Sapphire Waters, Grand City Walls
Giardini Naxos (Taormina), Sicily, Italy

Saturday, July 20, 2019
Mount Etna and Off-Road Ascent

I remember reading about Mt. Etna in My Weekly Reader some time in the early 1950s. The whole idea of a volcano—of a mountain spewing fire and lava—seemed crazy and exciting at the same time, and Mt. Etna became my internalized concept of what a volcano should look like and act like. Now, some 65 years later, when I read about a shore excursion that included the opportunity not only to see that volcano, but also to walk on part of it, I jumped at the chance. I realized we wouldn’t actually get up close and personal to anything that could be dangerous, but that didn’t matter. I could look down into one of Mt. Etna’s craters! Was pumped from the moment I read the description, and I couldn’t wait for the day to arrive.

We went to the breakfast buffet in La Veranda on the eleventh deck, as we had every morning on the ship, and settled at a table next to a window. As luck would have it, I sat facing forward and, looking our the window (maybe a porthole, but a rectangular window?) I saw a conical blur rising up in the distance. Was that really Mt. Etna? I whipped out my phone, checked the map app, and sure enough, I was looking at a volcano. The next thing I noticed was a wisp of smoke coming off the peak of the mountain. Yes! The mountain was speaking to me!

After breakfast I calmed down a little, made sure I had a water bottle ready to go, and headed off to the theatre to get my ticket for the shore trip. It turned out that this time we weren’t able to dock but were at anchor out in the water somewhere. Happy as I could be, just to be going on this little trip, I jumped onto the tender, found a seat, and settled into a place off the aisle and next to a window. As others made their way on to the boat, I really wished Judy was with me. We left the ship, headed for the shore, disembarked, and boarded a tour bus. I hate those things, but they’re a necessity on days like this.

The trip from the tender dock to our first stop had its good points. We drove along the coast at one point, and the rocks along the shore were definitely lava rock boulders. Black lava rock, which I have to pay dearly for to use with my bonsai. Our guide, Martina, was good and had been doing this for quite a while. Experience counts, you know? We were on a large divided highway for a while, not for very long, and wound our way through first one town or village then another. The roads got narrower and narrower as we exited the highway and continued to go uphill, and the landscape went through a series of changes the farther uphill we went. First we started seeing dry rock walls, like the ones Judy and I have seen everywhere from the Aran Islands to, more recently, Croatia. But these looked a little different, because they weren’t made of light-colored limestone but of dark gray, almost black, lava rock. The next shift came as the rocky places began to take over, and before our ride in the tour bus ended, the road wound through fields of old lava flow with only some sparse vegetation. And there were more switchbacks; I couldn’t seem to get away from them on this cruise.

The we left the tour bus at Refugio Sapienza, about 6,000 feet above sea level, where we had begun the tour bus ride. This was as far as busses and regular traffic were allowed, and there’s quite a booming little community there. Right in the middle of a landscape that looks like a different planet. Piles of black rock everywhere, steam/fog/clouds all around us, sand and smaller rock even on the roadway we had to walk across. You see, a little eruption had started on Thursday night, blowing steam, sand and rocks for about 40 hours. Tours going farther up the mountain than ours had been canceled, because there was still a problem with blowing steam up beyond our goal for the day. That news added a little bit of excitement to our trip, let me tell you. I was having a ball.

It’s at this point that our nice little group of about 30 people from the Voyager got to join other groups with the same goal in mind: going to look into a crater a good bit higher up the mountain. The Mt. Etna Funivia is a cable car/funicula type thing that takes tourists a further 2,000 vertical feet up the mountain. And there were a lot of people crowed into a narrow stairway headed for the same place we were going. I didn’t even try to count the number of tour guides there, with their little lollipops herding tourists through the process like so many cats looking for a bowl of cream. I dutifully collected my ticket, got in line, and with hardly any effort on my part boarded a swinging gondola with five other people. They were a nice family I’d never seen before, German speakers, so I rode in silence, making out enough of what they were saying to each other to sort of enjoy eavesdropping a little. Looking out the window, I was amazed to see people walking up this part of the mountain. It’s actually a popular place for dedicated (and healthy!) hikers to follow some footpaths all the way to the summit. Today they couldn’t quite get to the top, because the recent eruption had closed the uppermost levels, but they could walk a little farther up the mountain than we would go. It does indeed take all kinds, doesn’t it?

Eventually our little group of Voyagers reassembled outside the Funivia terminal at 8,200 feet up the mountain, after having a last chance at plumbing and a snack bar. The next part of our travel was to be by Unimog, and if you’ve never heard of a Unimog, join the crowd; I had to look it up later. They’re rugged Mercedes products with huge wheels and a chassis set well above the axle level. Sort of like Jeeps on steroids. These were fitted out with passenger cabins that would hold about 30 people, just right for our group. We followed Martina onto one of them, and the driver took off up a track that was for the most part a flat pathway one lane wide through black gravel on every side. It was a little hard to see where we were headed, because the fog and mist had gotten considerably thicker. Surreal. Occasionally our buggy met another buggy coming downhill, and those drivers just kept going like it was a normal commute. For them, I suppose it was.

We jumped down from the carrier, gathered together in the fog, and were handed over to a licensed Mt. Etna guide who would take us up the final leg of our outing. We had reached the base of the Barbagallo crater (nice photos on Google Earth) at about 9,500 feet above sea level, and we were told that on a clear day we could have seen our ship down in the bay. Alas, to me that remains only a rumor, because I could see only about 30 feet or so before even dim shapes became indistinguishable in the fog. I’m not sure what I expected this part to be like, but the path we followed, purportedly in single file, was an easy enough walk. It was chilly and windy, and the fog (really steam rising from a vent in the volcano a little uphill and north of us) seemed to come and go a little as we walked. In the clearer moments, I could see that we were walking along the top of a ridge that curved around as it ascended. On our left, the outside of the curve, was a drop to the “parking lot” with other Unimogs, and on our right was another steep slope into the crater itself. Just about the time we reached the level pathway at the top of the ridge, the fog blew away a little and we got a better look at our surroundings.

Oh! We were on the edge of a crater on the highest active volcano in Europe! The top layer of gravel on this path had been deposited the night before in the little eruption above us. The air temperature was cold, so the top layer had cooled, but when I scratched down less than an inch, the moist rocks and sand were steaming in the breeze. I could look across the crater and see another tourist group who had taken the other route up to the rim, going right where we had turned left. There were even some people walking along another path that went along a short ridge of gravel across the middle of the crater. When I looked down the other side of the rim, I could see that we were almost directly above the Unimogs parked below us.

Wow. I was on a volcano, about 9,650 feet above sea level, not quite on top of the world, but for a flatlander like me, it was enough.

The rest of the trip was easy and felt relatively quick. We walked back to the buggy, rode through the fog to the Funivia and took it back down to the terminal at the bottom. This time I was in a car with a Japanese family and spent my time speculating on the plant life I saw growing in patches in the rocks under and around the cable car. Amazing. Life will persist anywhere it gets a toehold. At the end of the Funivia ride, I got a slice of pizza and a beer and enjoyed talking with a man and his son who were in the Voyager group. After that quick stop, we boarded the bus, rode down the mountain, and took the tender back to the ship.

Picture it. Sicily, 2019. (I just had to put that in here somewhere.)

Judy had enjoyed an afternoon off while I was wandering through the fields of rocks. That’s not entirely true, of course. She actually did some laundry and took care of other things on board. While I was up on the mountain, unable to see through the mist, she was watching it from the outside. The fog had covered more and more of the mountain as the day wore on, and by the time I got back to the ship, I couldn’t even see the mountain at all. We spent a little time on the pool deck, then went to the theatre for the crew and staff talent show. It reminded us an awful lot of many of the FSP productions. They seemed to have really enjoyed what they were doing. That night we enjoyed dinner in Prime 7, one of the specialty restaurants on board. We sat with a couple from North Carolina and laughed throughout the meal. That made a happy ending to a very fun day.