Last days out

We are departing the UK mid-September so we thought it time for a catch-up of some recent local trips. This may be our last post from the UK but don’t despair – there will be plenty from our next two destinations of Italy and India to look forward to!

Gifford's Circus

We both use Olympus camera equipment and shortly after arriving here we joined up with the local Olympus community. We’ve joined them for some great events, some of which have appeared here as posts in the past. This time we were lucky enough to get tickets to their annual Gifford's Circus event – a private showing of several acts for us photographers followed by portrait sessions under the direction of professional photographers with their lighting equipment.

While the acts were fun they are hard to photograph due to the dim light and constant movement. The portrait sessions were great fun even though you only got about a minute each in front of each model.

Somerset

A last trip down to my birthplace, Wells and Cheddar. Though I am slightly biased, Wells is on my very short list of ideal large towns/small cities that I’d be happy to live in in this country, if the economics, family, and weather situation all aligned. Right up there with Totnes in Devon and Marlborough in Wiltshire. So we headed away for a glorious sunny summer weekend with my sister Gail and b-in-law Janos. The highlight, of course, being a walk around Wells. Lots of beautiful old buildings and a good market with plenty of interesting stalls and food. And a last visit to one of the best cathedrals in Britain too: not only has it an amazing carved façade, but plenty of effigies, interesting side rooms, and a medieval clock. And this was the first time we managed to get access to the old library full of ancient manuscripts with many of the books chained to their shelves!

The Library with chained books

The 18th C was rife with graffiti

For us no trip to Somerset is complete without a stop at St. Andrew’s church in Cheddar (where my dad is buried) and a stroll through Glastonbury which has some amazing abbey ruins and other old buildings, the spectacular Tor, and numerous hippies and shops selling crystals and hippy clothes. To finish off we were in for another 'treat' – and we should have guessed given we were returning home on a sunny mid-August holiday weekend – a “stop” on the A303 where we could contemplate Stonehenge for a while, and many less interesting fields while the traffic jam snaked along.

Horse and Carriages

Since our car died we’ve had to consider walking as a means of transport. We hadn’t put it into practice until we took a stroll down through our local paths to our closest village of Stanford Dingley. Britain is perfect for walking with numerous public walkways throughout the countryside. The usual difficulty is that they typically start at the side of small roads where you cannot park, so are only practical for locals who can walk to them. And long trousers are required due to the number of nettles, not to mention “wellies” as they are muddy for 11 months of the year.

There is an annual event around this neighbourhood where horses and carriages, with the passengers dressed in period costume, ride around the local villages. We met them at a local farm where they were stopping for drinks - and providing free rehydration for us spectators too! There were about 16 carriages in all, several of them with uniformed “staff “ who would hop off to lead the horses when necessary. Very picturesque and a good opportunity to meet with the locals.

With footman ...

On the way home we dropped in to “The Bull” where we heard there was a Hotchkiss car meeting. It was there! An obscure French make from 1910, though not the entire national collection as we met a couple of old boys, one who had just sold his as they are very expensive to keep on the road, the other had his in the garage undergoing maintenance. There were a couple of more recent, i.e. 1920’s, vehicles there too. Had a great chat with a local chap who flew the Concorde for 18 years.

A 1910 Hotchkiss lady

Sicily - Trapani

Probably our favourite destination in Sicily, this 

was our longest stop and, luckily, our most interesting. The only place where we could easily have stayed on for another week as there is so much to see and do. It is an ancient port city with the old part jutting out on a flat and narrow peninsula with the harbour on one side and beaches on the other. The unexciting bulk of the city spreads inland in the usual unsightly modern apartment blocks, but we had no need to venture there as everything worth seeing was a walk or bike ride from our perfectly-placed apartment. Though it was on the third – and top - floor of a smelly stairwell in a grotty alley (rubbish, feral cats, mad cat woman - no, not Vicki!), the interior was good and it was only a few buildings away from the port on one side and the main streets and beaches on the other side, yet very quiet as cars would have struggled to get up the alley.

Vicki enjoying one of her Italian favourites - crema di caffe

After walking with us to the apartment and showing us around, our hosts kindly left us with a couple of dozen pastries containing figs and a bottle of Marsala, a fortified wine. Marsala is a city to the south and we had seen many vines in that area as we travelled past in the bus. I enjoyed the dessert wine (like a sherry) but we had a bottle of "normal" white wine from that region and it was pretty tasteless.

Not surprisingly there were plenty of tourists around as the port has ferries to Tunisia, the Italian islands just off the north African coast, and up to Naples and Genoa, plus over to three nearby islands. Probably the highlight of our month was taking a boat for a day trip to the nearby islands. There were numerous large boats doing this (catering for 200-300 people each in peak season), but we found an old-style sailing ship (sadly only using its motors this time) that only took 30 people max.  While the highlight may have been swimming from the boat in the turquoise waters, we also managed a tour of the island of Favignana by Noddy train! Given our

limited time there and the few drops of rain (one of only three short occurrences in a month) it turned out to be a great way of seeing the small island, despite understanding little of the commentary. We’ll remember it for the beautiful beaches and quarries everywhere: a lot of stone has been taken from here for building on the mainland. We also found that multi-tasking is not an exclusively female ability. Our [male] driver stopped for a coffee enroute and we saw him steering, gesticulating at the scenery, talking on his cellphone, holding the microphone, and drinking coffee almost all at the same time - quite a juggling act!  Must be the Italian genes!

On the edge of Trapani there are large salt pans. These get flooded regularly and a few are still used to produce salt. There are some windmills too that were used to pump the sea water around the pans. The area is now a nature reserve and a stopping place for flamingos on their migration. As we were the only ones in the area I thought I’d sneak up on a few to try to get their portraits.  Suddenly there were several hundred airborne and two very sheepish tourists …

Perspective issue - the tower
in't about to fall!

Up on a steep hill above Trapani is the old town of Erice.  Much more like the northern Italian hill towns, it is clean, neat, uniformly old but obviously a tourist destination. The views are spectacular, as was the art work – our first real souvenir (other than my six euro Chinese-made shirt) was a hand painted bowl.

View down to Trapani. The old part of
town is on the thin "tail" at the top right.

View east along the coast
towards Palermo

We finished off our stay with a swim off the rocks in the town (the water had warmed up since early June), yet another liquorice gelato, and a nice dinner out.

Not a place to visit ...

Sicily - Agrigento

We have been staying at the beach-side suburb of San Leone as Agrigento is up on a hill and, apart from the historic centre it looks a bit “ordinary”, mainly large apartment blocks spreading out in all directions (and this due to mafia involvement, no planning permissions nor building standards followed). Our apartment is part of a stand-alone modernised house inhabited by a family. The actual apartment is pretty good, though why they’d put a kitchen (without power and hot water) up on a second level … let’s just say with the fridge and electric jug downstairs this makes cooking and washing up less of a joy than is usual.

San Leone is probably typical of a fairly modern beach area, a few large apartment blocks but mainly individual houses surrounded by huge fences and gates behind which one or more large dogs lurk. There is one decent supermarket (though by NZ or UK standards it is very small), and plenty of cafes and bars (pretty much the same thing). The beach area is variable, nice sandy areas with rocks placed out in the water to provide protected swimming areas. Plenty of public beaches but quite a few private ones too – for a price they provide loungers, umbrellas and toilets, showers and bar facilities. The street frontage is pretty dire though – broken footpaths, abandoned buildings and rubbish. At least the entire beach area has rubbish bins placed every 30m or less.

If we had a car there are several locations well worth a visit an hour or so away (one of the best Roman villas around, the pretty harbour town of Sciacca, and the designer outlet complex that we were teased with as our coach went past on the way here). Without a car we are relying on busses and they are pretty good too, though the timetables published on their web sites don’t always match with those on the bus stops themselves (which are more accurate). You are supposed to buy your tickets at the local Tabacchi (tobacconist) though you can usually buy them on the bus at a slightly higher cost.  When neither were available our bus took us to the nearest tabacchi enroute and waited while we dashed across and bought our tickets. That’s service!

The main reason for coming here is the Valley of the Temples, apparently the largest archaeology site in the world! Mind you, they're advertising the same at another archaeological park on the island. It contains numerous ruined – and not so ruined – Greek temples. Despite its name it is up on a ridge and getting in to it turned out to be a ridiculous and dangerous challenge. The public bus takes you to the exit which is nowhere near the entrance. There are no signs to where the entrance might be but at a cafe a torrent of Italian and a waving of arms indicated the direction and with mounting disbelief we followed another couple back down the main road and around a few blind corners (no footpaths anywhere, but a worn trail in the dirt gave us some encouragement), eventually scurrying across a large roundabout and heading for a large car park. Behind that there are a lot of stalls selling tour tickets and tourist items and, eventually, you come to the ticket office and entrance. If you survive all that then the next few hours are delightful. There are plenty of ruins of houses, walls, tombs and statues as well as the major temples.

like the Acropolis,
but without the crowds

a large olive tree -
that's not a hobbit at its base

We had an offer of a cheap hire car which would have been useful but instead we found a hop on-hop off bus that covered most of the places we wanted to go and worked out a little cheaper and a whole lot less stressful. So we splashed out almost all our remaining cash on getting the bus, knowing that the first destination for us was an ATM in Agrigento. Sadly the first bank ATM we tried declined our card. We prefer to use ATMs attached to banks as they are less likely to have their security compromised as we learnt to our cost a few years ago in Florence. Then the next ATM we tried also declined our card. Our bank in the UK couldn’t tell us why our card was being declined but put us through to VISA who spent some time with us arranging to forward cash to the nearest Western Union office (no doubt for a good fee). While we were awaiting for it to arrive – it was nice to know that this is a back-up option - we tried our card one last time in a Post Office ATM and it worked perfectly. We grabbed lots of cash and phoned VISA back to cancel the cash advance just in time. Then we spent some time letting the stress levels slowly return to normal …

A walk through the old centre of Agrigento showed the main street was attractive with good shops and plenty of grand old buildings and churches, but stray a block either side and conditions deteriorated rapidly. Lots of little lanes and steps with a few buildings nicely done up but the remainder scruffy, decrepit, or in various stages of demolition. And the ever-present rubbish and dog poo. Interesting and a few photographic opportunities but not a highlight. As usual, the locals saved the day - recognising us as tourists (somehow!), without being asked they'd cheerily direct us to the closest point of interest.

In the back streets, the street art was a highlight

Heading a few kilometres west from Agrigento there is a port where ferries head to the southern-most islands of Italy just off the African coast. And just beyond the port are beautiful beaches and then the prize – Scala dei Turchi (the Turkish Steps), a white cliff ascending from the sea, allegedly giving the Turkish invaders an easy path up the cliffs from their ships. It is spectacular even if it's a popular tourist spot.

Lastly, fans of the Montalbano crime series will know Agrigento as the headquarters, though the TV series is filmed mainly in Ragusa, a little further to the east.