Concerning your stay in Tropea: we stayed in hotel ‘La Perla‘. We made this choice because it seemed to us the best price/quality-ratio at the time. We booked via booking.com. At arrival we received a warm welcome by the lady at the reception. All people here were very helpful. Our room was a basic double-bed room with a small bedroom and tv. Great plus was the free WiFi access in the whole hotel. Let us put it this way: La Perla was definitely not ‘le grand chique’, but it was a very neat hotel living up to the promises in it’s booking.com reviews.

We booked the breakfast-included formula, and we couldn’t really complain about the breakfast either. Croissants, fruit, yogurt, bread, muesli,… And especially A LOT of freshly baked cakes. If you’re a cake-lover you won’t be let down. We were mostly one of the last people to show up at breakfast (oops! ) but by the end of our stay we found out that you can ask the personnel for extra croissants (HA!).

Of course, depending on your needs and budget, there are plenty of other options. We found La Perla to be a great hotel for young girls like us with a limited budget who wish to stay close to the center. We paid about €250 for 2 people, for one week, breakfast included. On booking.com you can find a bunch of other places to stay, for example some B&B's located right in the village’s center, and hotels close to the coastline with a nice pool.

We took off at 7.30 AM, so we woke up horribly early to make it to the harbour in time. Needless to say we weren’t little rays of sunshine at the time, but well, we could handle it. On the boat we enjoyed the rising sun. Our first stop in Stromboli went well. At least that’s what we thought. While we were on the boat, we realised that we both weren’t wearing a watch. So it would be a problem to get back to the boat in time.. But no problem – problemsolvers solved the problem. We set our camera’s clock, and decided that this would do. Well, it didn’t. By the time we arrived back at the harbour after having a drink in the (very tiny) village, our boat had left. The problem was, we had two camera’s, and apparently one of them got the time all wrong. So there we were. Two idiots, no phone, hardly any money, no boat, stuck on the tiniest island for miles around with people who hardly understood a word we said. Honestly, we weren’t winning any prices for the brightest smile at that time, either. But we trusted in the kind people of Stromboli. Oh boy, that didn’t last too long. When we went to the touristic information service, they seemed very shocked themselves, as if no one ever had missed a boat here. We were panicking just a liiiiiittle bit.. By the time the next person we asked for help directed us to the police station, we were pretty sure we’d never get off that friggin island. At first they'd gave us hope, bursting the bubble by telling us the next boat would only be in 3 days - we didn't even had money to overnight here for 3 days and that would also mean we'd miss our flight back home. So that's when we almost started to cry LOL. 

But oh how we love the carabinieri. Those guys were awesome. They started calling the boat agency right away and before we knew it they decided to take us to Volcano so we could get on our boat again. I guess it helped that they both really loved Belgium and especially our ‘birra’. After about half an hour or longer at the police station, the plans had eventually changed into: you have to take another boat at 5 PM and this one takes you ‘home’. They even wrote us a little note to make sure we wouldn’t forget. Too bad we forgot to ask for a selfie but oh god how happy we were. So at the time it was about 11 AM and we were stuck for another 6 hours on this teeny tiny island. Needless to say, we are not the biggest Stromboli-lovers now but we made it through the day anyway, by beach-bumming all day long (aka roasting on a black-sand beach and going home like red lobsters). 

Not sure what hurted the most: the fact we missed out on the spa-island or the fact we paid to do absolutely nothing for a whole day. So if you’d like to know what Lipari and Volcano are like: try it yourselves and let us know! Don't forget to wear a watch. 

Price: €35 pp. 

You’re probably thinking by now ‘it can’t ALL be good’. Unfortunately, it can’t. Being huge food-lovers, we were a little bit disappointed in the food-options Tropea offered. At noon: no problem. You can have tasty bakery-goods or a delicious paninis in most of the little bars on the main street. Our problem was mainly dinner. We went looking for a great pizza or pasta and honestly, they were pretty hard to find, or we were just very unlucky to pick out the wrong places. Another disappointment was the endless search for tiramisu. Apparently Calabria isn’t the region for that. We did manage to find a good, oven baked-pizza one night though, in ‘Ristorante Il Normanno‘, near the cathedral. Also, there’s lot of places were you can have a good cocktail -duh, important-, we especially enjoyed ours at ‘Bar Veneto‘ on the Piazza Vittorio Veneto. To be honest, we did get a red-wine shower here, but the waiter guaranteed us this was the first time something like that happened. 

But the one place we would really recommend, is our all time-favorite bar: ‘Made in Sud‘ on the Viale Stazione. They serve the most heavenly paninis !!!! DEFINITELY a must try!!

Of course, a week is not long so we couldn't try out a lot of restaurants. According to some other blog posts the food in Tropea is heavenly, so I recommend to research in advance some good dining places so you won't be ending up disappointing as a food lover.