Saturday, November 28, 2009

Nov 27 – Taormina Trek

Today we were intending to take it easy and just do a bit of a stroll around Giardini Naxos (the town below Taormina where the tender comes in) and then head back to the ship to do some homework.

But, as it was another lovely warm day (this could have been the height of summer in Britain), we decided to extend our walk a little. We finally made it all the way around the bay to the pretty Art Nouveau train station to see the setting of that scene from The Godfather III, where Michael Corleone meets his ex-wife, Kay, off the train on her way to Palermo.

At this point, we foolishly decided that we might as well walk all the way up to Taormina itself – in spite of it being 650 feet above us at the top of a steep cliff. So, again in the midday sun, we toiled our way up the precipitous pathway, which in a couple of places had disconcertingly actually fallen down the side of the hill, leaving us scrabbling over some very slippery shale.

Eventually we made it up to the top, arriving in stylish Taormina in a hot, sticky, unkempt mess, where we rewarded ourselves with those traditional mountaineers' favourites, cannoli and coffee. Fortunately, the trek down was not nearly as hard work, although Tracy had to resort to crabbing down the slope on her bottom, over the most hair-raisingly skiddy parts of the path.