wtr bfflo

Italy

Water buffalo.
A tower of wheat. What else
Does one need in life?

We rode down the hill from Appolosa one last time with Massimo on his way to work, and we had a quick conference about the route for the day. It is supposed to be easy to get to Bari in a couple days from here: it's only mountainous for a while, and there are many places of interest along the way. We put all our things back in order and biked to Benevento in a fairly short amount of time.

We hoped to score a few extra tubes, since we haven't replenished our stock in some time, so we stopped at a bike shop in town. Unfortunately, they didn't carry the right size (the shop specialised in racing bikes and the appropriate smaller tubes), but more important than anything we could have bought at the shop was a chance meeting with a fellow named Gerardo. He hails from... Boston. Hooray, a chance to speak English!

We chatted with Gerardo, who is in the area for a short time before starting a bike trip around Greece (he and his family are originally from a town near Benevento called Passo di Mirabella). He gave us an alternate route to Bari, which heads... well, further south than we thought we'd like. Massimo was careful to point out a route that is generally fast and flat along more major-ish roads, and Gerardo's route was more meandering, with several hard, hard climbs sprinkled through it. It looked generally longer, but we noted it down on our map, anyway.

That wasn't the best part. He told us that a festival would be happening near his hometown, and that it would involve two things: water buffalo and a tower of wheat. Despite the fact that attending this festival meant covering only 30 or 40 kilometres for the day, we immediately determined that it was a brilliant plan. We took his directions down and headed out of town. We headed out, er, the wrong way, but we corrected it by climbing over an excessively steep hill unnecessarily. Solution: cyclist legs.

Some creative navigation over streets not visible on our maps eventually found us on the right road towards Mirabella, and to celebrate we stopped in a café for slushies. They also had... internet! We decided to check for sure where the WWOOF farm was. We had unfortunately been labouring under the impression that it was in Bari... but it turns out to be near Ceglia Messapica, which is a full 90km south of Bari. Crap.

With our goal suddenly extremely modified, we decided that it's probably better to take Gerardo's route southward through the twisting mountains. It doesn't matter, anyway, since we can't really get anywhere until tomorrow. Anyway!

We arrived at the edge of Mirabella, and there stood a church. Some kind of hubbub was about, and people were wearing brightly-coloured shirts and seemed to be waiting for something. We tied our bikes up in front of the church and headed into the bar to try two Italian specialties we had been putting off trying: Campari soda and grappa. Of note: grappa is good when you have good grappa. I had previously tried some that was less-than-delicious, but this glass was nice and rather like whisky.

Suddenly! Water buffalo! They were being... led up the stairs? In pairs? Who cares? We care! We followed them as they paraded through all of Mirabella, gathering a band and a large crowd of people as they went. Along the route, someone sang Ave Maria, and someone else laid flowers on an altar of the church of Maria Dolorosa. We took pause in another bar as the lumbering buffalo fell behind us to try the third drink we hadn't yet: limoncello. Some of the local kids decided to strike up a conversation with us, and we learned that we'd been spotted in Naples a couple days previously. That was a strange thing to hear. :)

Also during the walk, we were stopped or moved several times by local people trying to get photos or videos that featured us in appropriately good lighting. That was strange, too; we were local stars for a few hours. One man in particular even came up to us and asked, in Italian, if we speak Italian. When we answered that it was only a little, he decided that that was enough, and he set up microphones and a video camera to interview us briefly. We decided that he was our personal videographer.

Eventually, the procession wound up at a large tower which was made of wheat. Please look at the photos and try to understand, dear reader, because I simply don't know that I can explain this one. It was several stories tall, and was in fact supporting the weight of several people inside. Fireworks were set off (strangely, many of them were actual fireworks as opposed to just noise-makers, and we could see vestiges of coloured sparks coming off into the daylight), and at 15h the tower began to move.

There were hundreds of people tugging on ropes at all sides of the tower, trying to stabilise the thing while it rumbled behind the hard-working water buffalo. We helped! One of the photos (taken by our personal videographer) is quite nice.

We actually took a break in the middle of the multi-hour tower moving epic trip to move our bicycles from one end of town to the other for easier access. En route to a new parking place, we were intercepted by some more local kids who asked about our trip. We told them a bit, and they gifted us with pistachios for the road and a couple sips of beer in passing. Yum!

Our bikes parked, we got back to the tower-moving nonsense for a while, but gave up shortly and wandered off to find a cotton candy vendor we'd seen earlier in the day, since our stomachs were beginning to rumble. Along one of the streets, we stumbled across our friend Gerardo! We talked to him some more: he was there with his family to see the festival and the tower and the vendors, and we decided to walk around with them.

As the night wore on, he asked if we had a place to stay yet. We admitted that we were just planning to camp outside town after we left the festival, and he immediately said that we were cordially invited to stay with him and his family at their big house a few kilometres away. Excited about this prospect, we continued enjoying the fair (there was some live music and a lot of stuff-vendors) with the group for the evening, talking a lot to Gerardo about his bike-tripping style and whether he had any tips for the relatively-new adventurers. At the end of the evening, we followed their car home, arriving to the place some time after dark.

Gerardo was so kind; he filled us with bread and olive oil, local mozzarella, fruit (they have fig trees!), local wine (amusingly, some land that his family owns is rented to farmers for the price of some wine), tomatoes from the garden, green tea... Delicious pre-sleep food. We talked more about bikes and photos and maps, and after showers we are ready for sleep. In a bed!