Ciao tutti
This is the last leg of this trip and involves following the coast from Selinunte around the western tip of Sicily, along the northern coast to a bit past Cefalù, then cutting inland behind Etna back to Floridia.
I left my bunker in Selinunte in light rain, and spent a couple of hours wandering around the Greek ruins. Selinunte was a major Greek metropolis and port from the mid-500BC time to around 200BC when it was virtually razed to the ground by the Carthaginians and most of the population had to flee. Many of them travelled around 250kms and occupied the cave tombs at Panatalica, near Floridia, which I will visit soon.
My first stop is Mazara del Vallo, a major fishing centre. It is full of little alleys and I find myself going round and round in circles a few times, often arriving in the same place, but by a different route. I'm hungering for a good fish meal, so I ask some men at the port and they tell me to go to 'Il Pesciolino' (the little fish).
I scoot down there in the rain and the waiter wonders who this is squelching through the door in sopping wet clothes and a bright orange backpack and speaks to me in English but relaxes when I respond in Sicilian and it's after 3pm but he checks with the kitchen and they can fix me up something. I have pasta con ricci (sea urchin sauce), and a mixed grill of seafood and a half litre jug of white wine. After lunch the rain intensifies substantially and I wonder what to do. Here I am warm, nearly dried out, and mellow with the wine and a full stomach. I can see it's not going to stop raining and I can't stay in the restaurant all day, so with a good meal and half a litre of wine under my belt I head off for Marsala. At the best of times my scooter slides around a bit and I 've got to be careful. The rain is now absolutely bucketing down and the streets have 15-30cms (6-12 inches) of water and it's coming over the footboards of my Aprilia. I am wearing a Goretex jacket, which sort of keeps my upper half dry, but the rain funnels down the front of it directly on to my crotch - it's a very funny feeling having a cold wet crotch, but not unneccesarily unpleasant once you get used to it (ok, now you're finding out about my kinky side). Cars coming in the oposite direction are showering me with their spray from head to foot every few seconds - in short I seem to be riding through a universe of water coming at me from all directions, above, below and the sides. My jeans are heavy and cold as only wet jeans can be. I am enjoying myseld immensely - I am cackling with laughter every time a car sprays me. I feel like singing but it's not practical to open my mouth otherwise it will be flooded with dirty water. I reach the outskirts of town finally and there's less traffic and water on the road and I can speed up a bit.
Just to give you an image of me at that time I want you to use your imagination - I am riding along a windy seafront road in heavy rain, the Aprilia slipping and occasionally aquaplaning along, I am completely sodden, I can barely see out of my visor (no windscreen wipers, you know), half a litre of wine is coursing through my veins, my mouth is firmly shut but I'm humming songs and the words are running like SBS subtitles through my mind (for non-Australians SBS is the puclic TV channel that screens foreign films). I ride on like this for about 15 minutes, then as I come to Marsala I ride out of the storm.
I park my bike outside the city walls and walk up the main pedestrian thoroughfare - Marsala is a bit like a Sicilian Tidy Town - all very neat and clean. A number of the Enoteca's (wine shops) have tables with bottles of Marsala outside and you can just pour yourself some and taste it. I go into one that offers degustation, and an attractive young lady behind the bar divines my wishes, sits me down and proceeds to take me through a comprehensive tasting of Marsala wines (5 dry, aged up to 22 years, and 3 semi-sweet), accompanying them with little titbits she hands over the bar (with one of them she gives me an almond biscuit and she says dunk it in the Marsala - heaven) - after the fifth Marsala I'd like to be lying down on a sofa like a Roman noble with her putting a glass of wine to my lips and popping the titbits into my mouth (ok, I better stop fantasising and get a grip on myself, the wine has gone straight to my head). I tell her I'll buy a bottle of Marsala but she says I can't let you go without trying the Zibibbo, and weak man that I am I stay a little longer and try it - very delicious and I get a bottle.
So I totter back to the Aprilia and ride to Trapani - much of the coast has stone walls containing salt pans. I reach Trapani, the capital of the province (70,000 population), and find a lovely B&B with a restaurant attched. Although I've had a substantial breakfast and lunch, plus assorted titbits at the wine tasting, and I'm not really hungry, I psych myself up to eating dinner as I want to eat couscous, for which Taranto is famous - they even have a couscous cooking competition every year. The couscous obviously is a remnant from Arab times but I don't know why it's only cooked in Trapani and nearby, but nowhere else in Sicily. However the Sicilian influence is felt as it is made with with seafood - it's a lovely golden colour and is served with 2 fillets of fish draped over, and a bowl of reddish fish stock in a bowl on the side, which you spoon over the couscous to your taste. At the end I'm full as a goog, but there's a great selection of cakes on the sideboard and I can't resist - I have cassata (which traditionally is a cake, not an icecream) and a sponge drenched in wine (Malvasia, I think), and accept the waiter's recommendation of a glass of Malvasia to go with it.
During my meal I've heard an Australian accent at the far end of a table near me - there are 8 people and the ones down my end are speaking Sicilian. The face of the man speaking with the Oz accent is somehow familiar to me and I think he's a well-known bussinessman, Paul Rizzo (has sat on a number of boards - Telstra, IBM, etc) - I read an article about him in The Age (Melbourne's main newspaper) last year, in which they said how he had done well in business, coming from a poor family who had emigrated from Sicily, all the while remaining a very decent human being.
I overcome my natural shyness again and walk over and interrupt their conversation and ask if they're Australians, and yes, they're all from Melbourne (except the 2 locals), and it is Paul Rizzo, and several of them even live in the suburb of Kew, where I used to live. They are surprised and delighted to talk to me and pepper me with questions about what I'm doing here. Paul was born in Ragusa and migrated at an early age like me and I tell him I've just spent a week there visiting my aunt and cousins, and there we go again with the 6 degrees of separation.
I muse about this later and consider the similar experiences we must have had in our early years and the slightly different outcome - he's wealthy, well-connected, influential, probably lives in Toorak, BMW or Mercedes, etc and I'm unemployed, no house, and bumming around the world :) - I have a feeling I'm having a lot more fun.
I retire to my room and sleep for 9 1/2 hours.
Directly behind Trapani is Monte Erice (ancient Eryx) so next day I leave sunny Taranto and head up Mt Erice, of which the top third is in cloud. I've flown in to cloud but never ridden into it - at first little wisps of it then as I get higher the visibility drops to 50, 40, 30, 20 then finally less than 10 metres. I am riding up a steep, narrow road full of hairpin bends, the ground is wet from condensation, and cars coming from the opposite direction emerge from the cloud almost on top of me. It's a beautiful sensation - it feels like I'm in a little 10 metre moving cocoon of cold moist air.
I get to the little town of Erice, which I presume is somewhere near the top of the mountain, and it's an eery feeling wandering through the misty alleys - you can actually see wisps of cloud moving through buildings. The cloud lifts a little after a couple of hours and I have lunch at a cosy looking restaurant - busiate (a local handmade pasta coiled like a thin rope and about 15cms long) with eggplant sauce, then as a change from fish I have a long coiled grilled sausage with eggplant caponata (sweet and sour). I have noticed bars with very nice pasticcerie so I walk into one after lunch and see cassatine (crescent-shaped deep fried pastry filled with ricotta) and the friendly lady tells me they have freshly-made cannoli which she will fill to order - I can't make up my mind and have both (the cannolo is gigantic - about 22cm long) and I have a ricotta overload, so I have a coffee and a glass of Zibibbo to help my digestion and to warm me up and fortify me for the ride down the mountain (as you can see I can rationalise anything :)
It works and I ride down the mountain and continue along the coastline, which has one massive promontory after another. Early in the evening I reach the tiny village of Scopello, on the edge of a Natural Reserve, and I ride into the cutest, littlest piazza you could imagine so decide to stay there at a B&B high above the village on a steep, rough dirt road - an interesting riding experience at night.
I wake up to a beautiful sunny day (first one for a week)- not a cloud in the sky and calm sea. It's a welcome change from nearly a week of wind, rain and cool weather. I put my shorts on as a change from my jeans which can now nearly stand up by themselves, as any good bikies jeans should. I'm looking forward to the thrill up the breeze up the legs of my shorts (there goes my kinky side again). In Scopello I notice a sign for a boat excursion so 45 minutes later 6 of us and our captain Andrea (Andrew) cruise gently along the beautiful coast in a rubber inflatable. The coast is a series of rocky coves, interspersed with pocket handkerchief-sized beaches, green, turquoise and blue sea, and a backdrop of hills covered with native vegetation, and rocky bluffs. We swim, snorkel and sunbathe for over 5 hours, the conversation never flagging (even underwater :) and I get very sunburnt on all my white bits.
That night I stay in Palermo at Casa dei Amici (House of friends). As soon as I walk in I hear the unmistakeable Aussie twang and have a chat with Patrick from Perth. My devilish streak comes out so I ask him if he wants to go to dinner, have a shower and change then Patrick hops on the back of the Aprilia and we go off in search of a seafood restaurant, Patrick is a tall, strapping, good-looking young fellow and I've never carried a pillion passenger before on the Aprilia, so I set off with some trepidation - we are both without helmets, Palermo traffic is at it's worst, and I weave in and out of the traffic like everybody else. Patrick is strangely quiet and occasionally I look over my shoulder to see if he's still there. He is so clean-cut and squeaky clean and tall, etc and stands out a mile when we enter the seafood restaurant - I wonder what the waiters make of us - me completely different in every way - very dark suntan, short, grey-haired, but speaking Aussie lingo with him. He asks what's good to eat and I suggest sea urchins but he balks at that and ends up with a mixed seafood pasta, then later I shout him to a ricotta pastry and a digestive liqueur, which he's never had before.
I drop him off and go down to a milonga. I have rung Cinzia (Cynthia) who I met at the tango festival in Selinunte, and she meets me there. As we dance to a tango song she breaks out in a full-blooded voice and sings along with it - a truly amazing and disconcerting experience. She is a professional lyric singer and sings all over Italy and also overseas.
Next day I visit head off along the coast to Cefalù, where I have lunch, then continue along the old coast road - there is an amazing autostrada high above me on the right most of the way. I have now been riding my Aprilia for a week solid and this afternoon we become one - I have one long Zen moment as I glide effortlessly along the sinuous coastal road at high speed, passing every car in front of me. I just lean one way then the other and can feel the road in the minutest detail beneath me.
I reach Castello di Tusa, where a wonderful man, Antonia Presti, has dedicated his life to art, not for his own ego, but to benefit people. The Art Hotel has a number of rooms that have been completely created by artists. There are also a number of sculptures in towns and the countryside commissioned by him, and he has a project going in the Librino slum in Catania to assist the residents to regain their dignity through association with artists in a practical manner. I would love to stay at the Art Hotel tonight but I have to be back in Floridia tonight - I'm still over 150kms away.
I turn south up into the Nebrodi mountains and weave my way through them (neverending series of curves and hairpin bends) and eventually get to Bronte (best pistacchios in Sicily) on the western side of Mt Etna, then back down through Catania (stopping for a horsemeat hamburger in the street in a rough part of town (well, I'm a bikie, aren't I?), then get home to Floridia after midnight, after having covered a total of 1,600kms on my Aprilia.
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