Prior to conquering the beast that was Stromboli we visited some other pretty cool places...
We flew in to Palermo and spent a few days there. Which I wouldn't recommend to anyone. Didn't like Palermo at all. It was just crowded and noisy and unpleasant. Narrow pavements so you were continually stepping off them to avoid people but then had to avoid being hit by the zillions of people on mopeds and the insane drivers they have there. I've had some hairy taxi rides in Europe before but the taxi trip from Palermo airport takes the cake. The way to overtake seems to be drive right up to the bumper of the car in front and flash your lights at it until it pulls over out of the way. Continually. All the way in. I was laughing by the time we got to the hotel but it may have been the relief at having survived the trip in!
Palermo is pretty much home to the Sicilian mafia which was quite interesting. Kevin is now reading Cosa Nostra, and we're rewatching the Godfather movies as well. We weren't that far from the town of Corleone (which is where Mario Puzo got the name from) but it didn't sound like there was much to see there - and I had a feeling we'd stand out like very obvious tourists looking for mafia people if we went there - didn't really appeal!
From Palermo we did a day trip to Agrigento though which was pretty cool. About two hours on the train, so we got to see a bit of Sicily - really sun burnt looking landscape. Very harsh. Apparently it is/was known as the bread basket of Italy and during the war Mussolini had it growing all the grain etc Italy needed. However they neglected the other crops and the soil lost all its nutrients. It doesn't seem to have recovered much from the bits that we saw.
Agrigento is a collection of Greek ruins which were pretty cool. Except the best ones were not only covered in scaffolding (occupational hazard of being a tourist at historical sites), but some of them were even wrapped in plastic - that was a new one on me... Also scattered throughout the Agrigento site were loads of olive trees which were pretty cool - not many olives on them though as I think the tourists had been helping themselves! There are some photos of the ruins on Flickr. I've got more to load on to Flickr as well - but it takes ages to do it at home over the dial up so it might take some time for them to appear.
We also did a day trip to Cefalu (also photos on Flickr, but more to come) which I really liked. Had a nice looking beach, loads of eating and drinking places overlooking the sea, and nice little lanes to wander around. Would be a good place to go back to for a Sept break I think. Of course by then we were desperate to get out of Palermo so maybe that made it look even better!
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