Week 9: Easter Holidays!

This week began the start of our 2 week Easter Holiday. We decided to make the most of where Malta is situated and go to Sicily as it is less than 100km away. Having originally planned to go on a Friday to Monday we were a bit disappointed when our ferry was cancelled due to bad weather. Originally we thought they were being a bit over cautious and thought to ourselves that if we were in Ireland it would have gone ahead as we are used to bad weather. Instead we re-arranged to go on the Tuesday to Friday, and we were glad the ferry had been cancelled as our sailing over was rough enough! It felt like we were on a speedboat rather than a large ferry! After two hours of rocky sailing we eventually arrived in Pozzallo, where we got a bus to Catania.

Didn't take us long to get our first ice-cream!

Our own balcony!

My favourite pit-stop!

Having been travelling since 3:30am we were glad to arrive at our hostel and enjoyed chilling out and catching some sun on our own private balcony! We then decided to head to the beach to do some more sunbathing and napping! I can’t say Catania is the most beautiful city, in fact parts of it are quite rough and dirty and I wasn’t overly impressed with it, feeling uncomfortable at times when men would honk their horns or say ‘nice’ things to you.

The highlight of my trip was definitely seeing Mount Etna. Having studied volcanoes in my A-Level geography course, I found it really interesting and couldn’t believe I was actually standing on an active Volcano, the tallest one in Europe. We had booked a tour which picked us up at our hostel and included another woman and her daughter who were from London. We travelled about different parts of the volcano, stopping at different points of interest like where the lava flow had stopped just a couple of hundred meters away from a nearby village and formed a large wall, we got to walk around a crater called Silvestri formed from an eruption in 1892. We also got the opportunity to walk through a lava flow tube and managed to make it the whole way to the end! We passed a house which had been destroyed by a lava flow before making time to stop off at one of the many vineyards situated on the fertile soils of Mount Etna. Etna is known for its speciality in producing high quality wines and we got to taste some of these in the winery we stopped at along with different types of cheeses and other delicacies. Nearing the end of the tour our last stop was at Alcantara River where the force of the river managed to break through the strong basalt wall built up by a lava flow to form a beautiful gorge.

Lava flow wall

House destroyed by lava flow

Cute man who made sculptures out of the basalt volcanic rock

Just chilling on a volcano

Amazing views

The crater from 1892

At the end of the lava flow tube

At the vineyard

Wine tasting

All in all I would definitely recommend anybody staying in Malta to make the journey to Sicily, even if only for a day trip to explore Mount Etna. It was an amazing opportunity that I really enjoyed and I can now tick off ‘visit a volcano’ on my bucket list!