Ragusa Ibla & Cava Grande

This morning we walked around town again before breakfast, the main street in Scicli sure looks different without the market in town.  

Breakfast is included in our room price, at a restaurant around the corner from us.  Thing about breakfast in Italy, it is not bacon and eggs or anything like that, it is a crescent and coffee, or for many a cigarette.  We ordered crescents, Andre had his first cappuccino since we have been here, and I had fresh squeezed OJ.  It is nice enough to have breakfast outside, always a treat.  

We are in another church square here for breakfast, very pretty.  We saw some beautiful trees in bloom this morning, seems like every day spring is more in the air.

Not much flowing right now in the river through town

Out for a morning ride or going to church???

Breakfast today, Rollande, this is the first time we have seen a pepper shaker, she brought it out with our breakfast, do you think it was for the OJ, Coffee or crescents?

UNESCO list of Baroque towns. 

Next to pur breakfast restaurant

Statue of the man the square is named after

Gateway to our apartment

Our little apartment for the night, notice the stone walls which we were told were 500 years old

Wendys two favourite things driving, turns and bikers driving 3 wide at the same time

Scicli from a lookout leaving town

Town Cemetery

Beautiful views while driving.

We headed out of town after breakfast to Ragusa Ibla.  There are 2 sides to Ragusa, and we knew we wanted to visit the old side which is Ragusa Ibla.  Again the parking lot was empty that we had in the GPS, so we kept driving and found a spot right before you enter the old town.  It was marked blue and in Italy this normally means you need to pay, but the machine was all covered up so we “assume” we don’t need to pay.  

This is quite a small town that you can easily cover in ½ day.  We basically walked the entire old town, some beautiful palaces and churches again, seems like a repeat every town we go to.  

Mass at the was in progress when we got to the Duomo so we decided to attend Mass.  We certainly didn’t get a lot out of it, but we knew when the lords prayer was being said, and when to pass the peace.  Communion was different, they dip the host in a glass of real red wine then place it on your tongue.  We stayed after mass to take some pictures of the church, there was a beautiful tapestry hung at the alter for Easter.  

We wandered around the rest of town, talked to some people from England that were with a group on a bicycle tour, I don’t know that I would enjoy that, the roads really aren’t very wide here.  

We ended up having a light lunch outside the Duomo before we moved on exploring further, where we were going we weren’t certain there would be any food available.  We had the best Arancini here made with cheese and artichoke, then finished off with an ice cream, perfect meal, oh lucky Andre had a spritz, but I knew I had crazy driving coming up again so stuck to water.

City gate from 15th century

Someone needs to get a weed Wacker up there 

All this walking is making Wendy look like a child again

We finally bought our magnet from this trip here, souvenir shopping done for us

Tiny chapel

Private club

Duomo

Tapestry hung for Easter, the light coming in at this time of day was amazing

Palace that is now the information center

Tourist train that takes you between the 2 sides of Ragusa

The other side of Ragusa

We now had a debate what to do next,  either another outdoor activity or visit an old town.  We decided to go to Cava Grande, which is known as the grand canyon of Sicily.  We couldn’t find it on our GPS, so just started heading in the right direction, we find sometimes once we get going we can find things under attractions near you.  We are travelling along a pretty narrow windy road and finally the GPS picks up where we want to go, we turn off the small windy road, to a much smaller dirt road.  About 1 km down we see about 8 cars parked in a field, we guess this is where we want to be.

Out we get, a family is coming out of the gates to a farm and in our very terrible Italian/Canadian sign language we figure we have to walk about 2 km.  We pass by the farmers sheep, walk right beside his house, say hello, then up and around a fence and we can see signs in the distance.  

Some of the bridges here are really high

Fields of poppies we think, I wish we had been closer 

Farm we walked through to get to the "Grand Canyon"

Wow, unbelievable view.  I can’t figure out how this is in guide books and so few people are here.  The round trip to the gorge takes about 3 hours walking, we don’t have that much daylight left but we do go down quite far.  We come across 4 very much younger people coming up with their dog who is all wet.  One of the guys is in bare feet, this is a rocky steep climb, no idea how he does it.  Bets are on that these 4 are in the camper we parked beside.  Their dog decides to stay behind with us, at least we think it is their dog.  

Cava Grande

Such amazing views, I wore the sweater down, not up!

Andre decides to continue walking down further, I start back up the gorge slowly with my new dog friend, who sticks around for about 30 seconds and I guess decides I am too slow because he is gone.  Back to the top and Andre follows behind not too long after me. Back to the car, we guessed right, the 4 are hanging around outside the camper.  Back in the car, and one of the guys picks his dog up off the dirt road so I can get by, guess dog is not car smart yet.  Back on the twisty windy road to get down to the other side to head home for the night.

At this point Andre wishes he had just returned with Wendy instead of going down further

After looking at our guide books further and thinking about the map we saw at the top of the gorge we went down we figure out we weren’t at the tourist starting point, I thought it was weird to park in the farmers field.  About 3km along the road we see the much bigger sign pointing to the gorge.  Again amazing lookouts here, but you were not able to walk down, the trails were closed in 2014 because of dangerous rock slides.  Glad we stopped and walked earlier, no signs there.  There was a locked gate, but someone had put milk cartons in front and behind the gate to climb over, there were probably 30 cars here and no people around, so we know they were down in the gorge somewhere.  You could see swimming holes far below, and make out people walking back along the switchback trails.  Basically the sign said it was closed and if you go down anyway you are responsible for any costs in getting you out if you are injured and other legal jargon.  Glad we had already been down or I’m sure Andre would have been helping me climb over the fence.

A different view of the gorge down the road

On a clearer day I am sure you could see the ocean better in the background

Finally back on the road home on the twisty road, about 5 minutes in I had to go around a car stopped on the road, this is not uncommon here so I thought nothing of it.  Then I heard a bang which I thought was on the roof.  We pulled over and Andre couldn’t see anything, we decided it must be a stone that came out of the wheels somehow and made a bang, we had just been driving on the gravel road.  

Back on the road and the car that I had passed is right on my tail and motioning me to pull over.  Andre gets out and I can tell that the man is agitated and telling Andre that I had hit his mirror.  He showed Andre where the mark was on the side of the car.  Lucky for Andre he had just read about a scam where they throw a rubber something at your car that is covered in this sticky stuff that leaves a mark on your car so it looks like you hit them.  

Andre told him we were going to call the police to get it straightened out.  Didn’t take long for the guy to take off, what a scam.  Now we have to deal with showing the rental car company this messy guck on the side of the car.  It doesn’t look like it scratched or dented, just sticky stuff. 

We stop at a lookout after coming half way from the top of the mountain.

It is going to be a twisty ride down 

Back home and we realize that there is something on at the theatre tonight.  The theatre is not open very often so we are really glad to get tickets to a Drum and Dance night.  There was a lecture another night, but that would have been really rough to sit through in Italian.  We have about 30 minutes before doors open so go to a place that we have been to before and tell them we want something fast and they look after us. We shared a nice tomato brushetta. I had pasta with brocoli and Andre had pasta with a pistachio sauce. Both were very good.

The theatre is beautiful, I love going into these old theatres.  We are not sure if it is a school or what kind of group put on the show, but there were very few people in the theatre.  We paid 10Euro each to go, we bought the tickets from a young girl at the box office, we saw on the poster after that it was 15 Euro, or 10Euro for under 26 or over 65, which did she think we were?  The show was quite good, but the bit of a stressful drive home I was really tired and maybe dozed off for a few minutes.

Back home for a glass of wine and start working on the blog from the weekend.  I am sure I will dream about scammers throwing things at my car tonight.