The white town

Traveling around had been quite easy so far.  Most of the places we wanted to visit were within a half an hour drive.  The drives were calm and scenic, and the roads were generally good.  The only blemish to all of this were the terrifyingly badly designed highway on-ramps which provided no time or space at all the actually merge onto the traffic.  It seemed to create a horror scene each time with cars trying to accelerate onto the highway and cars trying to avoid them.  I entered each time with fear and learnt quickly to stay on the outside lane whenever I saw one of the on-ramps.

For our next visit, we decided to go to the nearby town of Ostuni.

This was one of the famous "white cities" of the region. With most of the buildings painted in white paint, these towns stood out amongst their surroundings.  Ostuni was even more special.  The town was higher up in the hills, and the town itself was built around the top of the hill.  It made Ostuni look like singular complex castle structure rising out of the ground.  

Inside, the town was a series of tight and winding alleys and streets.  Much like the other towns in the area, it was all maze and labyrinth-like, but here there was the added fun of the steep slopes and stairs that needed to be navigated.  It was a beautiful place to visit, but with the stroller we had to be extra careful to not slip on all the stones polished by the shoes of countless tourists.

 

We wandered through the town, we had a nice lunch, we changed baby Pickle.  It was a calm and relaxing exploration of a beautiful place.  As nice as it was to explore, I felt that this town was probably better to visit fro the "outside".  From the outside and the nearby "modern" part of the town it was an impressive looking place. From the inside, it was still beautiful, but certainly not as unique.  It shared many of the qualities of the other nearby towns without necessarily having any particular unique feature.

Before we left, I took us down to the top of the "walls".  There was a wide road that ran on top of the first wall and at the base of the first level of buildings.  From this point, there was a completely unobstructed view across the plains and towards the ocean.  I had tried several times to get to this point from within the town, but each attempt to walk down I had hit a dead-end or enormous sets of stairs that were too much for me to navigate with baby Pickle's stroller.  I was only once we had left the old town and started walking down that I found the path that took us out towards to this road. 

It was a big and open area.  Surprisingly, it was almost completely deserted of people.  There was a small cafe built into the base of one of the enormous buildings and so we ordered so coffees to enjoy the wide open space.  With the small wall on one side and the buildings on the other side, this seemed to be the best space to let baby Pickle run around safely.