The Adventures of Doug and Bec: Venice

The place we were staying in Venice was a new experience for us on this trip. It was called Jolly Camping and was basically a big camping area on the mainland just across from Venice. It service campers, mobile homes and backpackers with permanent cabins and tents. When we arrived at about 10:30pm it was packed! The entrance area was full of young backpackers, many in swimmers, drinking beer and cocktail buckets. We soon noticed the Busabout, Intrepid, Contiki and Top Deck tour buses all parked there!

Despite how packed it was there, it was definitely the place to stay. They had a 25 metre pool, restaurant, bar, mini-store and a shuttle bus in and out of Venice. Our first two nights were in a permanent tent which had three beds in it (we had it al to ourselves) and the only issue was it got a little loud and got hot at about 8am.. which in hindsight was a good thing as it made us get up and see Venice!

After our first night… which was a little restless due to the loudest snorer ever and some girls talking in an adjacent tent until 2am… we got ready to head into Venice. During the morning we met two girls, one of who were quite ill, and after giving them some medicine we had with us they gave us their island tour tickets for that afternoon which were worth about $30 each as they felt too unwell to go and do it. So with tickets in hand we headed into Venice for the day.

After some lunch and a few hours walking around the beautiful canals of Venice we made our way to the port and boarded the boat at about 2:30pm for a three hour cruise. The cruise took us to three of the surrounding islands where we saw some amazing glass blowing, visited some ancient buildings and visited some markets all with commentary about the history of the islands. The cruise was good, but a little hard to enjoy as much as we should have as it was edging on 40 degrees and we were exhausted! But free tickets are still free tickets! Once back in Venice we had an amazing pizza dinner (one of many to come) and headed back out to the camp site.

Our second day in Venice and we head back into the city for half the day as it was way too hot to spend the whole day in there. We oringinally planned to take a Gondola ride through the canals but ended up not doing it for the following reasons.

· It is EXPENSIVE! 80 Euro during the hot part of the day for 40 minutes and 120 Euro for 30 minutes in the afternoon or evening!
· It was way too hot to be out on a shiny black boat.
· The boat owners were not actually very nice! Well the ones we met anyway and we heard later people saying how their boat drivers were ‘pricks’.

We decided instead to have a nice lunch and head back to the camp site and relax around the pool for the afternoon – a much better solution. If anyone is going to Venice I would recommend getting a late afternoon Gondola if it’s hot and get a group of 6 people to split the costs.

Our last day in Venice and we had a 4pm bus to Florence so we spent the better part of the day lounging around the pool having a beer, food and reading books. The bus ride from Venice to Florence was about 5 hours and included a 45 minute stop in some random place… not sure where… but this gave us a good chance to get some dinner as we would be arriving pretty late in Florence.