Italy with Kids - Alcantara Gorge

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03 Oct 2008

The SS124 from Taormina to Giardini Naxos is incredibly narrow and windy. It still managed to fit us, a car going the other way and a scooter, with the occasional bus thrown in though. Giardini Naxos was pleasant to drive through, and we followed signs out along more windy roads up the valley to the Galle Dell Alcantara (Alcantara Gorge). As a side note: I've decided at this point that I am sick of driving Italian roads.

Now unlike larger gorges you may have experienced, and certainly what I expected, you couldn't see this one from the road as you approached. i.e. it wasn't a grand canyon or Clyde (before Lake Dunstan). We parked in the deignated "Gratuito" parking, and were prompted by a man wearing a suspect shirt for €1 for parking. I refused and indicated I would pay at the office (cassa). There I found out he wasn't legit, but the staff seemed to understand his presence, saying he was after a "mancia", i.e. a tip. (When we returned to our car after the walk we checked for damage, but there was none and the guy had disappeared).



The gorge is small in length, but quite spectacular. Adults can pay extra to wade up the stream itself which I would have liked to have done, but with the kids we settled for the walk and lots of photos.













Apart from the gorge, the proprietors have taken pains to name the flora in the area, although we paid scant attention to this apart from admire the prolific and very large cactus, in some places growing over the path!
















After the walk we drove on up the valley to Francavilla where we found our first supermarket. I had ideas of driving a loop through Castiglione and back to the coast further south from Giardini Naxos, but after a brief stop and walk in Francavilla, which provided some fun photo ops, we decided to get back to GN and have a swim at the beach.



















The beach was gravel with smaller particles like a coarse sand. There Joseph and I swam out quite a way admiring the fish, underwater rocks and sea urchins with just our swimming goggles. Liam also had a paddle around and chased a few fish.


We walked up and down the main street of GN, which sported quite an array of shops. Kylie found a neat pair of purple shoes, but she was out of cash, and Joseph and I had already headed off down the street so she missed out (and I got in trouble for not being around when needed). Due to not having had internet access to upload backups of our pictures, I had a DVD made of our pics off the camera for €6.


Then it was home and pack up time for our drive to Palermo tomorrow.

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