Unbelievable Sup Experience in Empty Venice Canals // S05E14

We've just spent the past few days exploring the incredible Dolomite Mountains, being isolated and surrounded by nature. We tried Via Ferrata for the first time and got adrenaline pumping in the Italian high Alps. Now we're dropping down from altitude and temporarily abandoning our trusty Kombi because where we're going, we don't need roads. I can't believe how empty it is here in Venice, this is probably the best time to come because not only is it kind of off-season, but it's a Covid thing, nobody's travelling here, so it's pretty dead, which is nice because I think it would be pretty crowded otherwise but I could enjoy it. With far fewer people visiting this major tourist hotspot in 2020, the waters are now quieter and less polluted than ever. Did you know that Venice's population peaked back in the 1950s at 175,000 people? Now it's a very different picture, most of the locals have moved out, Venetian homes are now Airbnb rentals, making it Italy's highest Airbnb to population ratio. The local population has now fallen to around 50,000, which is actually below the threshold to be considered a city in Italy. Still, there is something magical about this city which in any other year would draw over 10 million visitors. For the first time in too long, Venetians are now able to appreciate the slow pace of their beautiful, unique city. If we're honest, travel in 2020 has been more restrictive than we typically like, but every cloud has a silver lining and being able to enjoy one of the world's most touristic locations with empty streets is very special indeed. You haven't been to Venice? No. First time? Yeah. First time for me too. I love it when that happens. So we had an opportunity to see Venice in a very special way today, so we've come all this way to do that, so we're excited to show you what we're doing. Experiencing Venice via the famous canals is a must for any visitor, and obviously a gondola is the traditional method of transport. We were hoping for an alternative experience, so a few weeks earlier in Germany we'd been practicing to see if Alaska would also enjoy exploring via stand-up paddle, and I have to say, she loves it. So now here in Italy, we were able to meet up with SUP in Venice, who offer an opportunity to discover this traditional city via a more interactive and immersive experience. Right now in the city there's 400 bridges. This bridge in particular is where the Venetians fought fist by fist if they had like a debt or something, and they would fight here, and the first guy to fall in the water would be the loser. What we have here is a noble house, and it's a pretty special house because this one belonged to merchants who came from the Middle East. In fact, as you can see, there's a statue of the camel. That is to show that they traded with spices. Venice became very rich and wealthy through the spice trade. Even though the canals were quiet and there was barely any tourist at all, the locals were still out making the most of the quieter waters and doing what they've done for centuries. It's the local sport here, and it's been around for hundreds of years. We have a lot of islands here, and they all have very different purposes, like there's the island of the Lazzaretto, and that's actually where the quarantine was invented. It was because ships coming from all of the different places like the Middle East or Croatia would often have rats in them, so in order to avoid the plague spreading in the city, the people would have to stay 40 days in this island called the Lazzaretto. In fact, quarantine comes from quarantena. Quaranta is 40. So that's the story behind that. I didn't know that. This tour with Sup in Venice was so fun and packed with fascinating info that we actually filmed a lot more. However, we ran into a bit of a problem. Do you notice that thing clamped to the paddle in this shot? That's our GoPro. Do you notice how it's not clamped to the paddle in this shot? Yeah, our GoPro just sank to the bottom of the Venice canals. Leah just dropped the GoPro. Yeah, put it in your mouth and close your mouth. I thought that part would be obvious. Unfortunately, we are unable to retrieve our GoPro, our new GoPro. It's only a couple of months old, really. It's at the bottom of this canal, and the tide's coming up at the moment. It's low tide at three o'clock in the morning, but it's right on a busy section. So one, it's dangerous to get in there with the boats. Two, it's probably by three o'clock in the morning going to be somewhere else. So unfortunately, the GoPro's gone. It had loads of awesome footage on it, too. So it's a bit of a shame. What have we learned today, Leah? I have to put the GoPro in my mouth to try to hold it. Just close your mouth. I closed my mouth, it fell out of my... It just slipped out of my mouth. I shouldn't have done that. I'm spewing, I've got such good footage of you and Alastair. Oh, it's spewing. Time to see if we can connect to it. We've been trying to see if we can connect to it remotely and download some, at least a few of the clips, but we just can't. So it looks like it's already either run out of battery or it's just buried under sand or moved or something. But bye bye, GoPro. Don't worry, it won't. Leah and I are staying in a campsite on the outside of Venice whilst we visit the city, mainly because we need access to washing machines, but also we need to do a little bit of work and we're going to be using the Wi-Fi signal. I'm just going to check to see if we can find a good Wi-Fi signal. Almost every single one of the camping cars here is German. It seems like the Germans have come to Italy because it's relatively safe here. The same thinking as us. Surprised to not see any other nationalities or even any Italians, actually. It's all German vehicles, every single one. It's a really nice campsite, great facilities. Swimming pool's been drained and emptied and it's closed probably for the pandemic. So unfortunately, we can't take advantage of all of them. So I'm trying to upload a video from my phone on this public Wi-Fi at this campsite. It's pretty slow and because it's unsecured, I'm going to be using my Surfshark VPN, which is what we use all the time when we upload our videos to you guys. If you don't have a VPN, it's a really essential tool if you're connecting to public Wi-Fi like we do. It also allows you to get a lot of content that's available on other streaming services like Netflix or BBC iPlayer or something like that. It's a really useful tool and you can use it on all of your devices. So I'm going to be uploading the next video for you guys with Surfshark VPN right now. If you haven't got a VPN, we can highly recommend Surfshark VPN because we've been using it for over a year. So if you want it, you can get 83% off and three months free. That's an offer for our community. So thank you Surfshark for giving us that link to share with you guys. And thank you for sponsoring this video. We were too cheap to pay five euros for a dryer. And we thought we'd dry the clothes, two loads of washings today out in the sun today, but they didn't dry in time. So this is the result of them not drying. We have to hang them up in here with the heater on because they're still soaking wet. Standing room only. I like to sit down. Computers rendering down there as well. So I quite like the computer and the hard drives in between my legs. Clothes all around and a little doggy down here. It seems to be the perfect spot. Where are we going to sit? I'll just stand here until the clothes get dry. Hello. Where are you, Alaska? Oh, hello. From Venice, we pushed south through Italy towards the stunning rolling hilly region of Tuscany. We stopped briefly in the region capital, Florence, but just for a day. There is so much here that we would like to explore, but we only have time for one place. So we picked a tiny town with a very unique feature. Today, we are at the beautiful Bagnovic Noni hot springs. These are 16th century Roman hot springs and absolutely gorgeous town here in Tuscany, and I'm getting a brief moment in between the rain to check out this place. Honestly, stunning. So glad we drove down here. It's a little bit out of the way, but boy, was it worth it. These thermal hot springs were found and have been used since Roman times. The church and town of Bagnovic Noni has been built around the springs as their popularity increased. The town is on the pilgrim route to Rome and has long been a welcome pit stop for weary travelers. At the base of the town is an old mill dating back to the late 1800s. Here they ground wheat with large wheels turned by pressurized water. Unlike other mills in the area that couldn't run in the summer when the rivers dried up, this one was important because it could run year round and it did so until the 1950s. When they stopped using the mill in production, it actually deteriorated super quickly because of the how warm it was with the hot springs here. All the wood and metal just completely corroded away much faster than it normally would. It's so cool in here. I've been inside a cave. All the mineral deposits on the ceilings. No way, that's actually the old wheels. You can see them encrusted. It looks like they've turned to stone. They pretty much have turned to stone. Take more than WD-40 to loosen those up. Holy cow. For some reason, people don't bathe in the main town square, although it does look like an incredible location for a dip. From the main source tank, the water runs out towards the old mill via open waterways carved into the earth. Running downhill, it makes its way to an old 16th century bathhouse where men and women were able to bathe separately. The healing mineral water runs freely to the bottom of a cliff to a public pool. Finally, time for a bath. This is the main hot spring where all the locals come from the town and bathe in. But it's really, really cold at the moment for some reason. So no one's in it and we can't go in it because it's freezing. Apparently, right at the top there, it's like 50 degrees. It comes out 50 degrees Celsius. So I guess by the time it runs all the way down the rocks here, it cools down. Maybe because it's cold at night. It doesn't stay warm here in the water, which is a bit of a shame. Just got word from our trusty faithful navigation companion, Señor Google, that there may just be another hot spring in the nearby vicinity. So we are going to go check that out and see if we can't find some hot water that we can swim in. And the verdict is? It's warmer than the other one. Is it? Yeah. Would you sit in it? I think that one might be a bit warmer. I'd like to go in the bath because we drove so far to get here. It's not cold, cold. I kind of feel like I'm going a little bit crazy with this water not being hot, like there's a pipe coming out the top of this kind of mineral rock formation. It looks like usually there's hot water coming down that. And I've seen that in some pictures. I'm just wondering whether this is normal or whether they've diverted the hot water to discourage people bathing because of the whole pandemic thing. You don't think so? Yeah, but it's not it's it's it's hot because there's a little bit of water coming out of a rock over there. It's not warm enough to be in. And this whole thing that usually has water coming down it is there's nothing coming out of it at all from a pipe. So it seems a little odd. Of course, it could entirely just be seasonal. And it's typical that the hot spring is not hot during the winter, but certainly other hot springs I've been in around the world are hot in the winter. And that's actually the best time to go. So that's not here. Is that where we are? I think we found the hot springs. Unfortunately, lots and lots and lots of people here, which is not that surprising, really. So we're going to maybe come back in the evening. We are going to go out to the hot springs. It was busy earlier, so it's dark now. And we're hoping that no one's going to be there. I'm not bringing you with us, OK? We're going to be in a bath. But you understand, right? So sorry we couldn't bring you guys. It was entirely too wet and too naked to be filming. But we scored like a three hour bath. It was absolutely gorgeous. I feel so relaxed today. Stepped so well. The last time that we were in hot springs was like four years ago. In North America. The whole west coast of North America is absolutely blessed with so many different hot spring locations. And Leah and I would often break up long drives by visiting these hot springs, particularly the ones on the way up to Alaska were extremely memorable. And we went to all kinds of remote hot springs. And we haven't done it in four years. So it feels really good to to get back on the hot spring trail. Alaska seems to have made a friend. That's nice. We've only had a brief stop here in Tuscany, and unfortunately we have to leave already. There is one problem. The Kombi has developed a starting problem. I mean, it started in France. A few little taps with my best friends and we are back on the road, no? And has been getting more frequent. But just now recently, since we got to Tuscany, it's happening about at least 50 percent of the time we try to start the car. And so we're having to park on hills to make sure that we can actually get out of there in the morning. This is a slight grade, but it's not an ideal bump start location because that's all muddy and it's difficult to turn around. I've basically got to get under the car to see if I can fix it. And it's been extremely wet. So I'm trying to wait for a dry flat spot for me to investigate this issue. In the meantime, we park on hills, we sleep on hills and we hope in the morning we can start the vehicle. Oh, yes, come on. Oh, no, boomers. Nice. That's one heck of a relief. I did not fancy having to bump start this this morning or whatever. Roll down this hill into this muddy, probably couldn't turn around. Nasty situation. We'd never been able to get out. Never mind. We're on the road. Let's do this. This issue with starting the Kombi is not getting any easier. But finding the old parts we need isn't going to be easy. And our time in Europe is rapidly running out. From here, we have to do a 180 and start driving north to get out of Italy and Europe. But before we do, we've got one more adventure to take you on. But that is a story for next time.