Etna

After a lazy day in the apartment and around the pool today we decided to check out the largest tourist attraction here.  We have seen the volcano Etna vaguely through the haze on a couple of occasions and thought it time to find out more.  We had seen a road sign off the main road pointing to Etna so headed back to where we had seen it and found a narrow road between rock walls that headed inland.  From then on the direction signs ceased so we pulled out our tablet and tried to use Google Maps to help us (the GPS wouldn't recognise Etna as a destination) with mixed results.  After a long series of switchbacks through narrow urban streets we found a new sign pointing to Etna Sud - Hooray!  Interestingly the town we had climbed up through had more shops than we had seen in all our travels through Sicily to date.

From then on the signs were mostly visible, but not entirely - Italians don't like to make things easy.  As we climbed on generally good roads it was surprisinow dense the vegetation was andwe presumed that the clouds that Etna attracts means a resonable amount of rainfall.  Even the relatively recent lava flows were showing signs of green.  We passed several obvious vents at around 1200m altitude and about 1500m the trees started to thin out and there were high poles along the road for guidance in snow.  Reaching the main centre at 1900m altitude we stopped near a crater formed in 1998 which seemed to have deposited a lot of gravel over the landscape.  The crater itself was a little smaller than Mt Eden in Auckland but in many ways looks very similar. The general environment reminds me of the Bruce Road on Mt Ruapehu with fields of rough rock and gravel. Just around the corner was mayhem with a parking area crammed with 100s of cars and buses and a constant flow of people covering the road.  Just above us was the cone of the 2001 eruption with a steep trail covered with ants (well people looking like ants) struggling up a 25 degree incline.

We stopped, looked, turned around and escaped.  We could have taken a cable car up to 2500m altitude, but the crowds put us off and it would have been cooler up there.  Instead we set course for the town of Taomina which we had seen recommended in several places. Deciding to avoid motorway tolls we fought with our GPSthrough several rather drab towns along the coast until we came out on the coast itself on a narrow road above a series of attractive, if stoney, beaches.  We would have stopped, but there was absolutely no space.  The road then climbed around a sheer point and we found ourselves winding around the coast below the town.  The steep hilside above had semicircular bridges hanging in space to allow the road to zig-zag up the cliff to the town.  We ended up driving through pedestrian only lanes in the middle of town which was wall-to-wall tourists.  The town was really nice - clean, colourful, shops were bright and the houses seemedd to have a lot more character. Perched way above on an impossible peak one section of the town hung on to vertical cliffs and there was no obvious way to reach this section.

Arriving back at our accommodation we found that the land behind the complex was on fire and we watched as the fire advanced.  The complex caretaker was at the rear boundary with a garden hose, but it was clear more was needed.. Eventually a pump equipped landroved turned up with wht seemed an impossibly small water tank.  Eventually a garden hoe was found to try and keep up the water supply and the low volume high pressure pump they used proved quite effective in quenching bursts of fire that threatened the trees around.  Next door a regular fire engine pulled up, but we didn't see any of the action around that.  After an hour a helicopter with a monsoon bucket arrived and really started to damp everything down.  In the end the damage was restricted to around 2 hectares of scrub and grass land.