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Semi-Exotic Sicily

A travelogue in medium format

By Jace K

September 23^rd, 2018

UP AT FIVE. With daylight saving ending it’s really four. We leave Frankfurt sunny and arrive in Palermo in drizzle, but warmer. As the plane approaches we see that Germany has been replaced by olive and lemon trees and it’s all Mediterranean† and so looks like western Turkey, perhaps Selçuk, only at the sea. And then so much green everywhere and these giant, rocky hills sticking out into the sea and the buildings that are just not very German at all.

Once again, against my better judgement, we’re skipping a thousand kilometres and just dropping out of the sky and don’t have any idea where we are. It’s not the best way to travel. Still, we only have two weeks, so what can you do?

We make our way from the airport to the car hire place and finally receive a quintessentially Italian Toyota Aygo. We leave through some cracked back roads with large potholes and pass a small herd of cows under one bridge. Cacti and succulents grow extremely slowly as we pass. It’s the first day of arriving somewhere new and everything still seems exotic.

We skirt around Palermo, past the slightly broken buildings that look so beautiful and more cacti and succulents, and then eucalyptus trees and wattle that reminds me of primary school. Later we pass through a dozen tunnels and green valleys dotted with terracotta tiled houses just like in Albania only without the piles of garbage except then a little later we pass a pile of garbage which is a bit disappointing but still it’s nice.

Just after Cefalù we turn south, inland, and the road becomes tight and windy and mountains appear in the background topped with snow. Our B&B in Castelbuono is a large family house on the outskirts of the town. It’s all terracotta and terraces and cacti gardens and is idyllic. Our host Giuseppe is extremely friendly and helpful and inside the house is all tiled as well, which would probably be lovely in summer, but it’s not summer, so we put on thermals and walk around in boots. But it is idyllic. Dogs bark outside, which never happens in Germany—probably because they’re all inside the restaurants—and sometimes you can smell the aromatic scent of wood fire smoke. I think about what it would be like to live here: more things broken than Northern Europe, of course, but not as broken as Albania or Bulgaria. I wonder how fast this charming rundown-ness becomes old.

In the evening we walk the steep, cobbled streets back into the town for dinner and, misunderstanding the Italian system, order slightly too many main courses.

† Yes, I realise that Palermo looks out over the Tyrrhenian, but whatever.

IN THE MORNING it’s a traditional Italian breakfast of espresso and a croissant from a plastic packet. We explore the town a bit. It’s sleepy and most shops are closed. The only people around are tradesmen and, somewhat strangely, several school groups. Washing hangs from the iron balconies and blows in the wind. Three wheeled scooter/delivery truck things buzz past and fill the narrow streets with two-stroke exhaust. The cars fall into one of two categories: banged-up hatchbacks or lifted, short wheelbase four-wheel drives, some with winches and roll cages and covered in mud. None of the cars is German.

Somehow things seem more real here. You can see more of how everything works. Electricity wires are visibly attached to the outside of buildings. Garbage bags hang on hooks outside the houses. Small trucks are loaded with bottles of propane, presumably for cooking. More wood fire smoke hangs in the air. Fewer things are hidden away, taken care of by some unknown and unseen force. And I think that’s healthy, to see in just a little more detail what actually goes on; how things actually work. The somewhat broken state of everything adds to this feeling. A crack in a stone wall reveals that the wall underneath really is stone, not just a façade. It appears that things are valued for what they actually are rather than how they look or how they are advertised. No one buys a three wheeled delivery truck scooter thing because the ads make it look awesome. However this is Italy so I must be completely mistaken about all this.

Back at the B&B we ask Giuseppe for restaurant recommendations. He tells us about one place: “you can eat pizza and food”. We go there and eat food.

THE NEXT DAY, as we’re finishing breakfast, which in Italy happens more or less immediately after starting breakfast, Giuseppe comes in with some shopping, including a dozen fresh artichokes. He pricks his finger on one and it bleeds. We ask how he eats them and he explains how to prepare them with olive oil and lemon and I think something about soaking them for a long time. “But I just boil them,” he tells us. “I like quick and easy.”

Afterwards, we drive up to a nearby mountain refuge, through a forest along a broken road with large stones lying all over it. The refuge is closed. We do a walk through the snow† up to the 1512 metre peak of Cozzo Luminario, following previous footprints in the snow rather than any real trail. I tear my jeans climbing through a barbed-wire fence, which annoys me. At the top is a clear view of Castelbuono below, and the sea in the distance. Apparently on a clear day you can see Mt Etna but I forget to check.

† Wait, what? Snow? Aren’t you guys in Sicily? I didn’t click this link to read about your boring “I walked through the snow” alpine adventure. Where are the beaches and Italian ladies and super interesting and original stories about sitting on a piazza eating gelato or missing a bus or standing in line for ages to get into an extremely famous museum?

We’d struggled up through the snow† to the top but now it isn’t clear where the trail continues. A few other German‡ tourists join us and also don’t know the way, perhaps because we are all using the same guidebook. One group gives up and goes back the way they came; another, all with soaked pants, are convinced that their way is not the way, so we ignore them. They disappear somewhere while I look around, or more likely, fiddle with my camera. We know which general direction we want to go, so we decide to just head down the hill that way and see what we find. Mountain goats with giant horns watch us from a distance.

At the bottom of the slope a path heads in what we think is the right direction but there’s not a single footprint disturbing the snow, making us suspicious. A quick check of the GPS reveals we’re going the right way and we reach the bottom easily, just as the rain starts and before the other Germans.

Back at the B&B we huddle around the heater, still in thermals and boots, and watch the rain turn to hail.

In the evening we go back into town to eat, and afterwards collect a loaf of bread from the restaurant that Giuseppe had left there by accident earlier in the day. He seems to know everyone in the town and it seems like a great way to live.

The B&B is dark when we get back, illuminated only by Giuseppe’s wood fire. Looking into a wood fire. This is certainly one of the things humans have got right.

† Yeah, sorry about all this.

‡ I’m not German.

A view from the top of Cozzo Luminario, not of Castelbuono or Mt Etna.

IS THIS MORE VISIBLE REALITY any different to country town Australia, a place I always suspected was still a little provincial? A few years ago† I passed through a small town in New South Wales with some friends. At the only pub in the town one of them tried to order a Red Bull. “Red what?” was the reply. “Nah mate, this is the country.” At the time I found it kind of outrageous, but now I wonder if they’ve been doing it right all along. Maybe we just don’t need such superfluities.

But still, this observation that a less developed lifestyle is closer to reality, closer to nature, less abstract, this isn’t very profound. What are you trying to say, Jace? That we should all go back to living an agrarian life? Clearly that’s not a solution. Pol Pot enthusiastically tried this a little while ago and everyone agreed that was Not A Good Thing. So what then? No answers here, unfortunately.

TODAY WE’LL HEAD BACK TO THE COAST, back to Cefalù and the beach. Happy now? No more snow adventures. We take the windy, mountain road via the church at Giblimanna and on the way pass ancient olive trees and cows with huge bells and rocky hillsides. The roads are narrow but the traffic is light and it’s easy to stop anywhere. Perhaps this is part of the reason that there is a sense of space here that is so deeply lacking in Germany.

At the church we can see the sea. The bells ring without moving and after a short walk around we get back into the car and head on to Cefalù. The town greets us not as in the pictures but as a real, slightly shitty sea side town like maybe Sarandë in Albania or Çanakkale in Turkey. There’s more two-stroke exhaust, vegetable shops, scooters, traffic, dusty streets, crumbling concrete apartment blocks. And that’s fine. It’s kind of nice, even. It means the town is real. People actually live here.

† OK, quite a few years ago.

We check in and walk into the old town, which is more like the pictures, except with more tourists. This time there are Americans as well as Germans. Along the rocks at the edge of the water the sea seems dead. No seaweed, barnacles on the rocks or fish. A seaside fit for the 21st century. Just before we leave we see a crab.

TOMORROW IS NOW TODAY and it’s a lovely day, the first sunny day since we arrived. Back into the old town, espressos at the square and pizza slices in the hand†. The streets smell like fresh washing. In the afternoon we walk up to the top of the hill above the town for the view and get back down just in time for the good light.

At night the circuit breaker trips in our room and I remember that that is a thing that can happen. We stand around helplessly for a while wondering what to do, but then it fixes itself. How about all that run-down charm?

† There you go.

WE CHECK OUT EARLY, and then sit back down on the terrace of the flat and spend quite a long time looking at our phones to book accommodation for tonight. The scent of flowers wafts past on the breeze.

We leave along the coast road this time, skipping the autostrada. The road winds constantly around blind corners where the Italians casually overtake. At first I can’t quite put my finger on it but then I work it out: their driving resembles the behaviour of a child: undisciplined and largely uninterested. They’re not malicious, they just don’t seem to be bothered by things like rules, lane discipline, speed control, etc. Kind of like me looking at mosaics. They’re fine, I guess. Some people like them, I just don’t really care.

But the route is great. It feels like we’re seeing what Sicily is really like. These unremarkable towns where people live, or Italians go for holidays, but aren’t in any English guidebooks. You could easily slow travel a year in Sicily.

But we don’t. We instead stop at one of the towns that is in our guidebook, Santo Stefano di Camastra. It’s famous for ceramics, which I find similar to mosaics. We look in one or two shops because we feel we should and then go for a coffee. Local kids hang around with 50cc motorbikes that are built to look like 1000cc motorbikes but still sound like scooters. It’s windy but warm and we’re looking out over the sea and it’s extremely relaxing.

We pass through more towns, then stop at one called Patti to eat sandwiches on the side of the road next to a beach. It looks like all other European beaches—not that great; cigarette butts—and I can’t see why some of them are more popular than others.

We take the autostrada and skip the last few towns and head inland at Falcone to cut across the island. Suddenly it feels like we missed something. The towns all look different. Inland towns, somehow. We get fuel and the guy is confused when I try to fill the tank myself. He explains to me how use the pump (thanks), and then inside when I try to pay they ask me how much I’d like. It’s very confusing.

The landscape turns to valleys filled with citrus orchards and then we climb into the mountains. The towns are built seemingly exclusively at the tops of the mountain peaks and I can’t work out why. We reach the ancient village of Novara just before dusk and meet our B&B host Salvatore. He’s extremely friendly and tells us about the Good Friday procession that evening as he shows us around. As we bring in our bags he runs upstairs and comes back with a plate of Easter biscuits, and then takes us outside and tells us about some ancient water mills on the opposite side of the valley. He’s actually in a rush but he still takes the time to shows us the sights and is very patient with our complete lack of Italian. Satisfied that we’re settled in, he leaves with his family for the procession.

We get our things together and head up into the old town ourselves a little while later. But around the corner from the B&B I get immediately distracted. There are half a dozen road rally cars parked along the street, some with fully slick tyres and missing bodywork. Super rad, super unexpected. A guy gets in one to move it to the other side of the road and the straight through exhaust explodes and barks and the echo bounces around the hills. I grin and give him a thumbs up and realise we’re definitely travelling through Sicily in the wrong car.

We head further into the town. It’s dark now, and windy, and the town is completely deserted and there’s no more racing car noises, unfortunately, or any car noises at all. We follow the stone alleys to the church but it looks abandoned. Are the people just inside? We wander around it for a bit but after a while decide, no, it is in fact abandoned. We go on. Paintings of saints in glass boxes look down at us from the walls and things rattle and knock in the wind.

A little later on some people appear again and then we come to the actual church, or rather the one that is actually used. Soon the procession begins, starting with a large statue of a woman—presumably Mary—wearing what looks like a headscarf on top of a big, gold (naturally) frame, pulled along by a few men, everyone looking deliberately sad. Then we see one of the men is Salvatore from our B&B. He sees us and can’t resist a huge smile and “Ciao!” We smile back and he returns to frowning.

Then another statue is brought out: a crumpled, broken man, presumably Jesus, and then a cross with another Jesus hanging from it, but this one looks dead. Finally, at the back of the procession after the band, comes the priest dressed in crimson and more gold, holding a large gold cross, walking under an expensive-looking square awning held up on poles by four men. He is the only black person there.

And then, suddenly, carrying a third and final Jesus (also dead), this time in an improbably elaborate glass coffin, comes a dozen men, the final chapter of the procession, dressed in white robes and pointy, conical hats covering their whole faces with holes cut out only for the eyes. Just like the KKK.

What. The. Fuck.

I thought this shit was illegal. Do they know the priest is black? Are they going to set something on fire now? The cross maybe? But Jesus is still on it. Will they torture the priest? Is he not the priest after all, but actually a slave? And the whole time all the fashionable people of the town, which is actually the whole town, I think, look on by, and us with them, and we don’t say a thing and it smells like Hugo Boss Woman.

The procession goes around most of the town and back into the church, the Klan members with them, and we then head to one of the few open restaurants and sit down at a table next to five or six other heathens. As we eat, the procession starts up again and as they pass the restaurant the people marching send us frowns through the window. Our fellow heathens do not have good teeth.

THE NEXT DAY everything is normal again and we walk through the town once more in daylight. It’s a very cute town. Strange how some places get big write-ups in guidebooks and some don’t. We wander into the church from last night and a the KKK has been replaced with a friendly guy with an American accent who invites us to go down into the crypt. Inside are many skulls and the mummified remains of previous priests†. One mummy has a hat and looks a bit like a pirate. We don’t point this out. Another is hanging awkwardly out of his alcove and we wonder why they don’t put him back in, and why his head doesn’t break off. We don’t ask about this, either.

Back outside a group of young men with fast, Italian motorbikes hang around a café, out on a Saturday morning ride. We head back to hit the hills ourselves, and for the second time in two days I’m reminded that we’ve brought the wrong vehicle.

† Apparently at one stage there were 1200 priests in Novara, which must have been nearly everyone.

TODAY WE’RE GOING to Taormina, which unlike Novara, is a place you’re supposed to visit. We stop at Gole dell’Alcàntara for volcanic rock formations but it’s busy and we don’t find it so interesting. Instead we spend the afternoon sitting in the car booking accommodation again.

Our budget, rather than our discerning taste, leads us to a holiday apartment in the nearby town of Letojanni, looking out under one of those big freeway bridges. Cars clunk over the joints between segments of the highway overhead. It’s the little things. The clothes drying rack on the balcony is made of that powdery old white plastic that rubs off on your hands when you touch it and the awnings that block out the view of the freeway are orange.

But it’s fine. We go into town after dark to eat at a place on the beach with tarpaulin walls and the TV on. They’re showing some kind of cooking show and the food looks delicious.

OUR BREAKFAST the next morning is again typically Italian: an espresso at the bar and a baked hotdog pastry thing… We’re in Taormina now, and are going to see the Greek theatre like good tourists.

We walk the length of the street of stalls of tourist tat leading to the theatre and set our expectations accordingly. We’re amongst the first in for the day and it’s actually quite nice, probably because there aren’t too many other people like us. We are certainly part of the problem rather than part of the solution in this regard. I try to make up for this by spending my time concentrating on photo compositions rather than learning about the history.

Afterwards we walk through the rest of the town and wonder why anyone would come here rather than one of the more interesting mountain towns. Why, indeed, have we come here? Just to make sure that it’s like we thought it would be? It’s unclear. Perhaps everyone else here is actually thinking the same thing, all just checking to make sure that they’re not missing something, but really wishing they spent another night in Novara instead. At one particularly famous piazza are views of Etna, who pays us no attention and goes on smoking quietly.

The view from a piazza in Taormina. Not in the direction of Mt Etna.

WE LEAVE THE NEXT MORNING as a rooster crows under the highway bridge and cats climb through the dumpsters. Is there a line somewhere east of Germany where stray cats become endemic? Around Hungary, perhaps?

It’s Easter Monday and we’re going to Etna. And so is everyone else. The traffic thickens improbably as we get close and on the way up cars are parked at every possibility, their occupants ejected onto the shade-free lava to picnic. It doesn’t look as pleasant as it is popular, but there you go. The car in front of us wobbles through the corners with one buckled wheel and another replaced by a space-saver spare and we keep our distance. Sitting in the sun on the lava seems to be something worth taking risks for.

At the top it isn’t bedlam, but it’s pretty close. There are no trees anymore, only lava and a giant carpark full of cars and tour busses and old snow. We do some short walks around some of the smaller, lower craters and I waste Lotte’s patience not taking photos. Or at least not good ones. After a bit we head back down, into a traffic jam and once again reach the bottom as the light turns good.

We check into another B&B and I rush out to try to salvage a picture or two from the last of the light but don’t really succeed. Just as the sun drops Etna turns pastel pink, highlighting the ever present streamer of smoke, and I understand the references to majesty.

IT’S THE NEXT DAY and we’re in Noto, which is another must see town, but this one is actually worth seeing. We check in and find we still don’t speak any Italian, but super-friendly Francesco is very helpful anyway. The town is known for its baroque architecture, which I’m not super excited about but here we are. Happily, it’s actually rather lovely. Not because it’s baroque, but because it’s nearly falling down. The buildings are cracked and crumbling in parts and it’s another example of this gorgeous, run down charm. It’s all real. A real city, with real people living there with not very much money it seems, who just happened to inherit an excessively ornate set of buildings from a couple of centuries ago. But real buildings. Not styrofoam imitations like a Vegas casino, and not so precious that they have been restored to where they again look like styrofoam imitations from a Vegas casino.

At the centre of the old town is the town hall, and directly opposite is the cathedral, built to tower menacingly over it. Everything about the cathedral is built to make you feel small. The giant doors, the three flights of stairs leading up to them, and the columns with their disproportionately huge bases that come up to your waist. It does not give the impression of glorifying any god as much as being a threatening statement of the power of the people who run this human organisation called the church. Which I suppose was the intention. So well done then. Also, did anyone else notice how similar the words catholic, cathedral and catheter are? There seems be some common root there somewhere. I must remember to look that up.

Inside it’s brand new because it was all rebuilt in the 90’s after the roof collapsed (oops—too charmingly run-down). But it’s actually very nice. They’re kind of obsessed with the crucifixion but there’s also a cross made of bits of wood from a refugee boat. Perhaps the church is trying to redeem itself after all.

TODAY WE’RE DAY TRIPPING to the coast. Marzamemi is a cute seaside town with an old centre where we sit and drink espresso and eat artichoke, but also has lots of holiday houses that look like they would have been super modern in the 60’s but now look weird and run down, but not in a good way. Kind of interesting, but the run down-ness doesn’t make you want to live here like it does in other places. Later we drive to the fairly unremarkable Portopalo di Capo Passero for no particular reason and look out over both the Ionian and Mediterranean seas.

THE NEXT MORNING we leave Noto and drive through delightful country roads to the delightful Necropoli Pantalica to see the caves in the mountains. It’s just delightful. We stop before the main attraction and do a walk amongst the caves. It would be a good place for boofen†. It feels hot, and would be terrible in summer, probably. There are wildflowers everywhere and these bright green and black lizards. A group of Germans is parked there with 70 series Toyota LandCruisers, which seems overkill for Italy but who knows what they’re doing. Probably something more interesting than us, actually. All along the trail are bees, including the menacing looking red and black ones, and it’s quite loud.

† Boofen is what people do in Saxon Switzerland when they sleep outside under a ledge. It’s fun.

We leave the rest of the necropolis unvisited and start the drive back across the island to Palermo to be nearer the airport to drop off the car tomorrow. The small towns seem very quiet. We pass an awesome rotting concrete stadium (missed photo opportunity). The higher areas here have an alpine feeling with fewer trees, rocky, grassy fields and street signs saying something about snow chains. By the time we get to the highway again the country has changed to the Windows XP desktop. The road is elevated above the ground and under construction most of the way and we clunk over the joints between the segments for several, tedious hours. It’s golden light most of the way back, which is the perfect light for a photographer to spend time in a car on a broken highway.

At some point we stop at a petrol station for a snack and drink an espresso. It’s actually pretty good—probably even as good as the espresso from petrol stations in Albania, which is significantly better than any of the espressos that I’ve had in Germany. The woman serving asks (in Italian) where we were from. I say what I think is Australia in my best Italian sounding accent: she smiles. Then Lotte tries: “Germania”.

“Germania? Oh no.” She shakes her head. “No”. Frown. She doesn’t seem to be joking and we stand there awkwardly. Afterwards she brings us our mini pizzas and she’s super friendly to us anyway. Strange.

As we near Enna we take the turn and go up the steep road to the town at the top of the hill with supposedly a view over all of Sicily but it’s busy and parking is hard and the buildings are ugly concrete and tall and we walk around in the dark canyon formed at their bases and time is running out and we can’t find any good view and there’s another town on the hill opposite that’s also somehow Enna and is that maybe the Enna that’s supposed to have the view but we don’t have time to check and it will have to wait for another trip. We keep going, back onto the bumpy highway through the golden light.

The gold changes to pastels as we turn off into the small country roads above Trabia to our B&B. The gate at the end of a dirt road is locked and we aren’t even sure if they know we’re coming but soon we’re greeted by Francesco (again) and he’s super friendly (again). So far we’ve found the Sicilians to be all very warm and welcoming, like the Vietnamese, or anyone paid to be warm and welcoming, really, but somehow here it feels genuine. Our room is the first one so far without a TV, which is nice, and like seemingly all Sicilian houses, the floor is tiled, only here the tiles give the impression of my old high school changing room.

Homemade dinner is prepared by Francesco’s wife, and it’s lovely.

THE NEXT MORNING we chat with Francesco before we leave. He and his wife only moved here from the city three years ago when they bought this place. They run the B&B with a pool and a fantastic terrace, but they also have a bit of land with almonds and mandarins, and over 100 olive trees. Last year Francesco said he made 700 litres of olive oil and has sent it around the world. Three-quarters of a tonne of oil sounds like a lot but I wonder how much money it really makes. He also talked about the how the trees should be pruned: cut off at the top to let light in and allow the olives to be reached. Leave the branches hanging down at the sides. Later we saw other groves with trees pruned in this way. It’s a really great place and a tempting advertisement for that lifestyle that we often dream of. It’s a pity we can’t stay here longer.

We return the car to the airport and get on the shuttle bus into Palermo, back along the road we just came in on. We thought it would be easier in the city without a car, but now it’s strange to be trapped on public transport again. It feels so passive. Taking the car certainly seems the preferable way to travel. No one ever achieved anything great by taking the bus. You can’t invade a country by bus. Lotte points out that we aren’t invading any countries but I still think it’s a valid point. You can’t do anything that hasn’t already been organised for you by someone else without your own transport. This post is full of profound realisations such as this that I offer to you, dear reader. Treasure them.

And now we’re back in a big city. We pass rows of shops displaying famous brands and I realise I haven’t thought about that sort of thing since we arrived. There’s a McDonald’s, also the first. And there’re homeless people again and beggars and immigrants hawking cheap tourist crap. In places the streets smell like Pairs, which is to say they smell like piss. The dog shit on the pavement is the same, too. Giuseppe from Castelbuono had said that he despises Palermo, and I can see how you could come to this conclusion, but it’s also a big city with international restaurants and cool shops and it’s busy and exciting the way small town Sicily is not (or small town anywhere, really).

We check in to the new B&B and Francesca is super helpful and friendly, of course. We eat arancini at a bakery food-court thing and then head into the city to explore. In one square we pass statues of men unrealistically riding lions. Seriously, who comes up with this? It’s commonly known that all mammalian biology can be divided into such a taxonomy: ridable and non-ridable. Just like the marmoset, the toy poodle and the golden-mantled ground squirrel, the lion is not one of the ridable mammals.

Swifts screech overhead, which incidentally are neither mammals nor ridable, though like lions they do frequent Africa.

At Chiesa di san Cataldo (it’s another church) we go inside and sit for quite a while. It’s small, with three domes and elements of Islamic architecture, which is a nice thing for a church to have. It wasn’t fully completed so you can see all the raw stones it’s built with and how all the arches and domes hold themselves together and it’s much more beautiful because of it. Late afternoon light shines through the high windows and gives the room the impression of lightness, even though it’s actually quite dark inside. I annoy the other visitors by trying to take some photos with much too low shutter speeds.

IT’S SATURDAY and we head to the famous Ballaro markets, again like good tourists. The vegetables look good. Food is just better where it naturally grows, which for most good food is not Germany. Next week at home we’ll probably buy tomatoes for 10 times the price and they’ll be from Tunisia, or Sicily.

The rest of the day we explore the city. Here more than anywhere the people look like how you imagine Italians to look like: the women with bright red lipstick and sunglasses and handbags with gold chain straps; men sporting blazers and slicked back hair and gold-rimmed aviators and cigars. I wonder who is mafia and what they have done.

Even so, of all the places we’ve recently visited, Sicily is one I could imagine moving to. Not Palermo, really, but somewhere a bit away from things with sunlight and some space and good food. It seems that what it lacks in infrastructure and development it makes up for in the things that actually make you happy. But it is still developed enough. I’m an expert in Sicily and you should definitely believe my opinion. Probably this is part of an unrealistic dream of me tending olive trees in the sun, an activity that I have shown heretofore no interest in whatsoever, but it does seem very appealing. And olive trees must be much easier than sheep or cows, right?

AT OUR LAST BREAKFAST we chat to a Korean girl who is taking a one year “sabbatical” to go travelling. The conversation starts like that amongst all backpackers: where are you from? where are you going? what have you already seen? It’s the first one we’ve had this trip, perhaps because at most places we’ve been the only guests. This time I’m not even annoyed by it, I just let it happen. It’s nice to chat but it won’t lead anywhere and we have a plane to catch and and so when we finish breakfast we say goodbye and go. We don’t exchange contact details, which always seems like a shame, but there’s really no relationship. Francesca from the B&B sits quietly while we talk and looks kind of left out. She must have overheard this same conversation a thousand times. I wonder if she travels herself, or wants to, or if she’s content with life in Palermo, but I don’t ask. There’s no real relationship with her, either.

At the airport we eat some low value for money sandwiches while we wait for the plane. And then, like The Doors most eloquently pointed out, it is the end.