Theft in Sicily

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After an eventful two days of flights, I arrived in Palermo feeling exhausted, but excited at the prospect of what lay ahead. I caught a taxi to the hostel and couldn’t help but notice the dilapidated state of the buildings in the area and the questionable types who were loitering in the streets at such a late hour. Getting to sleep then proved to be a difficult affair, with some horrendous karaoke being belted out in full tuneless voice long into the morning hours. Still, I had made it to Sicily safely, which wasn’t looking likely twenty-four hours earlier when I unexpectedly found myself in Chennai, so if having my ears assaulted by woeful karaoke was the worst that could be thrown at me that night, then I was happy to let them sing into the night air for as long as they wished.

For this Mediterranean jaunt, I was meeting up with a close friend, whom I hadn’t seen in far too long. We headed out the following day to arrange our hire car and then set off on a drive along the northern coast of Sicily. We decided to make our first stop in Cefalu for lunch, enjoying a pizza along the beachfront under a canopy of uninterrupted blue sky. After a short stroll through the narrow streets of the old town in what turned out to be a successful search for some delicious gelati (I’m salivating now just recalling it), we hit the road again in our jelly bean of a Fiat 500 and snaked along the coastline for hours. During this drive I was constantly marvelling at the vistas opening out before me. Villages would plummet to the shore, which would stretch out in a rich velvet blue until it shimmered into the paler blue of the distant sky. When we reached the north-eastern tip of the island, I was amazed by how close the Italian mainland was from the Sicilian coast. If you think of Italy as the boot and Sicily as the ball, it’s like contact had been made just a split second before, sending the ball on its merry way out to sea. From here, the next aspect of geography that arrested my vision was that of the imperious Mount Etna, with its snow covered sides reaching up through the clouds, revealing a smoking cone exhaling the heat of the earth from its zenith. Little did I know that the inner tumult of this volcano was going to be symbolic of what was about to erupt in the city Catania.

We were driving through the hectic streets of Catania at dusk in search of our hostel when I decided to pull over in a piazza and get my bearings on the map. Barely a minute had passed when I heard someone open the passenger door of the car, followed by a brief struggle taking place in my periphery. I turned to be confronted with the vision of a man in black wearing a black motorcycle helmet wrenching my friend’s bag from their shocked grasp. Once my caveman brain registered what was happening, I took the useless action of yelling at this robber whilst pinned to my seat by the seatbelt. Within a few seconds it was over and I saw the figure dash to a running motorbike with a waiting rider and they took off into the night. My friend lost their passport, mobile phones, driving licence and other treasured possessions and I simply sat there in impotent rage and spiralling notions of disbelief. The irony of all this, is that we had actually parked the car right outside the hostel we were searching for, without even knowing it! We learned of this strange twist when three of the staff from the hostel who had witnessed the mugging ran over to offer their support, whilst also ringing the police who arrived momentarily and escorted us to the station to file a report and so on.

With Sicily now being tainted and plans being made to get to Rome the following day to visit the Australian Embassy and sort out an emergency passport, it was a stroke of luck that another friend happens to live in Sicily in the town of Caltanisetta. We decided to drive there first thing in the morning, which unveiled many of the rolling green hills and peaks of central Sicily to us. In a remarkable display of hospitality, we were provided with lunch, alcohol, the Internet and a telephone, enabling us to sort out all arrangements necessary to take flight from Sicily that very same night and get the ball rolling through the obstructions of bureaucracy the following day. The Australian Embassy were superb, having an emergency passport issued in two hours and we were on our way to getting things back on track.

A smoking aeroplane spilling jet fuel with the force of an incontinent drunk, followed by a brazen mugging taking place when sitting inside the false safety of a car - where to from here? The Greek Islands of course! Rhodes, I’m putting my trust in you to turn all of this around. Bad things don’t always have to happen in threes, do they?

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