Settling in at Livigno

The flight was utterly uneventful and I watched "Mad Max - Fury Road" which I can now confirm is a total waste of time even on a flight where there is not much else to do.  If you had to delete car chase scenes and things blowing up out of the movie it would be reduced to a 5 minute wast of time instead of a 90 minute waste of time.

Going through immigration was interesting; Caron and I walked straight through but it took Carl and Kirsten about 10 minutes to get through.  We thought that they were having some problem but we weren't going back to associate ourselves with them just in case an arrest was imminent.  One does have to be careful with family.

We had hired a mini bus which is a small bus as opposed to one of the ubiquitous taxi's that we have in South Africa which we found quite easily and then we were off through the dark misty streets of Zurich to find Gary and Laurie who had arrived in Zurich a couple of days before.  We thought that the driver was definitely lost when we pulled up at an apartment block which was clearly being renovated but it turned out that it was only the first floor or two and Gary and Laurie were above that in quite a nice apartment.  Carl and I wondered if Gary had brought his work with him to Zurich but he denied this.

 The shot above was taken at 08:00 in the morning ... note the bright sunshine outside!

The trip took us about 3 hours through green valley floors, past beautiful lakes and snow covered peaks.  Really, really beautiful.  We stopped for a small break at the top of a pass which was completely snowed under and we were all getting excited only to have the driver, Marco, tell us that Livigno didn't look anything like this.  Going up the snow lined pass and down the other side was hair raising given our previous experience of driving on roads that have compacted snow on them instead of on the tar itself but Marco drove very carefully as did all the other cars and we had no real bad moments.

Livigno, it turns out, looks much like AfriSki in that there are brown grass covered mountains with some strips of white where they have manufactured snow and opened a few pistes.  Not quite the white blanket of my imagination but I think there will be enough to keep us busy for a while.

Most of the afternoon was spent doing the grocery shopping but by five it was dark and after a more or less sleepless night we were all really tired so we tried to grab a pizza for supper.  The first place laughed and said that they were only open at 19:00 so we found another place and like previous trips the food is just fabulous.  I could order the same dish in Johannesburg and it would not taste half as good; I don't know how they do it but it just tastes better here - much better than what we can get in johannesburg.  After we had asked for the bill a round of limoncello shots just arrived which we had to down in celebration of being here.  Rather a nice way to end off the meal and not as sweet as some of the other limoncello's that we have had.

By 20:00 the eyelids were drooping and after a great shower we retired to read until the sleep buzzards arrived to carry me off.