Monday, March 01, 2010

Erice, why I travel

High above Trapani on the west coast of Sicily is the mystical city of Erice. It has ancient roots, the Greeks were there over 2,000 years ago. In fact Trapani still has remains of the Punic wars but today Trapani is so modern you can't imagine it had any history. We took the city bus up the steep and windy road that led to Erice. The bus left the station at 9am and these pictures were taken around 10am and it promised to be a nice day. Then the mist came in, it was still nice, it had this eerie feel to it. Then the rain came and the deluge. We were soaked, not just that, we couldn't see our way around. We wanted to get back to the bus stop, at least there's some kind of shelter there. We got lost.  and thought that we were going to die from exposure. We tried to ask a few people the way to the bus station but they were too busy getting out of the rain. Finally we collared this guy who was pulling out of his driveway in his new BMW. He tried telling us in Italian, he didn't speak English, we couldn't understand him, he motioned us to get into his car and drove us a few feet away to the bus stop. God! That was so nice of him, we were soaked and I can still visualise the puddle we left in his car. There were other tourists but they came in their tour buses so all they did was to get back into their buses. It was another 1 and 1/2 hours wait before the city bus came back and we waited in the WC, dripping wet, it was smelly and the attendant was flirting with us and we tried to be polite, we didn't want to be put out into the deluge and the cold.
Erice is really beautiful and because of tourism, it is expensive to live here. The residents are mostly the rich people from Trapani who keeps weekend homes here. Hence the guy in the beemer. I've seen pictures of Erice in bright sunlight but I prefer this look for Erice. this has a different worldliness about it.
It rains a lot in Sicily between October and March. We were there in March for the first trip and in October for the second and we had very few dry days but it did not take away from the fun of being there.

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