We waved goodbye to Stu and Margaret and headed south - well we didn't want to feel we were on the way home sooner than we needed to! First stop was Monopoli which is a nice old town with a little harbour. All along this coast are cliff top towns seemingly just about to fall into the sea, with the houises all just about built on top of each othert. Every so often there is a little sandy beach but the cliffs make for dramatic scenery.

Next we moved down to the very southern tip of Puglia where the scenery is similar except the cliffs are higher, and were entertained by macho types finding higher and higher points to jump into the sea from. I managed to persuade G not to join in, just! While we were down here we found a very Italian beach with everyone walking up and down and posing - I sat with my towel round me a la British of course.

But we have been learning a bit about the Italians from our observations: Every woman under 50 has long hair - I did see a could of girls with short hair but I expect they were french, so an easy life for hair dressers here! And they like it noisy - In every campsite thay have had what is called "animation" which is sort of Italianised red coats orgainising constant entertainment, most of which involves lots of noise. It wouldn't be so bad but they also seem to prefer really bad Euro pop music, that is when they are not singing My way on Karaoke! However, they are also very happy to help and get involved. Gordon always has a multitude of advisors when he is reversing the van here - though maybe that is just his reputation preceding him - and one good example was when we were trying to get an oil change done on the van in Lecce - its about due a service so we thought it would make sense to at least do that. We found the Peugot garage but a sign outside said it was closed for a week for holidays. This chap heard us complaining and said he'd show us a garage which would be able to do it for us. He set off on his scooter and we followed in the van and then he took G in to explain what we wanted - fantastic! Though after we'd had it done we then found that while we'd assumed 12000 miles for a service, the manual actually says 20000 so we needn't have bothered anyway! But never mind.

Off to the west coast and Basilicata/Capania next