Hotel Casena Dei Colli Palermo

apres un peu plus de 3 heures a sillionner la sicile, nous somme arriver a palerme. une ville qui ressemble plus a naples qu'a syracuse.. C'est dimannche, tout est fermer, nous avons eu du mal a trouver de quoi se faire a souper, mais nous somme finalement tomber sur une petite boucherie ou nous ...

WE depart Sicily with wonderful memories of sunny skies, blue Mediterranean seas, green hillsides covered with grape vines and olive trees, old cities, castles and greek temples, and of course good food.
We will see more sights in Rome, and then travel down the coast to Sorrento and Amalfi. I will post more about the things we are doing and seeing as we continue our trip.

... towns. Aggrigento was on the south coast of Italy and had temples and stuff. After getting the bus back I realised my hat had disappeared. I am sure I took it on the bus. I can't imagined it fell off my head. I didn't even fall asleep on the bus. I just got off and realised it was missing. Ran back on the bus and it was gone. Someone must have been a Forrest Gump fan. I am devastated.

Flight Problems

When I emailed my travel agent to oragnise my flights from Paris ...

... the hot sun and also from a couple of rain showers! The local pizza was to die for!!


We had time after lunch to saunter thru more picturesque streets before finally meeting up with Marco for the 2.5 hr drive back along the northern coastline to Palermo. Another wonderful day, finished off by 45 minutes of peakhour traffic from city outskirts to our hotel! A real shame that our time in Sicily was at an end....4.45am wakeup call arranged for tomorrow morning departure.

... we witnessed a funeral procession, where the mourners all walk behind the hearse, rather than drive cars as in the norm back in Australia. A sobering moment, after which we decided to head back into Palermo for lunch & to find the local archeological museum.....alas it was closed for renovations!


Another bus got us up the side of nearby Mont Pellegrino (600m) where there is a castle on one side up high...unfortunately not open to the public. Mont ...

... loose underfoot, with numerous places to slip or tiwst one's ankle, especially given the large number of elderly tourists we saw making the trip.

Next, we were off to the town of Trapani, right on the coast, with part of the older section jutting out in a spit into the two adjoining seas. Drove past & thru vast expanses of salt pans where salt production has been carried on commercially for centuries (surprised to find out from Salvo that the entire process ...

... tiles in the world....truly something to see, and the views across Palermo & the nearby coastline were very nice as well.



A morning well spent, and well worth the money, as we saw & learnt so much more than tourists travelling by themselves would expect to. We walked to local trattoria for a late lunch, then stocked up on supplies at the nearby supermercato, before snacks & rums for tea and an early night!

If you have doubts whether the mafia is still working... I don't.
Palermo is a charming mediterranean city, his highlights are so great, his Cathedral is amazing, but try not to get lost in the streets... we saw a peculiar street market and we decided to ...

... sightseeing... 6am. We walked to our hotel and were able to drop our bags off. Sicily is an interesting place, because it has gone from Greek to Roman to Norman to Italian rule, so there is a hybrid of architecture and style. Also, the attitude on the island is entirely different toward us. Street vendors wait patiently and don't bother you while you are shopping. I also found out that they don't bargain AT ALL, when everyone else in ...

... at Hotel Elena. Sicilians seem to be really friendly and helpful people. So far people have been willing to help us. That's helps cause we had no idea where to go. We are such rookies at this. W settled into our hotel and dropped our bags. We took off for dinner shortly after that at this place called Pizzeria Enzo. Here we had a massive dinner. The food here was really cheap!! I got Spaghetti alla Carbonara, pizza funghi corcini ...