ICU Guy….

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Today we‘ve got a long day of travelling south to the town of Cefalu on the north coast of Sicily.

We’re having a bit of trouble getting the GPS on our trusty hire car to work so we decide instead to follow our noses thinking that we can’t go too far wrong if we just hug the coast. Road signs are handy too. Slovenian must be a very efficient language; it’s spelling of Trieste is Trst, yep, you just leave out all the vowels. I’m glad our beloved Emma isn’t Slovenian. Maybe following our noses wasn’t such a great idea. We’re fairly sure our route to the airport isn’t supposed to take us through the middle of downtown Trieste. It’s now morning rush hour so it’s just as well we’ve got a bit of time up our sleeves. It looks very attractive - a large square facing the waterfront surrounded by classical looking buildings.

We land in Rome. I’ve seen movies with scenes of dead planes sitting out in the desert somewhere in New Mexico or Arizona. It seems that the now defunct Alitalia didn’t want to bother with that one last flight; we taxi past rotting shells sitting out here in full view between runways - missing windows and engines, paintwork half peeled off, broken wings. I’m somehow not finding this all that reassuring. I don’t think they’re just waiting for maintenance, but all the same I think nervous fliers might be a bit happier if they put them somewhere else.

As we stand in a long queue to board our very full looking flight to Palermo Issy points out a middle aged man a dozen or so places in front of us who looks like he should be in the ICU at the local hospital. It’s a nice comfortable twenty or so degrees in here, but this guy looks like he’s just crawled in from the Sahara; he’s soaked in sweat, and he’s coughing his lungs out. Surely they won’t let him get on the plane, but no problem there, they just scan his boarding pass without a second glance and wave him through. We climb into the bus out to the plane making sure to give ICU guy a very wide berth. We can’t see him, so maybe they did stop him after all. On the off chance that they didn’t we calculate the odds. We think there are roughly thirty rows of six passengers, so the chances of him sitting next to us are close to one in two hundred, so we’ll be OK surely. Uh oh, hang on, here he comes, staggering down the aisle towards us. It’s a bit chilly in here, but he’s now wearing a heavy jacket and he can’t stop shivering. Pity the poor bunnies who get to sit anywhere near him. Noooo! He plonks himself down right next to me. This can’t be happening. I reach for a second mask and put on my sunnies (we read an article the other day about the dreaded virus getting in through your eyes), and turn on all the air vents so they’re blowing everything away from us and towards him. Issy tells me to lean towards her and just face the window for the entire flight. I hope I don’t get stuck in this position and find that I can’t move when I try to get off. What if ICU guy dies while we’re in the air, ‘cos that’s feeling like a distinct possibility right now? What if he‘s got Ebola? We briefly consider asking one of the flight attendants if we can get off, but that would require facing him and asking him to get out of the way, not to mention being a bit inconvenient for the last four weeks of the trip. I try to look at it from his point of view. Maybe he’s going home to die, but if that was the case mightn’t it have been better to catch a train, at least then fellow passengers would have the option of moving to the other end of the carriage. Or maybe he’s flying because the train would take too long and he’d be dead before he got there. Anyway he survives the flight, and we wait until he’s long gone before we inch nervously past where he was sitting, trying very hard not to touch anything. We then spend a long time in the airport toilets with the disinfectant. That was interesting. I wonder what the incubation period for Ebola is.

Palermo airport looks to be sandwiched between the sea and some spectacular barren looking rocky mountains. Our train ride to Cefalu follows a similar pattern of landscape; rocky mountains on one side and wall to wall pebbly beaches on the other, a lot of them heavily occupied by sun loving Sicilians, along presumably with the odd tourist.

Cefalu is a maze of narrow streets, and it seems to be sandwiched between a sheer towering rocky cliff and the sea. It’s very crowded and preparations seem to be well underway for a festival of some sort. We meet our host Giovanni. Our apartment‘s in an ancient building right above the sandy beach. … right above.… if we spilt a drink off the balcony it would land on a sun worshipper twenty or so metres below us. The view is spectacular. I think we might have hit the jackpot here. Giovanni confirms that we are indeed here during the festival of the local patron Saint, and apparently we’ll have front row seats to a spectacular fireworks display in a few evenings' time. Let’s just hope one of us doesn’t come down with Ebola in the meantime.

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