Once the liberals among you stop having fun with the last two, the real answer is they all have an impact on our trip through the Tyrrhenian sea. But more on those at the appropriate time.
Our first stop is Tropea.
We have been here before. True Colors came through here on her maiden voyage from France to Greece. That time we had a captain and there were four people on board. Now it’s just us. It’s amazing how far we have come to get back to where we took our first steps.
Tropea is pretty impressive from the sea. Another one of those towns that are built on a rocky promontory high above the water. This one has very picturesque little town beach where everyone and their dogs can go swimming.
It also has the largest sandcastle in the world.
Just kidding but the stone of the building blends so perfectly with its surroundings that it just might well be.
But back to the title of the blog. Firstly, the snails. Last season, Lori’s friend Cristiana told her about a face cream/lotion made from snails. (It’s called “Bava di Lamaca" in Italian.) At this point, the audience for this blog is immediately split into two. The women are saying “Interesting” and the men are saying “You’ve got to be kidding.” But I am not .
We find this in Tropea and Lori decides to buy some. It is not actually made from snails but from snail secretions which I think is code for snail poop. Personally, I think this is part ofthe Greenpeace “Save the Snails” campaign. “ You can’t eat these little creatures, they have valuable secretions.”
Check with Lori for her assessment of the product and she may be able to take some orders for fulfillment on our return,
In Tropea we had the first glitch of our trip. We went off to town for the afternoon and came back to a non-functioning air-conditioning system. This system is not exactly reliable but it has never been totally out of operation before. We call a local electrician who comes promptly; he tells us both pumps need to be repaired; he says he will bring them back tomorrow. We ask when and he says he will call. In Italy this can be code for “I have no idea when I will get this done but it certainly won’t be tomorrow”.
But no.
At 9:30 the next morning he turns up and re-instals the pumps and everything is fine! So we regather from what might have been a wasted day and set off to see volcanoes.
This part of the world has three active volcanoes - Etna (which we’ve talked about), and two in the Aeolian Islands, Stromboli (which is the most active) and Gran Cratere (on the aptly named island of Vulcano).
It is said that all other volcanoes in the world are designed after this original iconic model. You can moor on Stromboli but Lori has been (ever so subtly) advocating mooring on the neighboring island of Panarea and watching any fireworks from a “safe” distance. I have a different view. We decide to compromise and .... we go to Panarea.
This turns out not to be a bad idea. Firstly, Stromboli is quite quiet right now so there’s not much to see apart from weird red glows from what you thought was solid land. But, secondly, Panarea is an unusual place.
The car-free island is tiny and what seems, at first, to be a sleepy little summer resort town is far from it. Apparently, the truly discerning glitterati come here as evidenced by the following:
“Princess Alessandra Borghese lives in a stately converted army barracks overlooking the violet-hued Mediterranean on Panarea’s Via Vincenzella, a narrow cobblestone footpath overgrown with frangipani and wild cacti. A list of her neighbors, all slumming it in simple bougainvillea-shaded limestone retreats, includes a Bulgari and a Visconti, while just a bit farther down the road is Prince Laurent of Belgium. Days in Panarea are lolled barefoot, often on wooden boats anchored for lazy, late-afternoon swims beneath secluded rocky coves—or on jagged Lisca Bianca, where Michelangelo Antonioni filmed his 1960 classic, L’Avventura.
This tiny island off the north coast of Sicily—the smallest of the seven-island Aeolian chain—has quietly become the epicenter of the chicest summer scene in the Mediterranean. Gaining admission, however, takes a bit more finesse than simply writing a seven-figure check: If you wish to possess one of the few, highly coveted homes here, you need to know someone who knows someone. And while a famous last name and a loaded bank account may be a given, if you’re not charming, forget it. “It’s all word of mouth,” Borghese says, “so the wrong people are simply not allowed.”
So now we know people and you know us and if you meet all the other criteria, you may just be able to find a cute little place here with a view of a volcano.
By the way, the pilot book says there are only a few anchoring spots here but it turns out that there are two good-sized mooring fields. We think this must be a recent addition and we ask the attendants how long they have been in place. “Fifteen years” is the answer. Rod Heikell and his crew need to get out more!
On to Lipari, the capital of the islands. This is again much more chic than you might expect but more the you-and-I kind of chic than on Panarea. But what strikes us most is the quality of the produce. The fruit and vegetables are amazing - like we said last year, you know why tomatoes are fruit when you taste the deep red, sweet, juicy ones they have here. And the fish is abundant and fresh. You can forget the concept of “food miles”, here we are talking about “food yards”.
Our final stop in the Aeolian Islands is Vulcano. It has a small marina at the foot of the volcano. We decide to get up early the next morning and climb up to the crater. At six o’clock we set out and are at the rim of the crater by just before seven. The climb is not bad apart from the soft volcanic sand that covers most of the bottom two-thirds. It gives your calves a great workout.
At the top you are suddenly looking down into the vast crater. The white clouds in the photos are not mist but instead clouds of sulfurous steam with that slightly rotten-egg kind of smell. But what is most surprising is that in the areas where the steam is billowing, it is noticeably warmer and the ground feels hot under your feet.
Our Leading Lady
Now on to rubbish and Donald Rumsfeld. We had just left Vulcano when suddenly the engine sounds unhappy and lumpy. It doesn’t seem to want to run smoothly at normal revs. I back off on the throttle and things seem better but when I increase the revs again we get the same uneven result. We can’t run the engine at anything more than 1000 rpm without getting this effect. That translates to a top speed of 3 knots compared with our usual 6 or 7. We need to get this fixed.
But what is “this”? And here is where Donald Rumsfeld comes in. We have a “known unknown” - we know we have a problem but we don't actually know what it is. There are two options. Go back to Vulcano. This would be good if it is a minor problem but useless if something major is wrong - Vulcano is too small to have any major engine repair facilities. The other option is head slowly for the mainland where I can find the resources I may need. This would be a bad option if the symptoms continue to worsen.
I choose to go to the mainland 18 miles away and we spend six uneasy hours motoring slowly to Milazzo - a major port in the north of Sicily.
We let the marina staff know that we have reduced engine power and, possibly, reduced maneuverability (I have no idea if the boat will go in reverse at all). They send out a tender and have set up an alongside berth for us. With their excellent help and the fact that we can go backwards we get ourselves tied up safely in an excellent harbor and we both breathe a sigh of relief.
The next morning a diver removes a knot of plastic from our propeller and says that everything else looks perfect. We decide to take a breather of a day before performing a sea trial to be wholly sure.
The weird thing is that we've been here before too. On that maiden voyage we had a much more dramatic garbage knot incident that stopped the engine entirely and we had to sail slowly to the Italian coast and again get a diver to free us. Odd.