Soooo where was I? Ah yes, the trip to Western Sicily. So, our program had planned a trip to the Western side of the Island, centered around a trip to Palermo. Now, due to a lot of classes, meetings, midterms etc, this trip actually took place 2 weeks ago from this post, but let's just on with the story shall we?
Right, well Friday morning (7 am...) we set off for the Western side of Sicily, about a 4 hour drive. So the first thing we drove by of any significance was Mt. Etna, the volcano just by Catania. It is one big volcano, believe me. I've been learning all about it in the Volcanology class that I've been taking, and in November I'm going to go hiking up it with my class. So more stories about Etna to come.
So after intermittent resting of my eyes, I was able to take a few pictures of the middle of the island. Sicily has a fair amount of hills and mountains, so it makes for very dramatic landscape photos. Next, unbeknownst to me, we drove through the suburbs of Palermo on the way to our first destination. However I did think the buildings were the perfect example of the architecture here in Sicily. It is very telling that the buildings are all done in a 60s and 70s feel, because that was the last time anything got renovated here. The next picture is a shot as we climbed a small mountain to our first destination, Erice. A beautiful place, with a city and castle on the top of this mountain. When I stepped off the bus I felt a breeze and I felt cool, not cold, but cool for the first time in about a month and a half. So we explored the town and had lunch up amongst the clouds. As you can see I found the castle on the mountain in the next photo. It was occupied only by Phoenicians, Arabs and the Spanish, the Greeks never made it this far on Sicily. So after that I turned around and took a couple of panos and then we hopped back on this bus and went off to our next stop. We went to a national park, Lo Zingaro. It is a large piece of protected coastline with a small rock beach in the middle which is where we spent the afternoon. The first picture was picture of a mountain just before we got to Lo Zingaro and then the final picture is a small pano I did on the beach.
The rest of the story will come with more pics in the next post!