As one of our free weekend trips, we decided to travel to Ponza, an Island in the Tyranian Sea. If you have the chance to travel there, I definitely recommend it. Ponza is a small island, about 5 miles long and 1.5 miles wide. The ocean surrounding it is a beautiful turquoise color, and is so clear that you can see the bottom.
The lady that we were renting our house from told us about a specific boat captain that took people out for tours, and so on our first day, we went out and got pizza and set out to find the captain. When we found him, we learnt that he (like most people in Ponza) spoke no English. Luckily, one of the girls that was with us spoke quite a bit of Italian, so she could translate for us.
Our driver took us on a two hour long tour of the Island, periodically stopping the boat and allowing us to swim. The best part of the day was when he stopped at a ginormous natural stone arch. He told us that the arch and the bay that it was in was known as the most beautiful part of Ponza, and it was definitely beautiful. We jumped off of the boat and swam for a while, and then decided to swim through the arch. We swam around for a while and later climbed the arch and jumped off into the water. The water had such a high salt content that instead of sinking to the bottom after I jumped off, I sank in to about my shoulders and then bobbed right back up to the surface.
That night, we told the rest of the people that went with us to Ponza about what we had done that day, and we decided to take another tour the next day with all 18 of us to the nearby island of Palmarola.
When we woke up the next morning, it was raining, but the boat captain said that it would still be alright to go. We all got in his boat and started the one and a half hour drive to Palmarola, in the middle of a small storm. When we were halfway there, the waves were huge and our captain came back to ask us if we were doing ok—and then we realized that he wasn’t driving the boat. Little did we know, the captain had recruited one of our friends from the trip to drive the small boat through the middle of the ocean in the middle of a storm. That would not have happened in America! When we finally got to Palmarola, the sky started to clear and it stopped raining, so after the boat was anchored we got off and swam while our captain cooked us a lunch of pasta with red sauce and fish before heading back to Ponza so that we could catch the ferry home.
Ponza was undeniably the most beautiful place that I have ever seen in my life, and I will most definitely be going back there the next time that I visit Italy.
