos 🙂