Nellie Windmill

Against our better judgment we decided to do a 20km hike around San Gimignano in Tuscany. We’d been leading quite the sedentary lifestyle so were relying on our youthful vigour to pull us through. I happily anticipated a gentle pastoral stroll through a relatively flat landscape. In the end it was more the marked lack of alternative transport back to Nettle that saw us through to the end.

We started out by wandering yet another mediaeval town. My expectations were perhaps a mite high after hearing of it’s popularity and the reception I received at mentioning we were going there on Facebook. As with most major tourist attractions we’ve visited on the trip we were left wondering why this town out of all the mediaeval towns in Italy is so obscenely popular. Location, location, location – it’s within a day-trip from both Siena and Florence. As with any major tourist attraction the maxim “the act of observing changes that which is being observed” – or perhaps more to the point “tourism changes that which is toured” – was evident in San Gimignano. Luckily tourists are extremely easy creatures to be rid of – just walk in any direction they’re not going in, which is pretty much every direction bar one and then like magic you have the place to yourself. So we wandered the back streets a little bit.

It was a beautifully sunny day when we began our hike through the pastural landscape of olive groves and vineyards.

And we were feeling both youthful and vigorous

We came across an interesting, seemingly completely purposeless structure built into the ground that reminded me of something from a fantasy novel or the Amazon jungle.

As the day wore on, the sun that had originally made the day so cheerful, sapped us of our will to go on when it continued uninterrupted by shade and unrelieved by a breeze the whole day long. Like seemingly everything else in Nettle, our water bladder had fallen victim to mould, which had left us with one small bottle of water between the two of us. Of course, we could have bought another water bottle in San Gimignano but every now and then we seem to make these inexplicably stupid decisions, which in hindsight leave us questioning our mental capacities. I think we thought we’d find places to fill up along the way. I’ve definitely come to associate Italy as a place abundant in water fountains, which is great if you’re in a town and not hiking through the countryside where they don’t tend to build public facilities. After running out of water somewhere near the half-way mark of our hike we decided to walk a little bit out of our way to get to the nearest town. We asked the first person we saw for some l’acqua – a middle-aged man picking olives out the front of a property. Of course, he happily obliged. However, it still wasn’t enough water for the two of us and we decided to beef it up with some electrolytes (we didn’t bring enough water but we did bring a full first aid kit) and ration out what was left.

We noticed the following strange phenomenon and wondered if the “anti-light” would show up in a photograph or whether it was just our confused brains telling us the rays of light are dark:

Nope, not an illusion. Anti-light, baby.

We walked back to the point from which we’d diverted from the Lonely Planet directions and took the trail they described (“Buona passaggio“, from a well-wishing olive-picker we passed). Only it wasn’t the trail as it was a dead-end. So we took the only other trail that matched that description, which was also a dead end. We went back and walked along the road a bit further and came to the only other road it could have been. It didn’t match the description in the Lonely Planet guide at all but sure enough that was the one they meant. It turned out to be a short-cut to the very place we had just walked to get water. Having successfully added a few kilometres onto our hike by walking in circles we set off in the right direction for the first time in a good long while.

Stumbling and half-limping, zombie-like, we trudged the rest of the way along the decidedly un-scenic highway back to Nettle. One of our dreams for our travels in Europe is to hike the Alps. Given that we just had our asses kicked by the gentle, rolling hills of Tuscany I think we might have a bit of work to do.

I’m woefully behind on the travel blogging front. In fact visitors to this blog would be forgiven for not knowing that I am in fact travelling Europe and North Africa in a motorhome called Nettle with my partner, Mike. Fortunately, I am able to preface every vaguely travel-related blog post with the announcement that Mike has been dutifully keeping his travel blog up to date. It is official, he completes me… or at the very least gives me an excuse for being an absolutely rubbish travel blogger. However, I also want the pretty pictures on my blog so in a valiant attempt to get up to date here is a blog post about what we were doing 3 months ago (God, has it really been that long!)…

When I’m researching beautiful places to visit I’ll often do a google image search. The Mt Etna National Park in Sicily was no exception and I had in fact ruled it out based on the lacklustre results I’d found. Photo after photo of barren black lava landscapes left me less than enthused. Fortunately due to an unexpected prolonging of our stay on this small island we ended up doing a few things we wouldn’t have done otherwise. The problem with doing google image searches is that tourists, generally speaking, all go to the same place to see the same thing, and take the same photos. There’s much more to Mt Etna National Park than barren black lava flows but you wouldn’t know it looking at the travel photos on the net. Hopefully this blog post will go some way to re-dressing the balance.

In this photo I am hiking in deep volcanic ash (like very fine sand) on a nearly vertical incline (okay, not quite but it was steep damn it) – that was very very hard.

One of the things I love most about hiking up big steep things. The romantic in me will never tire of being able to touch the clouds.

Before we left Australia, one of the things I was really excited about was getting another autumn. Two autumns in one year, my favourite season! Images of shockingly colourful autumnal forests was a staple of mine whenever I would fantasise about travelling. This might sound strange to non-Australian peeps, but most of our trees are evergreen so a whole forrest full of deciduous trees makes the nature lover in me get all giddy with glee.

Until Mt Etna we hadn’t actually seen any autumn colours – a very discouraging state of affairs given that winter was just around the corner. I had no idea that we would find our autumn when we decided to give the Mt Etna national park a go. We were both astonished by the vivid colours. On our first leisurely walk in the national park I commented to Mike that just when I think I’ve seen a place so beautiful nothing could ever compare we go somewhere new and see something even more beautiful.

However, Sicily stole my heart not for it’s beautiful scenery but for it’s beautiful people. I honestly never knew that people could be so kind and open and genuinely friendly. We were treated like family by complete strangers. We were invited to stay at people’s homes, join their celebrations and were taken on personal guided tours that lasted all day and all night and then invited to do it all again. I think Mike has done those stories justice so do head over to his blog to read more.