🍋 Sicily -> Sardenia 🚲

​Oh sweet, sweet Sicilia. I’m not sure what happened but along the ferry from Italy to Sicily, I lost my favourite hat and gained a new sense of adventure. 

When I first started my trip, I was gentle! I eased myself into the trip like lowering into a hot bath, the terrain accommodated and I dipped my toe in the waters of cooking for myself, staying in campsites and hotels, checking google maps and komoot *excessively* but now I am totally submerged in the trip (and this weird bathtub metaphor). I am happy to report that something has shifted, it’s been less about the destination and about the minute to minute of what I’m seeing and how i’m feeling, the bird calls outside my tent in the morning, the little orange flowers in the grass under olive trees, the smells coming in on the wind (lately pushing me backwards, like going up a hill all day long on flat…even downhill) and maybe at the very least just a little less afraid of being alone. 

Sicily for me was a strange adventure. Im finding it hard to put into words, it’s an island like poetry in that way, how do I capture the feeling? It’s a melting pot of history from Greeks and Roman’s and Arabic’s. It feels a bit unhinged. It is proud, it is farmers, it is food and local dialect. It’s raw and unrefined and it’s genuine. It’s mountains and beaches. It’s all at once glorious and at times industrial and garbage riddled. 

In fragments: 

Strange as in biking down a road and and suddenly tbere’s 15 white dogs who aren’t aggressive and just watch me pass by… i thought they were sheep at first, it felt like a weird dream. 

Strange as in a man driving a giant model train down a back farm dirt road who gave me the hand sign of congratulations and I gave it right back. 

Strange like a giant toilet statue in the middle of a field with pop star photos taped to it. 

Strange like my latest Warmshowers experience in a bougie farmhouse where im almost certain my host was tripping on 

Something and racist: didn’t like the Congo. Too many black people. They all looked the same. I asked “are you serious?” He shrugged. My first stay I was excited to early from the next morning. 

Dreamlike in landscapes. I’m in awe with the passing clouds on this island and the shiny tipped over moon caught in the mist. The rolling farmlands of oranges and giant lemons and of course olives, some trees so twisted and gnarled they must be ancient (olive trees can live up to 500 years). When and if the sun comes out, the meditarian waters of two toned blues, and towns sandstoney, perched on the craziest cliffs they could colonize. 

Also on the flip side, terribly ugly landscapes, full of industrial buildings and industrial towns, and industrial

Ports. Highways upon highways, the biking has been my least favourite part and the routes I’ve been choosing are mostly chaotic, tight and narrow, full of trucks. Still honking 

Coffee. Cannoli. Pizza and pasta a la Norma. Arrincini’s. Oranges. Olive oil. A lot of repeated camp meals and boiled eggs. 

At large: 

After sleeping at a beach for a few days. I tried to bike up Mama Etna, every person I’ve met since has told me I’m fucking crazy for trying, but in reality I’m just an ignorant planner. Google maps helped me out though, suggesting a sweet lilttle 8 min shortcut, Grazie Mille! Which of course led me to a broken cobblestone path in the middle of nowhere up above farmlands wirh dogs barking aggressively from down below at whatever wild animal dared to move through the bushes along a road that felt like it hadn’t been touched since the Romans. It was 45 minutes of carrying my bike, swearing out loud and saying “THIS IS ADVENTURE” falling and cheese grating my knee (the bad one)(poor baby knee, it’s only 1 years old!). I looked at my map and saw I was near a campground Taylor had stayed at and told me about, it was 4 pm and I called it, knocking on their door in the dying ligjht, bloodied knee. 

I ended up staying a week! The day before I had been laying on San Marco beach, daydreaming about picking olives and now here I was, making a little family wirh work-awayers from Switzerland and France. I like olive harvesting. It was nice feeling farm work. I liked climbing the ancient trees. There’s three parts, lying down the nets, picking olives by hand, one by one, and letting them plunk down to the ground. Afterwards you all sit together on the ground, sifting and picking out the sticks or rocks. Actually there’s four, the worst part, hauling the heavy bins down or up the hills to the van. You can climb the trees, use a ladder, or if you’re needing to get out some pent up aggression, wack the high branches with a giant bamboo stick. I kept starting each day saying “Another day! Another olive!” (Instead of dollar-nobody understood, I  kept saying it everyday.) We listened to music, I Shazammed many Swiss, French and Italian tunes, and we chat about our countries, whats wrong or right with them, comparing and contrasting politics. I’d pause often to take in the beautiful valley, and the mid day playing of “Ava Maria” from the church below and we’d all join in, bellowing the words.  

Olive oil if you think about it is techincally fruit juice. Here it’s a little spicy, viscous, lime green and tastes very different than any olive oil i’ve ever had. My favourite part of picking was smelling the olives. Eating them right off the tree is a bad experience, bitter as a Saskatchewan wind. Going to the factory though?! Whoa baby! Intoxicating. Now here’s a smell I came a long ways to smell! I wish I could bottle it up and give you some, along with a spoonful of the olive oil. At the farm every meal was served with a large bowl of it in the middle, spooned onto all we ate, like medicine of our efforts. It felt really nice having a break from biking, planning, and worrying about what to eat and where to sleep for a moment. The towns nearby were very beautiful and quiet at this time of year and I enjoyed biking up to Castligone at night (a town perched on a tall hill with a castle) having the best gelato I’ll ever have (with crunchy toasted hazelnuts) and listening to the men chatter under the gothic street lamps with their salty beers (A Sicilian speciality). 

The mountains were cold though, the humidity 

high and when you wake up, everything is wet until the sun comes out, if it decides too. I can feel winter has come here, I thought I’d be a lot warmer and I had to spend a pretty penny on some much needed gear. *ADVERTISEMENT: dear family, do you love me? If so, I won’t be home for Christmas this year, if you are feeling charitable and want to send me money for birthdays, Christmas’s, heck, all the holidays i’m never home for. You can e-transfer me at hmacza@gmail.com. That would greatly go towards some protein and future rainy days. Thankyou. I love you. So much. (Kinda kidding)* 

Anyways, as I was saying cold. So very cold. I ended up a few days later hitchhiking up to Mount Etna which was a fun solo adventure, it was one of the quietest places i’ve ever been, and i felt like I was in space, on a different planet, it was like frozen waterfalls everywhere of black. I almost walked the length of the mountain down though as there wasn’t anybody up there and it was hard times finding a ride down. A couple from Malta took me some of the way, trying to convince me to visit! I decided it wasn’t the country for me, especially with a steep $80 euro ferry for a few hour ride. 

After a week I left the farm and headed south. Riding from Francavilla to Ragusa area, Modica. Stopping in Catania, Syracuse, and Noto, and many small spots in between, and also not, it was interesting times. I really wasn’t enjoying the bike riding or the wind pushing against me, the views industrial and rhe towns pretty but incredibly touristic. Everyday I got further south, looking at the map, anxiously seeing I had hundreds of kilometers between me and Palermo, or rather the port to Sardinia, with not much exciting me along the coast line, but not feeling like I wanted to head upward to the Mountains either. The saving grace were all my camping spots every night. Peaceful spots that felt safe and took my breath away with the strong wind that flapped my tent and lulled me to sleep. 

I met many nice couples in passing, two girls from Denmark who the night before we met had funnily enough stayed at the olive farm and were heading back. A French couple who invited me to sleep at their place, but the man told me he screamed in the night from when the Russians captured him and maybe I’d like to sleep at the beach instead, (I was really curious but didn’t want to go backward to Syracuse- a town that felt like the tourist old town and the poor or real people living there, pushed outside the wall). A few people came up just to chat, which I appreciate more than they can know, and many, many kind Sicilians just down for a smile and a wave or a honk that will always and forever make my whole body and bike jump. 

In Sicily I practiced French, I got a little better at Italian, I went out for meals, swam, and got anxious a lot. And had many moments just sitting in awe, in peacefulness, not afraid for one moment but appreciating the gift, the quiet aloneness of it. 

I have been experiencing a lot of anxiety. Wirh the wisdom of reflection, I can frame it another way now,  as overcoming fear and taking on many changes. I felt Irritable like I was wasting time. I suppose due to the winterness that is slowly coming in has been adding a feeling of haste to my trip, and I found myself down in Ragusa, with hundreds of kilometers between myself and Sardinia, against winds, against tiredness, and I decided with a bus in front of me with a driver tapping his watch asking, are you coming or not?! I hoped on. Back to Catania. A city i really liked and passed through quickly due to another shitty hostel experience (hard to find a good one when your alternatives have been peaceful beaches) I took a free waking tour, added some much needed context to the collaged city, built around many lava and invadeder take downs, I learned about their beloved saint Agatha who at 14 had her breasts sawed off and St. Peter preformed a miracle and placed them back on. She is EVERYWHERE, with her breast about and with churches all the way down the coast in her honour. They preform a 5 day ceremony in February every year in her honour. 

And then it was Friday and I found out ferries only leave Sunday’s to Sardinia and I pulled the trigger hard again, saying fuck it, and got on a train to Palermo, missing a lot of Sicily, a lot that would be amazing to see, a lot I can come back too. I spent the night, walking around Palermo, and then coming back to my hostel room that I shared with a boy from northern China, Quasiat was waiting, so excited to meet me, I opened the door and he jumped up from his bed “I came into the room and was so excited by the bicycle! I thought you were going to be a big strong man but you are a big strong woman, even cooler!” The electricity went out and we set up my headlamp and talked, laying across the room in our single beds, solving the worlds problems and talking about our lives and dreams. “wow. Im really good at English now.” He said at one point. He spoke to being indigenous and how back home he feels oppressed by China, pushed out, he’s studying in Poland now and really set on recovering and preserving his native tongue and stories passed down, he told me he keeps it alive through music. He plays and teaches an instrument and the songs are stories, often about the speed of the river. “Meeting you has been a treat. I will travel next by bicycle.” He told me, before falling asleep, with the light off now and the street lamp outside shining a soft pink light into the room. 

He sat up in the bed the next morning, wishing me off as I left the hostel early to catch the ferry to SARDINIA!!!! This is truly my dream destination of the trip, and I had a double wide smile on my bike ride down here, finding out when I arrived i had to go bike to another spot to get a ticket, cycling at warp speed to make it back (I had left an hour early but stopped got a coffee… (actually my first Krema! It’s like a Tim hortons Ice cap) (good but not missing the only ferry a week for) and now I am on the ferry! And I just met the coolest couple from France who have invited me to stay with them at an anarchist/chic village and bike across Sardinia if I like! All my dreams are coming true and I haven’t even touched pedal to the island yet - a 12 hour ferry for $40, take that Malta! 

Ciao Adopo my dearest Sicilia. I really wish I could visit the north of Italy to compare, as they are often talked as contrasts. After Sardinia my plan is to head to Spain now instead of over to Tuscany as everyday the weather app says the same: rain. 

Thankyou for all your fun and beautiful comments. I love you guys so much and often my thoughts in a day are about friends and family and feeling like we are all on this adventure together! Which is actually always true, I just feel it louder right now. 

Yours especially, Hannielulu