There are few experiences more bizarre than waking up in the car of a near-complete stranger who doesn't even speak your language - but such are the circumstances, and it behooves one to roll with the circumstances when, dead tired from a 190 km sprint the previous day, one finds oneself in a small remote town up in the hills of Puglia at the mercy of a cadre of well-meaning middle-aged Italian men. Nothing to be done but accept it; we have assumed all the trappings of hobosity, save perhaps for the part about begging for money - and hopefully it will not come to that. We have at some points floated about the idea of setting up a roadside kitchen, selling portions of caprese salad or fresh-cooked pasta to anyone who cares to place their gastrointestinal destiny in the hands of two weary-looking travellers, one sporting an ever more unruly beard...
...but enough of such diversions; back to the garage in Ceglie Messapica where, at approximately 0740, a well-meaning middle-aged Italian man named Nicolas creaks open the door, the rays from the by-now-long-since-risen sun ending our surprisingly good sleep. We are ejected (politely, of course) into the streets of Ceglie, left to our own devices to make sense of an increasingly tangled web of facts that we hope will lead us to the World Peace Garden:
0) It is called the World Peace Garden. 1) It is on Trattoria Alfieri on Contrada Alfieri. 2) It is run by someone named Greg. 3) Contrada Alfieri is some 6 km out of town along the highway SP 23, which we think (but are not certain) we know the way to. 4) The number we have is actually for the office in town, which is at 17-19 Via Francesco Baracca.
We come up with a plan of attack:
0) Leave a note on the door telling them that we'll be in the main square. 1) Wait in the main square until 1300. 2) If nothing happens, find SP 23, ride out to Contrada Alfieri, and start asking around. 3) If that fails, ride on.
It is a last-ditch effort, to be sure - but we're not getting very far here, whereas we certainly have a host in Barletta...but, for now, our stubbornness exceeds our impatience, so here we are...
...but, before we can execute our master plan, there are some important matters of biochemistry to attend to. The plan itself we concoct over caffé e cornetto at a local bar - which is evidently nowhere near enough food to bridge the vast energy gap blown in our stomachs over yesterday's monstrously long ride, so we grab some pasta and vegetables and cook up a quick brunch in the nearby park. On the way, we run into yet another well-meaning middle-aged Italian man upon asking where we can find a decent map of Puglia; he points us down the road to this press/journal stand, which is in the direction of the park anyways...all that done, we head back to post the note and sit in the square - and are waylaid by the same man, who invites us into this café for cappucini. We spend some time attempting to explain our trip to him, along with why exactly we should find ourselves all the way out here on a Tuesday morning, in a mash of broken Italian sprinkled with English...but he rapidly loses interest in struggling through the language barrier and joins his friends outside, leaving us to strive for ever more hyperactive levels of caffeination...
...and we finally get to the office door about 1030, worried that perhaps we missed them already - but there is no evidence that anyone has been here, for our note from last night remains firmly affixed to the door. We shrug, head over to the square to wash dishes, and entrench ourselves in a position conducive to writing these massive blog posts...
...1245. We are getting restless. No sign of Greg or anyone else with any connection whatsoever to this World Peace Garden thing. Almost ready to throw in the towel on 1) and move on to 2), despite frequent warnings to the effect that the backroads around here are difficult to navigate - and then, out of nowhere, a woman comes bounding towards us exclaiming something in Italian that we mistranslate as "It's my house". Through the mess of syllables and frantic hand motions, we understand that we are to follow her, so we get up and move our bikes - and are quickly at the office, where we look around in confusion for a second. The same woman is still making gestures at us, but she is standing down the road - and then someone at last comes down from the office to greet us with the by-now welcome news that, yes, this is the office of the World Peace Garden and no, Greg is not in right now, but he will be within the next few days and yes, we can come up and sit down for a bit...
Success at last! Fiorella attends to some last-minute work as we take in the aesthetic of the World Peace Garden office: there are bookshelves full of tomes on ancient rituals and healing practices and herbs, a good number of multicoloured cloth-based items, a scent of incense wafting in from the main room, a series of hastily-scrawled words and glyphs drawn in crayon on the living room wall. Not the sort of space you often find yourself in as a technophile student of Computer Science...
...and we are off towards the farm, following Fiorella's car along the SP 23 (so we did have the rough direction down!) on bike to Contrada Alfieri, where we make a series of turns down increasingly smaller roads until at last we come to this deadbolted wooden gate. As we bike up the driveway, we come to something that looks like a hybrid between a standard house and the cone-topped trulli structures used for storage in these parts. We stow away our bikes, setting up our tent underneath a walnut tree down in the lower terrace of the garden...
...the rest of the afternoon passes slowly; Fiorella is back to the office to continue her work, while we are left to explore the garden on our own. There are walnuts and figs and almonds, a small patch of root vegetables, and some potted herbs near the main kitchen and house complex - but most of the lower terrace is consumed by rows of vines bearing juicy red and white grapes, grapes that we hope to harvest later this week. As the evening wears on, we decide to try our hand at cooking on the stove - but it is not what we are used to. When camping, we cook pasta first and store it in our airtight plastic container until the sauce is ready. This makes plenty of sense when limited to one burner - pasta dirties the pan far less than sauce - but no sense whatsoever in these circumstances. We also make the mistake of grabbing too many onions from the pantry; these are from a very limited stock of onions grown on premises, and are therefore intended to be used sparingly for flavour. Despite these mishaps, the pasta dish is delicious...
...and now it is time for bed, here among the dogs and walnuts and vines of the World Peace Garden. What strange and exciting things will the next week bring? What exactly is the 13 Moon Galactic Synchronometer? Questions, so many questions...