Day 367: Down to Syracuse

Up and out early again, farewelling Messina, we hardly knew ye. Walked to the train station where we managed to catch the surprisingly-infrequent train southwards to Catania, the main city on the eastern coast of Sicily. This took a couple of hours and we had great views of Mount Etna basically the whole way, since it dominates this side of the island.

Found the airport bus here in Catania and headed out to the car hire place here, where we picked up our car for the next 10 days or so. We'd arrived about 45 minutes early so the guy refused to help me until it was the "right" time which didn't impress me, and then I didn't listen super carefully while he said he'd give us a Mercedes.

When we eventually got out into the parking lot, the Mercedes was a large minivan with 12 seats!! Supposedly it was the only auto transmission car they had at the moment, but I made my feelings known to a nice lady who seemed to be a manager of sorts and she managed to find me a Ford Fiesta that had just been returned. It hadn't been cleaned, but after all the waiting around I wasn't that bothered! It's also a pretty crap car - no Bluetooth, reversing beeps or screen, but it's at least got USB so that'll do. But it's got an auto gearbox and nothing else really matters.

So we finally drove off from Catania airport, heading southwards to Syracuse. It was mostly freeway and fairly unexciting, though the countryside is quite rugged and covered in citrus trees, reminding us both of Andalusia - a nice flashback considering where we were 12 months ago.

More driving in the shadow of Etna before we eventually arrived in Syracuse. It's quite a decent sized town - not a city, but still fairly populous. I didn't realise, but Sicily is actually home to 5 million people, making it the fourth most populous region in Italy (behind Latium/Rome, Lombardy/Milan, Campania/Naples). Syracuse is an ancient Greek city around 2500 years old, and I'm looking forward to exploring it tomorrow.

But that'll have to wait, because after another 5 hours of travelling today neither of us felt like going out to explore! We settled for staying home and working on various things, while Shandos drew the short straw and went to the supermarket for supplies.Read more