A farewell to San Vito

Posted on January 12, 2012 by AdrianC

Our last couple of weeks in San Vito seemed to fly by, fortunately with a change in the prevailing wind that’d been threatening to blow us away almost since we’d arrived. Coming straight off the ocean, the campsite was a lot more protected – although we did wonder if the original direction might be preferable overall on the morning there were a couple of large ships sheltering VERY close to the beach…

Christmas itself was quiet – those we’ve come to think of as “the usual suspects” were the only people staying on the campsite, and we just spent a day of eating and drinking (as ever). Quite how we managed to fit so much food into the van’s fridge, I’m still unsure – but it seemed to fly straight back out again.

We finally got around to heading up to the lovely hilltop town of Erice, visible from a good chunk of this end of the island as it sits high above Trapani. The cloud came and went, rolling down the street as we sat having lunch, but the views were superb, stretching as far as Mazara and the sea off the south coast glittering in the sunlight.

Entertainment was provided by another Christmas market, with small huts in a couple of the town squares, and a wonderful series of animatronic tableaus – both nativity and local-life-in-times-past – in a small courtyard.

The run-up to New Year saw a whole load of Italian registered campers appear, and we thought the site might see some lively celebrations. But they nearly all disappeared again on the morning of New Year’s Eve, for some strange reason. The year started with bright blue skies, so we decided to give a try to the walking poles we’d treated ourselves to, with another meander through the Zingaro natural reserve. Not just a meander, either – I even braved the sea for a New Year’s swim! Yes, it was cold…

Before we knew it, we needed to head to the airport to collect my mother for her week’s holiday. We’d spent just over a month at La Pineta, and it proved to be the right choice. We still don’t think the perfect campsite exists, but this one’s definitely a chunk closer than most, with a really good blend of facilities on site and proximity to a town with decent food shopping.

Oh, and top-notch cats. They’ll miss us. Probably…

Posted in By Country - Italy, Travel stuff | Leave a comment

Wherever the tastebuds go

Posted on January 4, 2012 by EllieGee

By the time we crossed the border into Italy, we’d eaten our way through Portugal, Spain and France. Food was always going to be a big part of the trip, being an aspect of life we enjoy to the full with both of us loving to cook and to try new things. Our aim was to shop locally, buy seasonally and sample local specialities, but we were on the move so much in the earlier part of the trip this wasn’t always possible. We also have to create meals within a tight space and with limited cooking facilities. Although we have always been able to eat well, Italy is the country we have been able to fulfill our aims with the greatest success.

Portugal is not known for its cuisine, with its narrow range dominated by bacalhau – salt cod – preserved fish being a staple of the seafaring explorers of Portuguese history. It’s bought in sackloads by every household weekly and we were told that every family has its 1001 ways with bacalhau cookbook. It needs to be soaked for three days before cooking though. Fine for those wooden ships maybe, but not great for a tiny campervan. So we enjoyed a lovely meal of roasted bacalhau at a specialist restaurant.

Bacalhau counter at the supermarket – note lady using guillotine to chop required amounts in the background

There is other good seafood too of course, especially the sardines popular at the Sao João festival in June.


Trying to find a decent lunch snack when not having our own picnics, we came across formulaic menus of rather processed ham or cheese sandwiches. Or you could have ‘miste’ – a mix of ham and cheese. Or really push the boat out and add in a hot dog sausage. In Porto, the speciality is the Francesinho, a spectacular sandwich of different hams, cheese and sausage covered in tomato sauce and topped with a fried egg and chips. We had to try it of course.

Francesinha sandwich in Porto

Spanish cuisine has much more going for it, and we’re especially fond of the tapas tradition, which we enjoyed to the full in Santiago and Léon. Like Portugal though, the offerings in food shops, even the huge French hypermarket branches there, left a lot to be desired. We were disappointed with the bread in Spain and Portugal too.

It may be ahead on bread but in some ways France seems to be resting on its culinary laurels. Disappointing restaurant meals and poor quality produce abound. However, high points were the food market in Puy en Velay and the best crépe ever on an island off the coast of Brittany.

So when we crossed the Alps into Italy, we were thrilled to encounter the Italians’ love of their food and their pride in openly sharing their knowledge about it with foreign novices. Pizza and pasta have been embraced the world over, but visiting Italy has shown us just what food means to Italians and how their cuisine is perhaps the most varied in Europe.

Traditional marinara pizza in Naples – tomato, oregano, garlic and olive oil (no mozzarella, no seafood)

Our first visit to a large Italian supermarket left us incapable of picking what to have for dinner. The quality and variety of fresh produce was the best we’d seen on the trip so far. The choice of fresh pasta alone left us dumbfounded. Stuffed pasta with such a wide range of fillings, we didn’t know where to start. Any amount of fresh sauces and antipasti. We bought far too much because we just wanted to try as much as possible from hazelnut pesto to porcini stuffed tortellini.

During the most recent part of the trip, in Southern Italy and Sicily, we have slowed right down and spent longer periods in one place. This has allowed us to discover more hidden away local shops and markets, and build relationships with the butcher, the baker, the deli counter staff and the stallholders with our faltering attempts at Italian. We see them often as we tend to shop every day (sometimes twice a day when the fridge was down). There is an abundance of fresh fruit and veg stalls everywhere and we have followed the seasons from late late summer into the beginning of winter and seen the changes in what’s on offer.

There are lots of new things we’ve never tried before, for example ‘loti’, also known as ‘kaki’ are persimmons in English – a sweet orange fruit, a variation is the ‘melekaki’ a cross between a persimmon and an apple. The fico d’India cactus fruits have also been piled high this autumn, and we’ve seen the cactus orchards too.

Persimmons

Persimmons unpeeled

There are lots of different green leaf vegetables tied in bunches, and fierce spiny courgettes (see below: the inner flesh has the texture of potatoes raw and when cooked) as well as types of fish we had no clue what to do with. No problem – the vendors will tell you how to prepare and cook them. Sometimes other customers join in and tell you how they cook it and there will be plenty of discussion and the characteristic gesture of rubbing a knuckle into the cheek to indicate ‘yummy’. What better incentive to help us learn and improve our Italian!

Fierce courgettes – you do need gardening gloves for these

Our friend Jenny introduced us to another Italian treasure not so common now – the fresh pasta shop. Here you can buy pasta from the local speciality shapes to ravioli filled to order, all made on the premises. If you want papardelle (the one that’s double the width of tagliatelle), they get sheets of lasagne and cut it to size. Enough handmade fresh pasta for two portions – and then some – for two euros. More for filled of course, depending on the filling.

Busiata – the local ringlet pasta from the Trapani region of Sicily

We’re getting used to the markets where you ask for a quantity and end up with much more than you requested, sometimes for free, sometimes not. Because of a tiny, and at times not working, fridge, we ask for apparently embarrassingly small quantities. At the market near Tropea, I picked up a handful of the pretty miniature red peppers an old man was selling … it was too small an amount for him to charge me, he said.

The Italian staples of pasta, gnocchi and risotto especially lend themselves to cooking on two rings, and have infinite possibilities when it comes to ingredient combinations both traditional and made up on the spot. Couscous is also a very useful staple both in preparation – it doesn’t even need a ring – and in what you can eat with it. It’s a local speciality here on Sicily with its Arab influences.

We tend not to do much frying because of fat spitting and fumes in such an enclosed area, so we’ve been missing sausages. Jenny cooked us a pasta dish with the local fennel flavoured sausage meat prised out of its skin and cooked with other ingredients. This has now become a regular addition to pasta sauces or to the risotti we’re so fond of.

The celebration of the local ‘produtti tipici’ of different regions tempted us to try truffles in Umbria, local wines from Montalcino in Tuscany to Sicily’s Nero d’Avola, and of course Sicily’s famous cannoli – small crispy pastry tubes filled with ricotta and sprinkled with chopped pistachios, and other pasticceria goodies. We’ve also been sampling a variety of local liqueurs from Mandarinetta to Limoncello.

Pasticceria goodies including chocolate cannoli

Then there are the different varieties of arancine – or rice balls. Made in Sicily from the 10th century onwards, these consist of rice moulded round a tasty filling, say spinach and ricotta, or meat ragu for example, and then bread crumbed and deep fried – a lovely change for a lunchtime snack.

Arancine rice ball and a stuffed bread variant in Marsala, Sicily

In each of these countries though, it is their own cuisine that dominates. Ingredients and restaurants beyond this tend only to be available in larger cities. We search out local ethnic grocery stores and street markets for Indian spices, fresh ginger and other ingredients for our stir fries and curries.

Fresh milk is the one surprising thing that is more difficult to find, although it has been more widely available in Italy. There are aisles given over to UHT milk in France, Spain and Portugal, and just a small shelf of fresh milk offered in the chiller cabinet and sometimes not at all. The things we might miss are outweighed by the new things we are discovering though.

Meat has generally been of very good quality across the countries we’ve travelled through. Cuts of meat are different, and are usually sliced quite thinly here in Italy. We’re missing lamb though – it’s been very expensive throughout the trip and has not been freely available here in Sicily. We did get some lamb ribs recently, which we pan cooked in a borrowed big frying pan. As our Italian improves we are getting better at asking for what we want from the butcher rather than buying pre-packaged meat. And if he doesn’t have the particular slab of meat on his counter, he will go and fetch a carcass from his cold store and cut off the required amount. This would make some people squeamish, but here it feels as if you are getting nearer to the source of your food.

We recognise that the food we were used to in the UK, is so varied, luxuriant and international that we’d become very spoilt. You can get formerly seasonal vegetables and fruit at almost any time of year. If you choose, you can have green beans from Zambia, asparagus from Peru and avocados from Israel in just one shopping basket … far removed from when these items are in season in England or even in Europe, if they ever were. The drive towards healthier eating and superfoods means we now expect and crave blueberries and pomegranates and any amount of hitherto unknown grains and greens in our salads year round. When we flew back to the UK from Lisbon back in July, we were almost overwhelmed by the choice in just one lunchtime food aisle in Marks and Spencer.

In spite of the variety and quality of food in the UK, British cuisine is only now being appreciated once again. However, there is that discussion about what British cuisine actually is. In the south-east of England at least we have no discernible regional specialities. I can’t think of any specific cake, cheese or sausage from our area, for example. We’re likely to take foreign visitors for a Brick Lane curry for an authentic eating experience. We do have a wealth of regional and local beers that actually taste different from each other though. European lagers really differ very little one from another and there are few local breweries.

We are not missing much from home, but what we do miss most are the beers, and oven cooked dishes, like pies and roasts (we’ve had roast potatoes twice in six months – those of you that know us well will know just how much we miss them!). In larger supermarkets you can find a few overpriced things on the ethnic food aisle. It is amusing to look at the British shelves. They usually have familiar brands of Marmite, custard powder, canned steak and kidney puddings, and baked beans if you’re really that desperate.

Now our taste buds are looking forward to the change in cuisine that crossing over to North Africa will give them.

Posted in Food stuff, Personal stuff | 2 Comments

With spanner firmly in hand

Posted on December 31, 2011 by AdrianC

One of the biggest risks of doing a trip like this is the van playing up. Choosing to do it in a vehicle that’s near-nuff a quarter of a century old was never going to minimise that risk. As the driveshaft saga so eloquently demonstrated, when the vehicle’s out of commission, you temporarily lose access to everything you can’t relatively easily carry in a bag. You can’t cook, dress or sleep in a hire car – and you’re at the mercy of somebody else. My opinion of the majority of the motor trade has never been particularly high, with plenty of examples of personal experience to fall back on as proof, and that’s before you add in the extra complexity of linguistic issues.

However, the biggest benefit of a vehicle of this age (purchase budget aside) is that it’s not chock-full of the kind of technology which means that servicing requires a diagnostic computer. When something has a little sulk, it’s almost certainly going to be due to a fault that we can diagnose and probably even fix without too much ado.

So, when the exhaust – which wasn’t in the first flush of youth when we bought the van – started to blow not long after we arrived on Sicily, there wasn’t too much of a melodramatic response from us. After all, given that we’ve been giving the poor ol’ dear so much use this last few months, it’s been behaving really quite well.

I managed to shut the exhaust leak up by wrapping the offending joint firmly with a bodge-bandage. That was never going to last long, though, since the leak was well forward in the exhaust – so a lot of heat, and a fair bit of gas pressure at work. The exhaust on this van has two pipes coming from the engine itself, one from the front and one from the rear pairs of cylinders, joining at a 2-into-1 which also acts as a 90degree elbow, taking the gases to the main silencer across the back of the van. The leak was from the gaskets sealing the two pipes going into that elbow.

When it started to blow again as we left Palermo, there was only one real option. A new exhaust. And that’s one of the reasons we’ve been sat at San Vito for a while. As well as the exhaust, we’ve been waiting for several other parts for the van to arrive. Then, once they did, it was time for me to get busy with the toolkit.

Buying the exhaust was the first challenge, of course. Order something up locally, or get it from a known-good source, but with the extra shipping costs? In the end, I didn’t even bother trying to get prices locally. I’m not sure my Italian would have been up to it, and we’d have certainly ended up with the usual ho-hum quality, fits-where-it-touches, mild steel system that would only have lasted a handful of years. Brickwerks do a full stainless system that was reputed to be excellent. In addition, close inspection revealed that we didn’t need the full lot – the first pipes in the system, going from the engine’s cylinder heads, weren’t quite at death’s door. Just as well, really, since the bolts holding them to the engine were utterly past-tense, and the job would probably have required the engine to be removed to allow them to be drilled out and the threads in the holes made good again.

It also became obvious that the bracketry holding the main silencer up was a bit historical. That was another tip in favour of a specialist source, since they’ve remade those in stainless. If you’re going to do a job, best to do it once.

Then there’s the “whilst you’re in there” bits. Since the main engine mountings are only accessible with the exhaust off, it made sense to order a set of those at the same time.

Once a large and heavy box arrived, it was time for battle to be commenced – and the first victory wasn’t long in coming. A quick bit of effort with a trusty junior hacksaw saw old bolts severed and all of the old exhaust from the elbow backwards hit the floor. Yes, the elbow backwards. The offending joint itself was still firmly intact.

At least with that out of the way, I could tackle what I was expecting to be the worst part of the job – the engine mounts. Surprisingly, they were also relatively straightforward. There’s a steel beam goes the width of the van at the back, supporting the bottom of the mounts. With a jack taking the weight of the engine, that could be unbolted and removed. The mounts themselves – blocks of rubber with metal brackets firmly fixed to the top and bottom – were then left dangling. It wasn’t possible to easily unfasten their tops, though – too much else in the way. However, they’re bolted to a large aluminium casting which could be unbolted from the engine itself, and again removed from below. With everything out, the old mounts proved to be utterly knackered. There’s a pair of inners, and a pair of outers – both inners were completely split in two, whilst both outers were not far off, meaning that the engine wasn’t being restrained in the van very well at all…

And so on to that exhaust elbow. There’s four bolts hold it to the pair of front pipes. Being subjected to road spray as well as a lot of heat, they were, of course, very definitely ex-bolts, with not one actual corner between any of their heads. Time to cut them off, too. The lower pair went reasonably easily. The upper pair, though… Nope. Not happening. Not with the tools I had with me. I just couldn’t get any kind of purchase with the saw blades onto them, because they were just so inaccessible. Still, at least I’d got to a point where things were no worse than they were before – all of the new rear exhaust could be fitted properly, leaving one joint (with nice new bolts) to easily redo when the offending elbow itself could be replaced.

Reassembly, in the immortal words of the Haynes manual authors, is the reversal of the removal procedure. Or something. It’s quite obvious that they’ve never attempted to get a bolt slid into place, then a washer and nut fitted onto it, sight unseen, by fingertips at the end of a tiny gap, whilst lying on their sides on sharp gravel, with near-on 15kg of exhaust’s weight supported along the length of one leg raised in a parody of an aerobics pose – and all with a cat sat on top of them. Lucky sods.

In the end, there was no other option but to take the recalcitrant last bit away to meet a man with power tools at his disposal. The local garagiste in San Vito spent a couple of hours underneath, with a mix of angle grinder and air-powered die grinder.

Even when he did manage to remove the old elbow, it wasn’t as straightforward as it could have been, with the mounting flanges needing a fair amount of work before there was any chance of the seal remaining gas-tight for long. Remember I said I didn’t have a high opinion of the motor trade in general? A few more experiences like this, and I could change that opinion.

Even better, there was the entertainment of learning a bit about Ape-fixing. It seems you don’t need a jack, merely an old car wheel with a length of steel pole welded to it as a prop. Just grab one rear corner, heave, tip, and stuff the prop underneath.

But I digress. The end result? Excellent. The exhaust itself is as good as reputed, and the replaced mounts have made a big improvement to the way the van drives. The gear change is much better, and there’s a lot less slop and judder as you move away or trickle along very slowly.

That, of course, was just one of the jobs needing to be done. You may remember that at Torre Salsa, the fridge had stopped working on mains. At Palermo, I took the fridge out of the van, and proved that it was indeed just the electric heater element that had died of old age. So, with a new one to hand, out came the fridge again. Once it was back in, a drawn-out period of waiting had to be endured to see if it was properly cooling again. It was… A cold beer proved the fact. Another proved it again. Finally, we were thoroughly convinced – and out of beer.

Other minor problems had also come to light during the trip. Back in the summer, we’d started having problems with the sink tap not always working. Because the water tank’s lower than the sink, there’s no water pressure – so the tap switches on an electric pump. Or, rather, it should. The small switch inside the tap had started to get tempramental. Sometimes it’d work first time, sometimes you’d have to open-and-close the tap five or six times to get it to work. Fiddling with it didn’t seem to produce an improvement which ever lasted long, so it wasn’t a great surprise when an attempt finally resulted in the switch’s innards falling apart completely. At least a quick and easy work-around could be made by adding a separate electric switch (bought from a local supermarket). It meant we had reliable water in the sink again – but wasn’t a great long-term solution. So, again, advantage was taken of a consistent address to order a replacement from another specialist, in Germany. Most motorhome taps are not only crazy expensive, but are either way too big to fit under our cooker lid whilst closed or designed for both hot and cold water – we only have cold.

Then there was the battery charging… All the time the van’s plugged in to mains electricity (and, yes, I’ve also had to replace the socket on the outside of the van, since the lid started to wobble around on only one hinge pin, as well as randomly opening and flapping whilst we were driving) it should be charging both batteries. However, it wasn’t – and after more than a few nights in one place, we kept having to jump-start the van from its own second battery, a quirk in the wiring meaning that the stereo and interior lighting took their power from the same battery used to start the engine – leaving the second battery with virtually nothing to actually do. Once that was changed over, via a small modification to the van’s wiring, it became increasingly obvious that neither battery was being charged – as the lights still dimmed to nearly nothing after a few nights of use. Replacing the charger had a stack of other benefits, though – not only is the new one MUCH smaller than the old (a big bonus when you see how squished in everything is in all of our storage space), but it’s a much cleverer charger – meaning that the battery should last a lot longer before needing to be replaced.

So we should – he says hopefully – be set fair for the next leg. There’s always the risk of tempting fate by saying that, of course, so cross your fingers for us. There is, inevitably, still a list of jobs to do on the van – but there’s nothing major that we can think of at the moment.

And, anyway, what else is a breakdown but an excuse to meet new friends and get some new material to blog about…?

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve just got a couple of bolts to check and the front spoiler to tape back together again.

Posted in Van stuff | 3 Comments

Swings and Roundabouts (part 2)

Posted on December 30, 2011 by AdrianC

The laptop’s back! One week for the shipping materials to get from Dell to us, one week for the laptop to get to Dell in Germany. Then a couple of days for them to rebuild it with a new motherboard – free, despite it being out of warranty. Then a week and a bit (including Christmas) for it to get back to us…

Anybody’d think we were out at the very end of a tiny spit of land at the furthest extreme of an outlying island belonging to a country renowned for the inefficiency of it’s postal system…

What this does mean, though, is that the Cefalu post can now be shared.

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Camping cats

Posted on December 27, 2011 by EllieGee

A delightfully gormless cat from the agriturismo near Pienza

This is a post for all you cat lovers. If you don’t like cats, you won’t like this, but please be patient and wait for further non-cat posts.

We rarely closely encountered cats in France, Spain and Portugal and being great cat lovers we missed feline contact. As we have travelled south through Italy, we’ve come across more and more camping cats. These are the cats that belong, however loosely, to the various campsites we have stayed at.

Our first camping cat at Lucca

A local neighbourhood cat that befriended us at the Siena camping

As we’ve made our way south and spent longer at places, we’ve got to know the cats well. Sometimes they are obviously feral cats in less than good condition, but more often than not they are fed by campsite owners and campers alike and seem generally healthy.

One of the many Costa Verde camping cats near Tropea

There can be just one cat at a site, but there have been up to 13 or so in some places. We make it a strict rule not to feed them, although we’ve often given them names.

Nero and Bianca - camping kittens near Taormina

And until now we’ve never let them in the van… that is until we reached San Vito lo Capo where it is impossible to keep them out for long. We still don’t feed them though.

So now we’re the mad cat people of La Pineta, San Vito’s year-round campsite. The cats have names and huge personalities, and are very affectionate. As we don’t feed them, it does seem more than mere cupboard love.

There’s Harriet, a large and very furry tortoiseshell. Sometimes also known as Furriet, she is friendly as long as it’s on her terms. She likes following you around, and likes companionship, but is not a lap cat. She is quick to lash out if you try to overstep her mark. Usually when we try to evict her from the van. She also lashes out at other cats if they come in physical contact. She enjoys her luxuriant fur being brushed. Has been known to try and help you brush your teeth, following you to the ablution block and stretching up to put her paws on the sink … She waddles when she walks and is generally very endearing.

She’s so very furry and round we dubbed her Hairy Harriet the Wombat Cat at first. She often acts like a teenager and huffs off ‘bovvered, me?’ or should that be ‘bovvato mi?’. Last night we couldn’t extricate her from the front of the van and looked set to have her in the van all night. Luckily after we had been dozing for half an hour, we heard movement and managed to entice her out.

Needy Noddy Nodward AKA Nodular Noddlebert and other similar derivations is a ginger and white tom who is completely soft and soppy in body and soul. He is almost too affectionate. We had a very strict ‘no entry’ policy on undone ginger toms being allowed in the van, but Noddy has completely wrapped us around his paw and no mistake. In fact, I would say that he has forcibly adopted us.

We have to open our sliding door wide to get in and out and he is so quick he is asleep on our sofa while we’re still looking around to keep him out. He will follow you around, will lick any exposed flesh, and sit on any bit of you that is available. He will also sleep for hours on your lap before you’ve really even noticed him. He is also the first cat to climb up the van onto the roof, and try and get in through the roof vent.

Needy Ned. A ginger and white tom who hasn’t been seen so much for a while. Rather battered in the face, he is the least cuddly but most attention seeking cat. He will trip you up to keep close to you as you walk by. We think Harriet could be responsible for some of the scars… and we believe lookalike Noddy is responsible for keeping him away from our attentions – he does want to be the sole cat of our affections.

Polly. A petite dark shorthaired tortoiseshell with a delightful chirruppy miaou. She is the affectionate ballerina of the bunch – and will head butt your hand and stand on her hind legs in a most delightful way. She likes to come in the van but doesn’t settle and doesn’t know about soft paws, so is a pain quite quickly – literally. She too is irresistible, hyperactive, but irresistible. Never stays still so not so many good photos of her.

At times our camping pitch has resembled the IKEA ‘Happy Inside’ (original, making of, and “the real commentary“) advert gone wrong. There have been moments when we have ‘allowed’ three cats into the van. Simultaneously. It really isn’t big enough and usually ends in tears and fur flying.

These cats have become such good company in spite of being exasperatingly underfoot at times. We know that when we move on early in January we will be sad to say goodbye to them.

Noddy and Polly about to start helping sort laundry...

Posted in By Country - Italy, Wildlife stuff | 7 Comments

Life in San Vito

Posted on December 24, 2011 by EllieGee

We have been in San Vito lo Capo for four weeks now and now it’s Christmas Eve. It’s hard to believe it’s Christmas and we’re still on the road. The weather has been mixed with some high winds, the most recent bout seeing really high seas and a large chunk of beach blown into the town streets.

Life continues at a slow pace, cycle rides around town, learning Italian, shopping, chores and jobs on the van. The parcels we’ve ordered have started arriving, although we’re still waiting for the main laptop to come back from Germany where it’s being fixed. The van has received a lot of presents this year. We’ve been on a few longer outings, but we’ve been very relaxed and as is often the case, even when there is something that should be done – writing blog posts for instance – it’s hard to get around to it.

We’ve been busy socialising. It started off with meeting Barbara, who has a cottage just a couple of miles up the road, in town. We popped by for a drink and a chat, which turned into a whole evening of talk, wine and food. Then there were the various campers who have been through the site. Jenny and Neil stayed here for a few days, before getting the boat northwards to get to Rome in time for Christmas. We had our ‘works’ outing with them to the only pizzeria open in town on a Saturday night. We drank it dry. Not as bad as it sounds, they only had a couple of bottles of white. They then invited us to have a free digestivo on the house and left the bottle of limoncello on the table … That certainly got us into the Christmas party spirit.

Social get togethers too with various other travellers who have spent time here, Brian and Mary, Rob and Sarah, and the Finns Seppo and Mailiisa who invited us for drinks in their van and we had a fun evening in spite of, or perhaps because of,  not having more than a very few words of any language in common. My ten words of Finnish ran out quite quickly!  Then there are those like us who are spending the festive season here – Uli and Martina who we know from Sferracavallo, and Karen and Paul who we first met at Rais Gerbi, the campsite near Cefalu. So just a handful of people here for Christmas, with their assorted dogs, and not least our camping cats to keep us company.

We spent a lovely day in the Zingaro Natural Reserve with Jenny and Neil. Fabulous vegetation and stunning views across the bay as we walked its paths and picniced in one of the rifugios high on the hillside. A challenging walk at times – a mix of coastal path and mountain trekking. So steep ups and downs – I went flying a couple of times.
The three euros a head entry includes a couple of little museums of local life in times gone by beautifully presented in old cottages. The plant life includes huge rosemary bushes, dwarf palms and wild irises. We didn’t see any of the wild boar that reside here, but did find traces of another inhabitant – porcupine quills. We look forward to spending some more time there soon.
We also spent a lovely day around the tiny village of Scopello with its Tonnara, a former tuna fishery set amongst the rock outcrops on the coastline, and the pretty village square on the hillside above. We had a lovely lunch of the local ringlet-like pasta – busiata – with seafood.
It’s been a tonic to be somewhere with a very relaxed approach to Christmas, with the seasonal paraphanalia not making its appearance before the beginning of December. We visited the small Christmas market in the port town of Trapani, about half an hour’s drive away. There was a live crib, free snacks and craft demonstrations. The best bit was following the local brass band, made up mainly of younger people all dressed in Santa outfits, as they marched round town playing very jaunty versions of Silent Night, Jingle Bells, George Michael’s Last Christmas and John Lennon’s Happy Christmas War is over. There was no mulled wine but we found a friendly cafe that fortified us with a superb Irish coffee.

We’ve also been making more plans for our travels in the New Year. Firstly, Adrian’s mother is coming to visit us in early January and we’re renting a cottage near Scopello (mentioned above) for the week. Shortly after she departs, we have our ferry booked for Tunisia. We are looking forward to leaving Europe for a change of continent and culture.

Wishing you all the best for a joyous Christmas and fabulous New Year.

Posted in Art & Culture stuff, By Country - Italy, Personal stuff, Wildlife stuff | 5 Comments

Welcome to San Vito lo Capo

Posted on December 16, 2011 by AdrianC

Ever since the snow in Abruzzo, we’ve been aware of the approach of winter. Few campsites are open, and the days are short enough that there’s a real restriction on what we’ve been able to do. As a result, we’ve been expecting a certain amount of stasis until Spring starts to approach.

The initial plan of finding an apartment has gone more-or-less by the board, partly through always wondering if the next place will be perfection, partly through wariness of the amount of bureacracy and hidden expense likely to be involved.

So it looks like we’re staying in the van. But where? It’s got to be somewhere south enough to be pleasantly warm, and it’s got to be somewhere with enough in the surrounding area to keep us interested. It’s also got to be a campsite with good enough facilities… Sicily’s certainly (mostly) got the weather – but every single one of the campsites around the island has been lacking in one or both of the other factors.

By the time we got to Palermo, then Cefalu, we’d more or less finished the lap of the island, and there was only one corner left unvisited – San Vito lo Capo, at the peak of a headland in the far north-west.

The campsite was closed for November, so we’d had to delay our arrival until the start of December. When we finally arrived, with expectations stacked heavily, our hearts sank. First impressions were not exactly overwhelming.

After a night, though, everything started to look much rosier. The showers are about the best we’ve experienced since leaving the UK. The town is incredibly dead and out-of-season, but still very pleasant – and there’s even a decent fresh pasta shop. The natural reserve of the Zingaro lies a few kilometres south – it’s not large, only about 7km north-south, but going by how small a dent we made on the map during our first (exhausting) day’s walk, that’s not going to be a big issue.

La Pineta is also easily the best site we’ve found for another reason – the cats here are definitely the most characterful to date.

So – it looks like we’ve found ourselves a base. With an address that we can rely on, we can catch up with some of the things we’ve been needing to order. That leaves us with no choice to sit here at least until various packages have arrived. Somehow, though, it doesn’t seem to be too big a hardship – it’s difficult to believe, but we’ve already been here over a fortnight – and we’ve less than another fortnight to go before Christmas… How DID that happen?

Posted in By Country - Italy, Personal stuff, Travel stuff | 8 Comments

Cefalu

Posted on December 16, 2011 by AdrianC

Just east of Palermo lies Cefalu – a city grown up around a cathedral, nestled snugly into the tiniest of corners of flat(ish) land between a monumental rock and the sea.

The town is a maze of tiny back streets, with tall narrow buildings looming over them as they climb and drop from the seafront. To the west of the town, a beautiful golden sandy beach curves along – the reason why Cefalu is one of Sicily’s two biggest tourist resorts (Taormina, on the east coast, being the other). But it’s the cathedral and the rock which dominate and define the town.

The cathedral, opening onto an airy piazza, is home to another set of gorgeous golden mosaics – slightly earlier than those at Monreale and Palermo’s palace chapel, and confined to just the altar end rather than filling the entire building – but no less beautiful for that. On one of the roads, there’s the medieval baths, a series of sunken basins with rapidly flowing water through carved stone lion’s head spouts.

On another, the derelict old fish market – with several scruffy ageing cats hanging around in vain for somebody to come and unlock the gates again. “Ah remember, when ah were a kitten, it were all fish guts around ‘ere, lad…”

Immediately behind the cathedral, a sheer cliff face soars upwards. There’s a footpath up from the town, climbing through two sets of 8th century fortifying walls. On top of the rock, there’s the ruins of a number of buildings, including a temple to the Greek goddess, Diana. A network of small paths wind around, taking you along the walls and all the way around the rock, before climbing upwards towards the ruined castle – occupied now by a large number of grazing goats. The views, of course, are stunning.

For miles in both directions, the coastline unfolds in twists and turns. Headlands jut into the sea below hill towns, whilst inland there are jagged rock crests leading into the mountains of the interior of the island. We sat on the wall, staring at the town and cathedral far below us, as we ate panini filled with delicious herb-roasted ham from one of the town’s delis.


The campsite near Cefalu was beautifully situated, with a view from our pitch straight onto the sea and more headlands.

However, it was a bit out in the middle of nowhere – to get the train to Cefalu involved asking the campsite staff to give us a lift the five or so km to the nearest station, along the steeply winding main coastal road. It did, though, have decent campsite cats – always a bonus. A lot of the cats on Sicily seem to have a lot of Siamese in them, and these were no exception – staring up at us with big blue eyes begging for the rind from the cheese we were eating. Yes, we are suckers.

The nearest town, horizontally, to the campsite was Pollina – only a couple of km inland. However, that masked the fact that the town is over 750m above sea level, and the road winds steeply for 11km to get there. Once at the top, though, the town was gorgeous – semi-circular open-air theatre seating with breathtaking vistas over the inland mountains, and the ruins of a castle dominating the coast. A randomly meandering old boy took us under his wing, and gave us a totally unintelligible guided tour of the centre of the town and the views.

We, of course, cheated and drove to Pollina. We’re not daft. However, Nadine and Christian, who we’d met at Tropea before crossing to Sicily, had been staying at the campsite for a month, and had cycled to Pollina. Apparently, it took three hours to get up, yet only one to descend again. They’re clearly made of sterner stuff than us – but, to them, it probably didn’t seem that major a climb – they live in the Alps…

Posted in By Country - Italy, Travel stuff | 3 Comments

Swings and Roundabouts

Posted on December 5, 2011 by AdrianC

There are days when nothing goes right, and there are days when everything goes right.

Saturday was the former, today seems to be the latter so far. (Well, apart from this morning’s little incident when Ellie and her bicycle were reversed over by a blind muppet in a battered Mercedes – but that’s minor, right? No damage, no injury, at any rate.)

We were sat in the van on Saturday evening, watching a TV programme we’d brought with us on the laptop, when suddenly the screen went black. The sound continued, but nothing at all on the screen. Turn it off, turn it back on – and still nothing on the screen. The video controller seemed to have died. A little bit more testing confirmed it – and I knew the laptop was out of warranty. Oh. Expensive fix, on a four year old laptop with an iffy battery and a DVD drive that doesn’t work either? Or a new laptop? This, of course, was the day after ordering an eye-wateringly large and expensive stack of parts for the van to be delivered to us…

A quick google on the campsite’s own computer found that it was a known problem – and there was an extended warranty available for all affected machines. After calling Dell’s technical support (in Italy – which made for some amusing attempts at phonetic spelling), they’ve agreed to collect it, fix it and return it to us – all under the warranty!

Whilst I was on the phone to them, Ellie decided that she’d have a check of the other laptop – which hasn’t been switching on since Portugal. To be honest, we nearly ditched it several times… It only went and worked, didn’t it? And that, dear reader, means that we can finally bring you the long lost text of our Lisbon post!

(However, we’re without any photos of Cefalu until the other laptop comes back, so that post’ll be a bit delayed.)

Posted in Personal stuff, Site stuff | 3 Comments

Palermo

Posted on December 1, 2011 by EllieGee

We followed the campsite owner on his bike slowly for around 5km, and arrived safely at Degli Ulivi campsite in Sferracavallo. It’s a small site compared to some we’ve been on, but cosy and very friendly as was the town. We had everything we needed just on the doorstep too in lively Sferracavallo, a satellite town of Palermo set beneath spectacular cliffs with a small harbour.

Regular fruit and veg stalls and itinerant Ape sellers (not selling animals but driving around in the picturesque small 3-wheeler moped vans and pickups called Apes and pronounced ‘Arpay’, which means bee as opposed to all the buzzing Vespas, or wasps). Being old quirky vehicles they are very dear to our heart! Announcing their wares, the vendors sound almost like the islamic muezzin call to prayer. A large Wednesday street market and the fresh pasta shop were the icing on the cake, and talking of which there was a lovely pasticceria too.The only downside was that the site had no internet access at all, which precluded us from treating it as a longer stay address to have some of the parts we now need urgently for the van sent to us… Somehow we forgot to leave after our planned three days or so and ended up staying for ten. Leaving with fond memories having met old friends again and made new, but still not having the parts we needed for the van.

The city was two buses away, both frequent lines, but their various quirks and the usual lack of information lead to some interesting trips home, and almost getting completely stranded in some outer lying suburb on one occasion. From our initial bus journey in, though, we just loved Palermo. Our first big city for a while, it has a wealth of grand buildings with influences from Norman times to the fascist era, via Baroque and a visible Arab heritage in some churches which started life as mosques centuries ago. On the first day we had ‘done’ about five churches by lunchtime. Piazza Bellini and its fountain of statues with magnificent Santa Caterina as backdrop started us off, and we covered the splendid duomo (much more impressive outside than in) with the Norman Palazzo Reale and its Palatine Chapel in the afternoon.

The Palace is also the Sicilian parliament chambers and is only open on certain days. For once our luck was in and we got to see the plush rooms, and the beautifully ornate mosaiced Sala Ruggiero (King Roger’s hall). The Byzantine influenced Palatine Chapel on the floor below was also astounding with its gold mosaics, and it was hard to tear ourselves away.

We spent some of our ten days just relaxing though and doing next to nothing – something that has always been hard for me but is becoming very easy these days. We strolled around Sferracavallo and caught up with Jenny and Neil again when they arrived a couple of days later. The most international site we’ve been on to date, with Ric from Scotland who has been on the road for a year. We also got to know Claudia, originally from Mexico. Claudia is following her dream to grow as a musician and artist, living in a turquoise tent and funding her travels with busking on the streets of the city, spending time meeting with other artists and students. The two of us spent much of a day sketching together around the bay, and talking about life, love and dreams.
German Uli and his Czech wife, Martina, have been travelling for two years and will be on the road for a few more yet. Jacques and Simone from Quebec turned up in their Canadian registered van, which had arrived in Europe at Liverpoool. We all spent a very social night together with Claudia playing some South American songs, and Simone joining in with some French Canadian.

After our wander around the Wednesday market, we had an energetic bike ride with Jenny and Neil to Mondello, a picturesque seaside resort town a few kilometres away, the other side of the mountain. We had a seafood lunch along the front there before the dreaded uphill ride home. Luckily it was nowhere near as bad as we’d feared, the threatening sky didn’t open, and the traffic was less busy than the ride there too.Back into Palermo and we visited a great non-tourist restaurant right in the centre of town recommended by Claudia. Cheap and cheerful and full of Palermo’s working people on lunch hour, it’s refreshing to know that you can still find such authenticity and value for money in the centre of a major European city. Once we’d figured out that we had to collect a docket from a booth, pay at the bar and go back to the booth to choose the actual dishes from the array on display … it was easy. And an enormous amount of food for €10 a couple -(including beer and side dishes) we could hardly move.

After lunch we explored the area in and around the Ballaro market, a wonderful sprawling vibrant place with a wider ethnic diversity reflected in the stalls and food shops. We pounced on the opportunity to get garam masala and ground cumin spices, and marvelled at strange shaped vegetables and colourful fruit displays. Even during the quiet afternoon hours, the place was buzzing with activity and reminded me of the souks of North Africa, not much more than a few hours south of here.

We then headed to the catacombs of the Convento dei Cappuccini. It was a bit of a trek from the city centre, but good to walk off that lunch. The catacombs contain around 8000 bodies and were in use for several hundred years until the late 1800s, although there are some later than this. As we descended into the dark quiet vaults, we entered into another world. The world of the dead. The bodies were preserved by many different methods, and many of them were hung or propped up in niches in the walls in their best clothes, or uniforms or religious robes. Time has meant that many are decayed to skeletal remains, however there are as many that retain skin, hair and have contorted horrific expressions. Think of Munch’s painting, The Scream. Think of any zombie films you’ve ever seen. Think of Penny for the Guy. Think of your worst nightmare vision of judgement day not quite come to life but looking as it they might do any minute. It’s extraordinarily eerie, claustrophobic, and macabre. These were all once living breathing Sicilians though, and it seems almost an intrusion into their eternal rest to visit them.

Here is a quote of the thoughts of the prince while at a ball in Palermo from The Leopard by Tomasi di Lampedusa, set in the Sicily of the 1860s (edition, published by Vintage and translated by Archibald Colquhoun) “As always the thought of his own death calmed him as much as that of others disturbed him: was it perhaps because, when all was said and done, his own death would in the first place mean that of the whole world? …he went on to think that he must see to repairing the tomb of his ancestors at the Capuchins. A pity corpses could no longer be hung up by the neck in the crypt and watched slowly mummifying; he’d look magnificent on that wall, tall and big as he was, terrifying girls by the set smile on his parchment face, by his long, long white nankeen trousers. But no, they’d dress him up in party clothes, perhaps in this very evening coat he was wearing now …”

Sunday morning saw Adrian working on a few odd jobs on the van, so I headed into town to the Modern Art Museum. It was worth the €7 entrance, set in a 15th century palace that had also later been a convent, it covered Sicilian art history in the 19th and early 20th centuries and featured some tremendous landscape artists, such as Francesco Lojacono and Antonino Leto. It was rewarding to see images of familiar places from around the city especially a lovely oil of fishermen from Sferracavallo by Luigi Di Giovanni. The information in every room was full for once and translated into English.

Adrian joined me later and we strolled around the previously run down area close to the old harbour known as La Kalsa. My aged guidebook (Rough Guide to Italy, 2001 edition), describes it as run down and dangerous even in daytime. Since then it has become a haven to artists, a lot of renovation work has been and still is going on, and it is now up and coming and an interesting place to wander. We enjoyed the last knockings of the antique market, after a lunch at a local pizzeria, and watched the stalls pack up and move slowly and precariously off (Apes again).

Another ‘must do’ trip from Palermo is Monreale. A hilltown perched high above the city giving magnificent views across the entire bay, Monreale is most famous for its cathedral with its golden mosaics. Similar imagery to the Palatine Chapel in the Palazzo Reale in the city, but on a much larger scale. The exterior is simple and rough hewn but cross the threshold and be mesmerised. We had met an older man, Sergio, in the supermarket in Sferracavallo a couple of days earlier who had urged us to visit Monreale and to make sure we went up the tower. We duly did so and were far from disappointed – up the narrow stairs and across the open roof above the cloisters, then inside again and along a passage way with wooden shutters with spy holes into the church below – then outside above the transept and up more stairs to the tower itself high above Monreale with Palermo stretched out across the plain and mountains all around and right out to sea. A bit hazy but that didn’t detract from the height and space.

After 10 days, although we were tempted to stay longer, we felt it was time to move on. There is more that will draw us back to Palermo but in the meantime we’re heading for Cefalu.

Posted in Art & Culture stuff, By Country - Italy, Personal stuff, Travel stuff, Van stuff | 2 Comments