Serenity now!

Little Master has been a very bad blogger of late, but I’ll try to make up for lost time now. I arrived in Sicily last Friday, and my friend Paul arrived on Saturday. We both survived awful nights ‘sleeping’ in Stansted airport with all the other budget traveller suckers. I arrived in Palermo exhausted and grumpy, but happy to see the sun again after London’s cold, rainy ‘summer’ weather. Highlights from the last week…

Palermo

Paul and I rented a car on Saturday and commenced our daily dance with near-death on the roads of Sicilia. For those considering renting a car here, it might help to know a few things about driving on this fair island: 1) Don’t bother staying in your lane if you don’t feel like it – drifting back and forth is fine, and god forbid you ever use a blinker. 2) It’s best to straddle the center line while driving on curvy roads so you can take the turns at the highest velocity possible. 3) Stop signs exist only for gullible tourists. 4) Small tiny alley that looks like it will hardly fit a bicycle? By all means drive down it, and if you get stuck, back up and honk at pedestrians who had the nerve to get in your way because they thought cars couldn’t fit there. 5) Parking is a state of mind and the world, essentially, is your parking spot. Feel free to stop your car wherever you’d like and leave it there as long as necessary. 6) If your car isn’t full of dents and scrapes, you’re clearly not a Sicilian driver.

Cefalu

Lovely little medieval town on the northern coast. Apparently elections will be held there soon, and there were posters of the candidates all over town. My favourite was a woman candidate’s that said – I kid you not – “Vote for me, even if you are a man.”

Parco Dell Madonie

At Lonely Planet’s recommendation, we headed up into the mountains into one of Sicily’s national parks. And by ‘national park,’ I mean a place full of small towns, farms, and orchards – in other words, like most of Sicily. Our final destination was the small village of Petalia Soprana which was virtually a ghost town when we showed up on a Sunday afternoon. It was only when we tried to leave this small hilltop town that we realized it was actually a black hole, as we could not figure out how to get out of the small, cobblestone streets in the car. We kept ending up back at the town’s piazza. It was a Sicilian version of ‘Look kids, Big Ben & Parliament!’ minus the roundabout. We finally escaped, only to have the same thing happen in the next two towns we visited.

Milazzo

This is the port town for trips out to the Aeolian Islands. Driving there in rush hour lunchtime traffic requires both a death wish and very good insurance. We parked our car in a sketchy garage and headed out Stromboli on a hydrofoil – happy to leave the chaos of the mainland behind for awhile.

Stromboli

This island cured us of all our travel grumpiness. No cars, native islanders with long, white beards, bougainvillea and white houses looking out over a blue sea, black lava beaches – oh, and a volcano that literally shoots rocks and lava 150 meters into the air every 10 minutes or so. We ate dinner at the ‘Osservatorio’ restaurant that looked out of a fantastic sunset over the sea in one direction, and the volcano’s eruptions in the other. I loved this island so much that I’m headed back there after Paul leaves tomorrow to spend my last week there.

Lipari

Another of the Aeolian islands – this one more touristy, but still quite lovely. We didn’t have a place to stay when we arrived, but a little Sicilian named Rosario greeted us as we got off the boat, and told us to stay at his house. We had spotless rooms there for a great price – I even had a sea view from my balcony. Rosario made us breakfast in the morning and told me about the feast of fresh fish he’d made the night before for his visiting cousin, the soccer player. Sicilians can be infuriating at times, but we’ve met enough Rosario-types here that it’s hard to stay angry at them for very long. We spent the day at a beautiful beach where Paul proceeded to get assaulted by a ‘medusa’ jelly-fish that left horrible welts that complemented his 35 mosquito bites quite well.

Taormina

Not a great day. We got back to the garage in Milazzo to find a big scrape in the door of our car. I got into a shouting match in Italian with the garage owner, who kept insisting in subsequently higher octaves that it was “impossibile!” that he caused the scrape, despite our having witnessed him move the car from a space that left about 2cm of room on each side of the car. I threatened to call the police, and he shouted back in his whiny, girly voice that I should call them. He seemed to be implying the police might not care about our plight and in fact, might not even be totally ethical. Is that possible in Sicily??  Our only real solution was to take comfort in what has become on mantra on this trip: serenity now!

We finally got to Taormina, a lovely town despite the hordes of tourists here. It is with some embarrassment that I’ve watched my countrymen here moving around in their white sneakers and fanny packs, following the elevated signs of their cruise-ship tour guides, speaking loudly and only to each other. Paul and I had drinks with two very friendly Danes from our hostel last night and at one point they asked, truly confused, if Americans really didn’t believe Darwin’s theory of evolution. Ugh.

Mt. Etna

Paul and I headed up towards the top yesterday, driving most of the way, catching a very expensive gondola further, and then hiking a final 2 hours to 10,000 feet. Because the summit was enveloped in cloud, the already bizarre lava moonscape seemed even more surreal. That, and the subzero temperatures and steaming craters, made for an interesting afternoon.

Today we’re hanging out in Taormina. Tomorrow we’ll return the car, presuming of course that we survive the roads of Catania which are reputed to be the worst in the country. Paul will catch a ferry to Naples tomorrow night, and I’ll head back to Stromboli. No internet there, so I probably won’t update again until I head to Naples later in the week. Hope you’re all doing well – ci vediamo subito!