Being near, being by, being on-in-under the water simply makes my heart soar.  It always has.  My whole torso tightens and lightens in anticipation; I become a walking, almost skipping contradiction of jittery elation and beatified calm.  A grin plays at the corners of my mouth, in fact usually it bursts forth uncontrollably, to elicit a certain warmhearted bepuzzlement from strangers.  My chest bubbles and foams and my throat constricts and I can feel that underlying quartzpulse behind my heartbeat crackle and accelerate, supercharged by the smell and the sparkle and the sheer blue green grey black freedom of the water.

 

So, dear reader, you can reasonably assume that the bus ride up the winding mountain shores of Lake Como was a toddlerish feast of unselfconscious glee… and possibly a journey of some concern those other passengers whose view of the glinting waves and pre-Alpine villages was obscured by two-hundred-and-something-pounds of bouncing, giggling, 30 year old manchild.  But the drive did have to attend on my usual maladministration and incompetence.

 

Nobody I had met to date had much good to say about Milan (although since they’d all omitted to mention Da Vinci’s Last Supper I might with hindsight revalue and devalue their advice) so I decided to head straight to the lakes.  In April over drinks in Rio, some old uni friends had insisted that the trip to Como would repay the investment of time, so using airport wifi I booked myself into the Lake Como Beach Hostel and set out following the hostelbookers instructions. Bus to the domestic terminal, metro to the train station, train to Serrano, train to Como, bus to Doma…. oh.  What do you mean, “it’s 9.30pm and the last bus to Domaso was an hour ago”?  What do you mean “it’s fifty kilometres away a taxi would cost E100??”.  What do you mean “No, you can’t sleep in the train station”???

 

Lake Como, it turns out, is rather bigger than I had understood.  Shaped like an inverted lowercase y, the town of Como itself sits at the foot of the bottom-left fork and Domaso is towards at the apex of the tail (hat?), two hours away by bus.  Hotels in Como (pretty, tranquil, and long famous for some of the best silk in the world) are expensive, and hostels are rare.  The Respau Eco-Hostel, a converted 11th century monastery, looked promisingly local but lost late and wifiless beyond the patio of the pub which was providing my connection to hostelbookers, I reneged on my principles and ordered a cab.

 

E13 later I was dropped off at a unlit stone archway framing a steeply-rising cobbled street.  The driver and a small plastic sign declared that the hostel lay “a little way” up this street, which was inaccessible by car.  It was also, after the first 100 yards, totally unlit.  Now… a little dramatic licence is tempting here.  Utter solitude throughout the half-hour hillclimb in inky blackness?  Battery failing on the phone which provided the only weak illumination of the road ahead?  Distant howling – or worse, nearby rustling – in the forest-covered mountains? Sadly not.  Just a couple of German cyclists who joined me on the trek to the summit after about ten minutes.  But it was, nonetheless, bloody dark,  bloody weird, and bloody scary for those first minutes, and had I not turned around to greet them and had they not been returning to the hostel at which they were staying, I don’t know whether my nerve would have held, or whether I would have convinced myself I’d taken a wrong turn, plausibly denying under cover of navigational incompetence what was in truth a primal fear of the unknown dark.

 

But after arriving drenched in sweat from the climb with my pack, I was resuscitated by water and wine from the charming Francesco, who also provided a lift down the mountain after breakfast the next morning.  (This is categorically not a story of breakfasts, but I will never excuse Francesco for providing, for my first cup of truly Italian coffee, a packet of Nescafe Instant).  I had planned to travel by boat to Domaso but the right bus was just leaving, so I got my first, and (see above) increasingly gleeful view of Lake Como from its windows as we wound further and further north along the shore.

 

On that day, in that mood, under sun so bright that even the halfmoon shone in the sky at midday, Lake Como looked almost fictionally beautiful.  On either side of the lake the pre-Alps rise sharply, their foothills butchered into agricultural terraces in the small hinterlands of each little town.  Every few miles these sit, fishing by the water’s edge, nestled around miniature bays.  They don’t have the chocolate-box quality you’d find across the border a hundred miles north, but personally I prefer the earthier and more limited Italian palette over its Swiss counterpart.  Gorgeously, hilariously Italian names, too – Cernobbio, Argegno, Menaggio, Bellagio –  it all sounds like a puppet show.  My grandfather, whose three-year stay in Italy in the 1940s was neither as enjoyable nor as consensual as mine is proving, always held that to speak Italian one simply needed to”add an o”.  George, it seems you were right.

 

In Domaso I sunbathed, I swam, I kayaked, I hillwalked, and I drank a terrible, bitter, campari-and-prosecco Aperol Spritz (“go on, it’s a local delicacy“).  Over light and tasty pizza I got into a fascinating discussion with some otherwise-normal San Fransiscans as to whether or not the world was 6000 years old, but we all went skinnydipping by moonlight after dinner and wine, so maybe I’m losing my Dawkinsian abrasiveness.  I got excessively stoned on the hostel balcony, and spent an hour gazing into the Milky Way, musing on whether any life could possibly be of any value that didn’t contribute to mankind’s eventual step into the stars.  And I broke my shoe.  Not on the balcony, you understand. I was still listing Domaso-based-activities.

 

On the Friday, from the bus and from the lakeside, the water was blue.  OhmygodlookhowBLUEitis blue.  That night, invisibly black.  On Saturday morning though under cloudy skies it was the colour of uncut jade, and choppy.  The windsurfers I’d been able to overtake by shoulder power alone the previous day would have left me splintered in their wake had I crossed their paths that morning, so land-based activities seemed best.  A sweat-drenched, soon-shirtless walk up the steep hillside and along a quaint winding path to the next town took three hours, and soon saw off both my hangover and the clouds, and by the time I boarded the ferry to Bellaggio the water was blue and inviting once again.

 

The town after which the casino is named is known as the pearl of Lake Como.  It sits at the point of bifurcation looking out over all three spurs of the water from a sprawling collection of settlements old and new, most of which I didn’t have time to see.  The oldest part of town is closest to the lake though, and I spent a very pleasant two hours between ferry arrival and bus departure seeing old churches and superb restaurants, and the hotel from the lakeside scene in Casino Royale, and delightful artisan shops and unaffordable designer clothes shops and botanical gardens and sidestreets so steep that every step, was a step.  One could spend a lot of time – and a lot of money – in Bellagio.  I though caught the bus to Como, and then the train to Milan, and found myself by nightfall in somewhat less salubrious surroundings.

 

Fourteen years ago I spent a different 48 hours by a different lake, which count among the happiest of my life.  It was a time of two exhilarating  ‘firsts’ for me as a young man: unforgettable, 50mph jetskiiing the diurnal one; and a Motown-voiced Jewish American Princess called Sarah a pivotal participant in the nocturnal.  Hard to top that, as lakeside experiences go.  But these two days by the shores of Como have come mighty close.  Ultimately, after swimming and kayaking and glorious sundrenched ferry rides I’m more inclined than ever to agree with Ratty:

 

“It’s the only thing,” said the Water Rat solemnly as he leant forward for his stroke. “Believe me, my young friend, there is nothing—absolute nothing—half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats.” ‘