Mount
Etna casts a sinister spell over this whole
landscape. Often she is hidden
under clouds, then becomes visible, a giant brooding pyramid always with a plume
of smoke coming out of the top. We
have spent three nights in her shadow, and on two of them we have been in
violent electrical storms and it feels as though there is one on the way
tonight. She is 10,000 ft high, but only 20 miles away
from Taormina and 10 miles from Riposto where we are now. When the storms have passed, and the sky
clears, you see the flattened crater at her summit, which is a mile wide,
burning with red lava, and this morning the burning lava had spread down the
sides of the mountain. She has had
four serious eruptions in the last 100 years, the last one was in
2001.
Taormina is reputed to be the most popular resort in Sicily, and
approaching by boat you can see why.
It spreads around two sides of a ridge, 650 ft above sea level, with
sheer cliffs separating it from the sea.
At the top of the mountain on which the town stands there is a Saracen
castle, then there are the winding medieval streets and baroque churches with
which we have become familiar in
Sicilian towns, but there are also beautiful 19th century villas surrounded
by pines and hanging gardens.
The only way up to the town is via a winding road (I counted 27
hairpin bends) or by a funicular railway from one of the beaches at the foot of
the cliff. We decided not to anchor
in the first bay as it was too full of hotels, beach umbrellas and pedalos but
the second bay looked fairly empty and had the added attraction of mooring
buoys. As we approached the buoys
two men in a RIB approached us, and one of them called out in perfect English,
“Welcome to our yacht hotel. We
have all the facilities of a hotel.
I am based on a boat in the bay and can look after you 24 hours a
day.......” This went on for a while and we looked around and could not see any
other boats moored (apart from the what the man in the RIB called his ‘concierge
boat’); but the combination of the stunning location under Taormina, the clean
sea to swim in and Mount Etna to the south, made us decide to stay. We were also intrigued to come across a Sicilian with
whom we could communicate in English for the first time in two weeks, rather
than struggling with a mixture of our few words of Italian with the addition of
some usually misunderstood attempts at Spanish and French.
We
took the bus into Taormina, and both agreed that it must have been amazing in
years gone by, but now it has been completely overwhelmed by tourists. The elegant houses and palaces in the
main street have all become either designer boutiques or outlets for garish
pottery, and it took dogged determination to walk to the Greek theatre, among
groups of guided tours, the spiel
of the guides being broadcast all around by the megaphones they were
carrying. We were relieved to get
back to the boat, and found the deck cushions covered with a sprinkling of grey
and white ash from the volcano.
The first electric storm was on our second evening in Taormina Bay.
Black clouds started drifting
towards us in the late afternoon, soon there was sheet lightning and forked
lightning , then the sea became turbulent and for about 30 minutes a wind of 40
knots brought down hail stones, first small squares of jagged ice, then milky
round balls which covered the decks, then torrential rain. I did not feel too afraid, as we were securely tied to
our mooring, next to our concierge boat, ‘Grand Siecle’, but when I went outside
to take some photographs, I saw
that we were about to collide with a large Italian power boat, called ‘Anything Goes III’, which had been at anchor about 200 yards
from us. I called out to Ian who
rushed onto the deck but said that the boat (an 85 ft Riva) had dragged her
anchor and we saw the crew frantically trying to get her started and out of the
way. Luckily they got her out of
the way and out to sea, and the next day the skipper motored over in the tender to Anything
Goes III to apologise, but said it had taken one minute to start the engine
after they realised she was drifting, as she was a new boat with a very
sophisticated computerised
start. Ian said that if they had
not pulled away he would have rushed to the front of our boat, released us from
the mooring buoy and shouted to me to start the engine (which only takes seconds
by turning a key) . For the rest of
the night after the storm the sky
behind Taormina was illuminated by lightning, then I saw the burning crater at
the summit of Etna, and decided I would probably go mad with fright if I lived
here permanently.
This will be my last blog for a while as we are flying back to
England for a week tomorrow. We are
tied up to a pontoon in Riposto Marina, which seems a safe sort of place (unless
there is an earthquake, or Etna erupts).
