Thursday – Catania and Mount Etna

Today, we arrived in Sicily’s second largest city, Catania.

I was on tour escort duty, on an excursion, continuing with the volcano theme, to visit Mount Etna.

LIke Palermo, Catania is a big, bustling city, and it took the coach a long time to break free of the traffic. Once we’d left Catania behind, the going became much easier and the roads slowly ascended the great hill that dominates the sky line, stopping only briefly for a particularly good photo opportunity.

Once again, we’d been lucky with the weather; our guide told us that for the first three days of November, they’d had terrible torrential rain, causing mudslides and all sorts of mayhem. Today, however, the skies were a clear blue, and the only cloud in the sky was the enormous plume of steam emanating from the top of one of the world’s largest volcanoes, Mount Etna.

Although Etna is 11,000 feet at its highest point, our tour stopped at about 6000 feet, at the official Mount Etna Visitor Centre. It is possible to catch a cable car or 4×4 to take you higher, but that comes at further expense, and would require far more time than we’d been allotted today.

It was fascinating to see the remains of the lava flow that descimated about 20 villages in the last major eruption back in 1983, and to walk around the edges of one of the smaller, extinct craters. The remains of a house, with only its collapsed roof visible is a reminder of the awesome, and destructive power of nature.

By the time we’d returned to the ship, at midday (just in time for lunch), the mountain was all but invisible, completely obliterated by clouds.

We spent a leisurely afternoon on ship, and watched Gervase Finn perform his second after-dinner talk in the evening, on the quirks of the English language, which was thoroughly entertaining… a very clever and very funny man.