Venturing to Mt Etna and Discovering Taormina

Wednesday, October 05, 2016
Messina, Sicily, Italy
After Santorini and the buried ruins of Akrotiri and then Pompeii, we had to complete the three and go to Mt Etna when in Sicily.

But instead of terrified people fleeing a volcanic eruption as in the past, we saw the opposite
 
Messina was the first place where we saw evidence of the migrant crisis with a ship-load of illegal migrants coming from Africa mooring next to us. 

Apparently 6000 arrived that day alone. With high unemployment this constant inflow is causing a lot of resentment and frustration. 

Another thing we noticed was the amount of rubbish in every nook and cranny.

Our guide told us that there's no sense of community in Sicily after centuries of foreign domination and this, apparently, is the reason for not giving a stuff about living with trash. 

Even on Mt Etna there were plastic bottles, tyres and assorted rubbish strewn around the craters and old lava flows.

So the Mt Etna experience was somewhat disappointing from that respect.

I should add the tatty tourist trinkets like madonnas carved from lava stone sprinkled with purple glitter and the garish tourist train carrying people about to the list of things the Italians have done to reduce a place of primal energy to one of a yawn .

This place will go with a bang at some stage but for now it's definitely a whimper.

It was worth going though. We'd have always regretted it if we'd given it a miss.

Taormina though, where we spent the afternoon, was quite a different kettle of fish. 

For a start, we had no expectations as we knew absolutely nothing about it.

Being high up on a steep cliff, the coastal views were wonderful but the town itself was full of interest, with impressive old buildings and intriguing steep little lanes running off the main road.

We made a silly mistake by spending way too long at an Internet cafe and then finding ourselves running about trying to see the place before the coach left.
  
A lesson learned about priorities!

We had no idea how interesting Taormina would be, so frittered away our valuable time on seductive electronic time-wasters.

Perhaps another time -- with a longer stay.
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