Marina di Pisticci, Italy

Here is a dot-point summary of Sicily:

– The roads are in dreadful condition
· The drivers are crazy
· The roads in the towns are narrow
· Italians can’t park for nuts!
· The coastline is stunning
· The beaches actually have real sand
· The water is barely above freezing
· The landscape is hilly, dry & rocky with lots of olive trees
· There are a lot of abandoned buildings
· The best towns are built in the most inaccessible places – usually either at the top of a hill or the bottom of a valley, or both!
· The vibrant colour of the bougainvillea and the prolific oleanders, again in full flower
· And I have seen the names of so many people we know of Italian extraction – either as street names, place names, business names, etc. Did all the Italians in Australia come from Sicily??

We started our adventure at Villa San Giovanni which is one of the two ports with ferries to Messina. We had bought our ferry tickets on-line and discovered, on arrival at the Port, that you key the booking number into a machine which then spits out your ticket – but only on the day of travel. We were told that we could park our Motorhome just before the Ticket Office and sleep there overnight. It also turned out to be across the road from a new-ish shopping centre with a good supermarket and we could top up our Data-Dongle.

Prior to this trip, we have caught a variety of ferries which all seemed to have a strong reliance on Workplace Health & Safety, which means that they double-check everything before moving on to the next step of the ferry crossing. The Italians don’t seem to worry about that! They certainly have the crossing process to Messina down pat – cars were still driving off the ferry when they started loading the vehicles for the return trip. All with a very Italian shoulder-shrug!

Messina was our port of arrival in Sicily and a startling introduction to Sicilian roads & drivers! Roads which were shown on maps as wide boulevards, were little more than two-lane roads (one lane in each direction) due to incredibly creative (and inconvenient) parking!

We did discover that having Oscar wasn’t a boon when it came to going into towns. The streets were very narrow and parking was difficult. We developed the habit of looking for parking places on one programme (Pocket Earth – very good, off-line mapping programme) and then firing up the internet and looking at the location on Google Earth. Using this method, we managed to avoid some hair-raising mishaps and found accessible parking places.

Though it wasn’t much help when we were trying to find our camp-site outside Taormina – our “beloved” GPS directed us down a laneway which “crossed” the Autostrada. It turns out that the laneway was very narrow and the bridge under the Autostrada was lower than Oscar! At this point, we had encountered no other traffic, so Nick started the process of turning around (10-point turn) when suddenly, there was a tractor coming from one direction, and a scooter and car from the other direction. Ignoring the fact that Nick was trying to turn, the scooter just blazed on through! At least the car and the tractor waited patiently till Nick was off the road (in the sidelane).

Thankfully, the GPS recalculated once we had turned around and the new route was much more Oscar-friendly!

We then headed down to the south coast and on the way, we visited an amazing town called Noto. Surprisingly, this town doesn’t rate a mention in the Italian chapter of the Western Europe Lonely Planet Guidebook. We were recommended to visit to see the beautiful architecture – Baroque, but we were stunned by the yellow stone that was used for the building. It is a local limestone which started out as white but has yellowed with age and now presents an amazing outlook in the town. You can walk to the top of several different churches to get a panoramic view of the town, which we did. We were also starting to see shops which sold the most amazing ceramic pottery, tiles, etc for which Sicily is famous.

We found a campsite which didn’t rate highly with us – no toilets, no showers, no water, no power, but it was convenient and right on the beach. We stayed at Pozzallo for 2 nights, and on the in-between day, we drove up to visit another recommendation – Ragusa. Ragusa was originally built on a hilltop but was destroyed in an earthquake which struck south-eastern Sicily in the 1600s. When they rebuilt Ragusa, it was on the next hilltop – so now you have Ragusa and Ragusa Ibla, which is the original town. You enter the “new” Ragusa, walking through it, all the time downhill and then walk up the other side of the hill, which is “old Ragusa”. Again, similar style of architecture and the same kind of limestone which made for an enjoyable walk through a lovely old town with streets that twisted everywhere. And we also scored a couple of kilos of Cherries from a local vendor for only €5,00!

We then headed across the bottom of Sicily to a place called Realmonte, which is near Agrigento, to see a natural formation called “Scala dei Turchi”, which was essentially the cliffs weathered into a step formation – ok, so they were BIG steps, but it was pretty amazing. We decided to avoid driving through Agrigento but we did manage to see the Valley of the Temples where there are a number of old Greek temples built on the top of hills – why was it called the “Valley” of the Temples if they were built at the top of a hill?

We decided to miss the western part of Sicily and headed to the north coast, towards Milazzo which is an access point for the Aeolian Islands. Though on the way to Milazzo, we overnighted at Cefalu which was another lovely old town, tried to visit San Stefano di Camastre which is famous for it’s ceramic industry but it was definitely NOT an Oscar-friendly town! So we managed to get out of town without any incidents, scrapes and our sanity and continued along the coast to Milazzo. We had a bit of time to kill but it turns out that we arrived in Milazzo on the weekend of the Go-Kart Grand Prix! They had closed off a few blocks of roadway near the ferry terminal when the Go-Karts made a lot of noise continuously for two days!

We had decided to do a day-trip out to the Islands and discovered a trip which would take us to two of the seven Islands – Lipari and Volcano. We got a ferry across to Lipari, where we had a few hours so we hired a taxi and did a tour around the island – sadly our driver, Maria, had limited English but we managed to pick up the salient points. Her family run the island bus company, one of her sons runs a couple of Taxis and they also run one of the garages on the island! Lipari has the largest population of all the islands but during the summer – the number of residents almost quadruples! This causes a few hassles because there is no groundwater and they rely on rainwater to fill cisterns in all the houses & hotels. Apparently May-June is the busy season for foreigners (mainly French, German & Americans, with a few English) while July-August is the Italian season!

We had a boat ride from Lipari to Volcano and they stopped in a quiet bay so that we could go swimming! The water was stunningly clean and clear, as well as warm! That was about the best swim we had on the trip thus far. Once we were out of the water, we continued on our way to Volcano where there are Thermal Mud Pools where you can soak away your aches, provided you don’t get overwhelmed by the sulphurous smell. We ended our day with another ferry ride back to Milazzo – but boy, were my eyes sore! It turns out that is a common side effect of swimming in the waters of Volcano, with all the sulphur bubbling up through the water.

But, back to Oscar for nice hot showers and time to get ready to finish our circuit of Sicily – we were only about 40-50kms from Messina, so in the morning, we hot-footed to Messina, boarded a ferry and returned to Villa San Giovanni.