Day 88: Saturday 14 June – Capo delle Correnti, by Ken

I visited the wi-fi area first thing to continue downloading the TomTom app purchased yesterday onto Jane’s iPad. While the icon showed the App was loading, nothing seemed to be happening and I put the iPad on one side. I logged onto DHL’s tracking site, nothing had been added since our replacement satnav left Rome, I assumed that meant the final leg of the journey was by road and ferry. There was still nothing happening on the iPad. I checked my email. The next time I checked the iPad ‘Loading’ had been replaced by ‘Installing’ and a few minutes later it was finished. I took the iPad back to Jane, she was very pleased that we had a back-up to Mabel’s unreliable satnav and would be able to drive to the DHL collection point in Catania in Smarty instead of using my plan of taking a taxi.

Early Morning In Avola

Jane found she could get wi-fi on her iPad sitting outside Mabel and I had always been able to do so on my MacBook. We spent an hour on the internet, Jane did some more planning for Greece – finding a suitable ferry crossing was proving to be a challenge, I published some more blog.

I checked the DHL site again, the satnav arrived in Catania at 07:13 this morning. Great news!

Just before 10:00 we set off in Smarty heading for, Capo delle Correnti, the southernmost point in Italy, and possibly as far south as we will get on this trip. Jane had her iPad on her lap with a female Aussie voice giving directions. We opted to drive through the centre of Avola rather than skirt round it on an Autostrada. It was a Saturday morning, the town was very busy with the usual games of chicken being played by cars and scooters weaving in and out as they do. I was quite enjoying driving in Italy having found that you won’t go far wrong as long as you are positive and don’t hesitate when a car creeps out of a side road. Having said that I’ve seen numerous Smart cars with chunks of their plastic front wings missing!

From Avola we followed a good road south but managed to miss the turn for our first stop at a nature reserve. That didn’t have an address we could put in the satnav, I pulled over and showed Jane how to use the maps feature in the satnav. The turn we should have taken was a few kilometres behind us. I did a U-turn – I was getting good at them. We found the turning this time and drove down a narrow road to a parking area at the entrance to the Riserva Naturale di Vendicari. The reserve contains wetlands, lagoons and dunes and, according to our guide book, contains lots of hides from which to view abundant bird life. People were heading out of the car park carrying beach umbrellas. Our satnav showed we were close to the sea, so we decided we would go prepared to look at the reserve and spend some time on a beach.

A large sign at the entrance to the reserve informed of twelve things that were prohibited in the reserve including taking in a kangaroo. I bet that one had caught out a few Aussie tourists. We walked into the reserve through reed covered wetlands on a series of causeways and boardwalks which were badly in need of repair. We came to the beach, it wasn’t a patch on others we have visited in Sicily with shingle at the water’s edge and weed along the shoreline. Nevertheless, it was busy with locals enjoying their weekend.

Do Not Bring Your Kangaroo (Bottom Left)

Boardwalk

Not A Very Nice Beach

We decided to give the beach a miss and, instead, walked along a sandy track just inland from the beach. We came to a hide at the edge of a lagoon, no birds were visible from the hide. We walked on and did see a small lark (I think) skittering above us. Further along the lagoon we saw three birds on the ground. It was disappointing, our guide book advised lots of waterbirds could be seen from the hide including herons, cranes, black storks, pelicans and more than three hundred flamingos. In the far distance on the other side of the lagoon, there was a mass of white objects, Jane thought they were birds, I thought they were cars. Blowing up the photograph later showed Jane was correct.

We felt we had got as much as we were going to from the reserve and walked back to Smarty. My feet were hurting, the Keene sandals I had bought in the US and wore for the first time today were digging into my heels.

A while after rejoining the main road a picture flashed into my mind of my camera being on Smarty’s roof when we were reloading our gear into her boot. A stop and a frantic search of Smarty found no trace of the camera! Another U-turn and a fast drive saw us back at the car park in next to no time. I had a good look around the grassed area where we had parked thinking the camera would have come off as soon as we moved. There was no sign of it. I walked over to the parking attendant and asked if he had seen my camera. His eyes narrowed and he beckoned me to follow him to a hedge. There in the grass was my camera, the attendant picked it up and handed it to me, the lens shield was split, the battery cover had come off and the protective screen to the image screen was missing. Otherwise it looked OK. At that point the attendant got very excited beginning a long explanation in quick fire Italian, reinforced by a lot of arm waving, as to what had happened. I didn’t understand a word of what he was saying, but the gist was his colleague, who was standing nearby, had seen me drive off with the camera on the roof and it had fallen off onto the road. The attendant clearly wasn’t impressed by me and I’m sure the Italian for f**kwit was uttered a few times. All the while this was going on the colleague was standing there grinning, I gave him a ‘grazie mille’ and he beamed. Back in Smarty I was relieved to find the camera was still working – I hadn’t downloaded my photos for a few days.

We drove on with Jane echoing the attendant’s view of me in a language I could understand. We stopped at another beach on the outskirts of San Lorenzo (our guide book claims there are excellent sandy beaches all along the coast). The beach was better than the previous, with a lot of locals making use of it, but certainly not excellent.

We continued south to the town of Marzamemi. It was time for lunch, we parked Smarty near the harbour and walked a short way and found La Nasa Ristorante, a largish place open at one end with a view out over the harbour. It was deserted and the staff were quite surprised when we asked if we could have lunch - that was a bit of a worry. We were shown to a table overlooking the harbour by a waiter with good English. Marzamemi is a fishing village and renowned for its tuna dishes. Jane was keen to try Spaghetti Bottarga which the English version of the menu described as containing, inter alia, tuna eggs. I wondered whether there was a comma missing, but the waiter confirmed the dish contained the eggs of tuna, not those from a chicken. Jane decided that was the dish for her, I opted for a more conservative risotto marinara. Both dishes were excellent, the tuna eggs looked more like meat, but definitely had an eggy flavor to them. While we waited for our meals we noticed wedding photographs were being taken on the harbour breakwater and a largish man wearing smallish speedos (the effect was enhanced by his belly overhanging his togs) preparing his boat for an outing.

Waiting For Lunch

View From Our Table

Plenty Od Fluids Are Needed In Sicily's Heat

Wedding Photos

Budgie Smuggling

We drove further south and parked by the beach at Capo delle Correnti. A walk along the beach took us to the southernmost point in Italy where a plaque confirmed it and informed we were 5,500 kilometres from the northernmost point near Trieste. Intriguingly, there was a small island a hundred metres offshore which I assumed was also part of Italy and not one of those principalities that crop up now and again. My iPhone showed we were at 36° 38’ 49” North, 15° 4’ 45” East. I wondered whether this would be the southernmost point of our trip, or whether maybe Turkey would see us further south.

Beach At Cappo delle Correnti Looking Towards Italy's Southernmost Point

Jane At Italy's Southernmost Point (apart from the island to the south, that is)

Jane chose to drive back, the battery in the iPad was flat (it seems the charge it was getting from Smarty was less than the power consumed by the satnav. We knew we needed to head for the town of Pachino and then on to Avola. We followed signs into Pachino passing lots of poly tunnels. In Pachino the signs petered out and after leaving the town we realised we were heading south, not north. I fired up the iPad, it had enough charge to select a route to Avola that initially took us past the poly tunnels we had seen 20 minutes earlier. It wasn’t long before we were back on the road we had travelled in the morning heading for Avola. I turned the iPad off to conserve the battery when we reached Avola. Having set the centre of the town as our destination, we were directed there. That was not going to get us back to the camping ground and by now we were in a back street. The App came into its own at that point with the maps feature showing a way through the back streets that would take us to the road out of town and on to our camping ground.

As yesterday, the sky got steadily darker as we drove. By the time we reached the camping ground we could hear thunder in the distance. I set to lashing up a repair to my camera using duct tape. The sky got darker and the thunder got nearer. Hailstones the size of marrowfat peas started bouncing off our awning followed by torrential rain. It was all over as quickly as it started and the sun was back.

Hailstones

I downloaded my photographs, they were all there. What a relief!

Dinner was the salami and cheese rolls we had taken on our trip as lunch in case we didn’t find somewhere to eat out.