...and some mixed news.

1630 - we're reunited with Scooby, dangling tubes and needles rattling on the lino, dressed in a tight fitting turquoise vest, groggy and wobbly from the anaesthetic.

The good news is that the surgery went well, so any future bleeds shouldn't cause the circulation problems that we saw on Tuesday.

The bad news is that, although the surgeon couldn't get a clear view of the tumour, it looked like the worse type.  It's likely to grow rapidly, spread to other organs and bleed increasingly often.  His life expectancy is weeks rather than months.

However, some more good news is that in the meantime he should be as comfortable and cheerful as usual, and can do what he wants.  Back to the beach, back to the squirrel woods, and if the fun kills him he'll have ended his life doing what he loved best. That's a privilege that these days is largely reserved for dogs and Formula 1 speedboat racers.

We've got some medication to relieve the itching from his nose, and by next week we hope the last of the lab results will identify an antibiotic that will finally clear up the abscess and make him more comfortable.

Our next stop is Sainsbury's to stock up on liver, then we're heading north to meet our friends in the Lake District.  Hopefully we can find some tripe up there as well.

Our dog is in for some serious spoiling!

Some good news

10:10am telephone call from the vet to tell us Scooby's chest x-ray showed no secondary growths, so he can move on to the next stage (keyhole surgery).

I know there's little point in updating this every few minutes, but it gives us something to distract us!

Dog Nose the Trouble I've Seen....

Another big update on the sequence of events that has brought us (abruptly, for anyone who hasn't heard from us and is just reading this blog!) to Bath, England.

What we didn't mention when we visited Zagreb was the big, and growing, lump on the side of Scooby's muzzle.  We left it for a couple of days, thinking it might be an insect bite.  When it didn't clear up we visited an English speaking vet in Zagreb.  After a couple of visits the conclusion was that it was an infection, rather than a tumour ('Hurray!'), but it was likely to be a dental abscess ('Oh dear!') and likely to require the extraction of a canine tooth.  That's a big operation for a dog, with a long painful recuperation ('Oh no!').

We got a twelve day course of antibiotics and set off for home a couple of weeks earlier than we'd intended.  If he needed any serious surgery we wanted his own vet to do it, and for him to be able to recuperate in one place rather than travelling around.

We were assured that the antibiotics would control the infection, and there was no need to race home, so we got to see a little more of northern Croatia and Slovenia on the way.  Scooby showed no signs of being in discomfort, eating normally, playing with toys as usual.  It didn't seem anything like Stella's experience of having a dental abscess, but what do we know about dog dentistry ….?

So, we finished off our trip to Europe, as we had started it, with a walk and some dog fun on the  beach near Calais.


Back in Cardiff, we went straight to our normal vet.  Claire examined Scooby and the notes from Croatia and immediately said it wasn't a dental abscess so no tooth extraction was necessary ('Hurray!').  But she didn't know what it was ('Oh dear!') and while we continued treatment with antibiotics and steroids she'd read up on what diseases we might have encountered en route.

She'd mentioned sandflies, which sent Stella straight to Google, where she found Leishmaniasis (a lifelong infection, hard to treat, sometimes fatal, 'Oh no!').  That gave us a sleepless night.

Since then we've been travelling around the UK visiting family and friends, doing jobs on the van and returning to the vet periodically.  It's been hard to plan beyond the next vet visit, but we've got to see a bit of the UK and remind ourselves that there's more to it than schools and offices!

We had a 'mini break' in the Peak District which, especially slightly out of top tourist season, is very lovely. Our first night there was spent on a little farm run by an eccentric old man who looked like Captain Birdseye. In the field next to our van was a newly born foal with its proud mother and a small flock of fabulously fat, woolly sheep. There were also lots of brown, fluffy looking hens and some very handsome cockerels wandering about, an old, portly bulldog and an hilarious Indian runner duck with curly tail feathers which liked to stand in front of the van and quack loudly.



We also finally managed to get ourselves far North enough to visit Richard's sister in Radcliffe  (near Manchester), where we had a great, boozy evening, a very good Indian takeaway and left having updated our musical knowledge and gained a jar of delicious homemade chutney. Thanks Liz!

Then we headed back to south Wales for another vet visit (Monday 23rd May), a nasty one this time as Scooby had to be sedated for a biopsy of his nose lump (which wasn't responding well to the antibiotic).  After that we went to Richard's parents' house in Swansea to recover.

On Tuesday (24th May) we spent a lazy morning in the sunshine, then went for a walk by the river Tawe.  Scooby was on top form, chasing his ball and swimming in the river.  When we decided to turn back for home he was still eager for more.  He trotted off ahead of us carrying his toy, Richard said “Look at him.  He'd have gone miles today!”, but then we turned a corner and found him collapsed in the hedge.

He spent the night in the veterinary hospital in Swansea, we spent the night worrying that we wouldn't see him again.  It turned out he had some sort of lump on his heart, which had bled into his pericardium (a sac of membrane around the heart).  The pressure on his heart had weakened it to the point that he passed out.  The vet hospital drained the fluid and he quickly perked up, but what was the lump?

On Wednesday (25th May) he was almost back to normal, apart from big shaved patches on his belly where they had used an ultrasound scanner.  We drove him back to his own vet in Cardiff who suggested an MRI scan to get a better view of what was going on.  Surgery might be an option.

This morning (Thursday 26th May) we took him to Bath Veterinary Hospital for further investigations; another ultrasound scan, x-ray and discussions with their specialist surgeon. They confirmed there was a lump which was almost certainly a tumour; one of two types (they have proper names but we think of them as 'quite bad' and  'very bad').

Current position:

• Scooby has been to the vet every day this week.  Not his favourite thing at all.
• The bill is going to be enormous.  Thank heavens we persevered with his insurance
• We still don't know what is causing the abscess on his nose (hoping for biopsy results tomorrow).
• He's going back to the veterinary hospital tomorrow for an x-ray under anaesthetic to check for secondary tumours on his lungs.  If his lungs are clear, Alasdair Hotston Moore will attempt to remove part of his pericardium using keyhole surgery techniques.  That way, any future small bleeds should drain away harmlessly.
• Scooby is wondering why we are being so indulgent this evening, but he's not complaining. After leaving the vet he was delighted to have a walk up the Kennet and Avon Canal, but couldn't understand why we walked so slowly and didn't throw his ball. He's currently snoring on a sheepskin fleece on the bench seat next to Stella, digesting a dish of sheep's liver and having his ears rubbed. Mercifully he has no idea that he's so ill.

The best outcome we can realistically hope for is that it turns out to be the 'quite bad' tumour and the surgery goes well.  In that case Scooby should be back with us by Saturday morning and good for another year or more.  Not bad for a 13 year old dog!  The worst outcome is that the Beautiful Big Blue Van might be down to a crew of two by the end of Friday. 

We'll update this blog tomorrow, come what may, but we may not feel like writing much. Wish him luck!

Croatia - concluding throughts

We're planning to leave Croatia tomorrow, after travelling around for two weeks. We've not published many blog entries, partly because web access has been tricky, but we've seen a lot and updated our first impressions quite a bit.

One first impression that hasn't changed is that this is a beautiful and welcoming country.  During our travels we've seen a little more of its diversity, but we know there's a lot more to see.  If we'd had another week we would probably have visited the Istrian Peninsular.  If we'd had another fortnight we might have got as far inland as the flat arable country towards the Danube.  As it is, we need to be home this month to get an MOT for the van, and a little earlier than originally planned to get Scooby to the dog dentist.

After we finished our last blog we made our way north up the Dalmatian coast (in southern Croatia there's not much except coast).  It wasn't obvious in Dubrovnik how we could buy insurance for the short stretch of the coastal road that goes through Bosnia, so we bypassed it by driving up the Pelješac Peninsular and getting the ferry to Ploče. Next we went to Split, which is another lovely little town, at least as good, if not better, than Dubrovnik in terms of historical features and pretty winding streets (but could hardly be more different).



Then we cut a little way inland to see Krka National Park, to the coast to Zadar and Nin and then further inland to see Plitvice National Park.  After that we spent a couple of nights near Karlovac and had a day trip to Zagreb (a beautiful, bustling and very stylish little city).  Tomorrow we plan to look around the countryside and small towns north of Zagreb before crossing into Slovenia and back into the European Union, Schengen area and the Eurozone!

Not surprisingly, Croatia looks very different when you leave the coast.  As you move inland there's less Italian influence and the buildings start to look much more central European.  Just south of Plitvice we noticed steep roofed houses with small windows, built for a place that expected snow and hard winters, looking like something from Poland.  Just north of Plitvice the scenery and the houses turned alpine, with overhanging roofs and pretty wooden balconies.  The lower town of Zagreb is filled with imposing highly decorated buildings from the 1880s and 1890s, reminding us of the parts of Budapest that were built around the same time (during that period Croatia was governed by Hungary).  On the hill in Zagreb, the winding streets of the old town are like the pretty old towns of Germany and Austria (dating back to the period when they were governed by Austria).




Krka and Plitvice National Parks are both stunningly beautiful places. We now have endless photos of turquoise lakes, gushing waterfalls and lush forests in every shade of green. The water in the lakes is so clear that you can see shoals of fish below the surface, apparently unbothered by the tourists peering at them, and on the lilypads are wonderful frogs that sound just like quacking ducks. The water in Plitvice lakes calcifies the roots and branches of the trees; which makes for very interesting, and rather ghostly, shapes below the water. Anyone with a poetic frame of mind would have plenty to fire their imagination here.



One of the things that we liked best about the National Parks was the fact that they were so well managed. All the walkways were very natural looking, with wooden slats to walk on and paths that took you right up to the lakes, rivers and waterfalls; sometimes the water was actually splashing over the edges of the path. But what they didn't have was all the warning signs and barriers that you'd have in Britain. The Park authorities clearly trust people to understand that water is wet, wood can be slippery and waterfalls entail steep drops.





We were told by a Dutch fellow-camper in Sicily that Croatia has “wonderful nature” and he was right. The National Parks are lovely at this time of year, but would also be gorgeous in the Autumn when the variety of trees in the forests would be a riot of colour. We'll have to come back sometime. 


Recovering from War

During the last week we've seen another side to the 'Homeland War'.  Before the war southern Croatia was occupied predominantly by Croats, so the war came from outside, caused havoc, and passed on leaving the survivors to rebuild.  Further inland and north, the populations were more mixed.   There was plenty of physical damage here as well, but it's also obvious how many people were displaced from their homes.  Gutted, abandoned houses abound, sometimes entire villages.  In Dubrovnik the saddest thing was the damage to the beautiful town, elsewhere the saddest thing is the people who aren't there any more.  We've visited a couple of places where Serb Orthodox religious institutions have been rebuilt  after the war, but they seem like museum pieces, inhabited only by furtive priests, their congregation fled.

European Union

When we arrived in Dubrovnik we were struck by how familiar and orderly it seemed after southern Italy.  It seemed like the sort of place that should be in the EU.

A lot of Croats have doubts about joining the EU.  Some are worried about EU rules impacting on their businesses.  Others are worried about the EU interfering in their national sovereignty (particularly after Ante Gotevina, one of their national war heroes, was recently convicted by the War Crimes Commission in the Hague).

As we've travelled around we've seen many infrastructure projects that have been funded by the EU.  Croatia has aligned its agricultural and environmental legislation with the EU.  When we visited Zagreb the EU flag was flying alongside the Croatian flag on the parliament building.

Sorry sceptics, there doesn't seem to be any requirement for a referendum here.  Croatia is going to join the EU.



Language

Croatian is starting to sound a little less alien.  We've struggled to learn a few basic polite phrases and are just beginning to be able to make the odd connection between phrases (“'Veliki slap' was the big waterfall, so 'veliki kava' must be a large coffee”).  Pronunciation's getting easier now we know some of the rules and realise 'r' can act as a vowel ('Hrvatski' (Croatian) is pronounced 'Herevatski', which is much more straightforward).

Some Croats have been delighted that we've learned to say 'Hvala' ('Thanks') and 'Molim' ('Please'), but others seem a little irritated that we're wasting their time with confused scraps of Croatian when they speak fluent English.  Everyone older than us here seems to speak fluent German and everyone younger than us speaks fluent English.  We walk into a bakery and the person serving greets us (before we've said a word) with “Good morning, can I help you?”.

There's no language problem for the English speaking visitor here.

Food

In Dubrovnik they were most proud of their sea food – fresh fish cooked simply, as good as the best of the Italian coast.  Further north and inland the food, like the architecture, it gets more central European (and more Turkish).  It makes for a very interesting mixture.

In Split we ate goulash as a spaghetti sauce, followed by baklava which was a pastry the size of a jumbo sausage roll. In Zagreb we were faced with a huge platter of grilled meats and kebabs. Here in Karlovac they are most proud of the 'world famous Ogolin cabbage' – a whole white cabbage pickled in a vacuum packed plastic bag.

In Croatia Italian, Austro – Hungarian, Ottoman and Slav influences all bump up against each other. 

Wine

Many miles ago in France and Spain we talked a lot about wine, and someone said they were enjoying our 'wine blog'.  We've tried to stay off the subject since then, but Croatian supermarkets were a revelation; walls of wine, almost all of it Croatian, none of which we'd ever heard of.

We bought a tiny bottle of Croatian red wine on the ferry from Bari, and I realised it was the first Croatian wine I'd tasted since 1989.  The 1989 wine was Laski Reisling – cheap, dull and apparently extinct.

During our stay we've naturally dipped into the available selection, which is full of surprises.  We had a golden syrupy Chardonnay at 14.5% alcohol, a bone dry Grasevina (which the supermarket told us was 'Welsh Reisling'), a Frankovka which tasted like a mature oaked French style Merlot, a honeyed Kapistran and a soft fruity Babić. There's a huge selection, some of it ordinary, some of it special, all of it well presented, and none of it appears in British supermarkets.  We can expect that to change when they join the EU.



And that's before we even start to consider the spirits. Croatian brandy.  Croatian rum.  Croatian herb schnaps.  Croatian cherry brandy.  Croatian slivowitz.  Croatian mistletoe flavoured aperitif...


Tomorrow, we cross the border and head north.  Looking forward to a brief look at Slovenia, but Croatia leaves us wanting more.

Croatia – First Impressions

Catching the overnight ferry from Bari to Dubrovnik was no fun.  I won't go into detail here, but suffice to say the Bari Port Authorities don't appear to have ever run a port before, and the reclining seats on the ship are about as comfortable to sleep on as bicycle seats.  If we'd been travelling without a dog we'd have been able to take a cabin, which presumably would have been much better, but also more expensive.  We ended up spending the night dozing fitfully on the quivering carpet tiles of the passenger lounge; another passenger lay on a metal shelf and tried to sleep there.



After that, arriving in Croatia was like returning to civilisation.  The customs and immigration people gave us a quick check over and a warm welcome.  Scooby  (“Stari pas”) got his ears rubbed by a burly border guard and we were on our way.  We stopped near the ferry port to get cash and catch our breath, and found the sleepy early Sunday morning town to be so inviting we spent a couple of hours walking around the coastal path.  After that, we drove about ten kilometres down the coast to a tiny welcoming campsite at Srebreno (Autocamp Matkovika) and settled in for a lazy first day.  The following day we visited Dubrovnik's old town, then Cavtat, and today we had another look around Dubrovnik and then drove a little way north to the Pelješac peninsular.

It was startling after southern Italy to suddenly find ourselves in this orderly, clean, prosperous, spick and span place.  No litter, no graffiti, people obey the traffic laws, park in the designated bays, stop to let you cross on pedestrian crossings and don't ride their scooters on the pedestrianised streets.  Even the port area is clean, tidy and well maintained – how many towns can say that?

The area is as incredibly beautiful as everyone told us.  Grey limestone crags, speckled with sparse herbs and trees, tower over the coast.  The sea is impossibly blue and clear, and strewn with wooded islands.  The buildings of Dubrovnik and nearby towns are quite unlike those of Italy just across the Adriatic.  They have a homely central European air, a whif of gingerbread and fairy tales.  Parts reminded us of old Prague, but like a cleaned up Prague with blue sky, turquoise sea, fresh fish, lemon trees and warm sunshine.



Our guide book's summary of the area's history started off with a warning that it's complicated, and so it is.  Dubrovnik was a trading town that made its fortune by managing to remain on good terms with both the Ottoman empire and the Europeans, so had a virtual monopoly on trade between the two.  It was effectively independent until the nineteenth century, and developed a complex cultural mix of Italian and Slav, with Latin speaking Roman Catholicism and strong links to Austria and Hungary.  Today's Dubrovnik is cheerfully Slav (to a foreigner the language sounds very like Czech  and there is plenty of pickled cabbage in the supermarket), but it's Slav with sunglasses, speedboats and a good selection of Italian recipes.

But of course there's been a serpent in paradise. It was a shock for us when we walked from our campsite down to the bay and found, behind the cool coffee bars, a series of gutted and shell pocked concrete hotels.  A pretty nineteenth century house on the waterfront was peppered with bullet holes, roofless and abandoned.  In the next bay a huge complex of what had clearly been smart hotels with landscaped gardens stood wrecked, desolate and overgrown.



We expected to see evidence of the war at some point during our visit, but not to see prime beachfront property in such a beautiful location still untouched after two decades.  We found out that this part of the coast had been occupied in 1991 by a Serb, Montenegrin and Bosnian army, who used it to shell Dubrovnik.  They smashed everything they could before being driven out by a Croatian counter attack the following year.  The density of the bullet holes bears witness to the intensity of the fighting.  The repair work has just been too big a job, and the old hotels have naturally been in the back of the queue behind homes, bridges and roads.

That's the sad explanation for why so much of this area looks so spick and span.  Much of it has had to be rebuilt and repaired over the last two decades, and there's still work to do.



From Dubrovnik's ancient city walls the city looks perfect at first glance.  It's only when you notice a mossy old terracotta tiled roof you realise that around nine tenths of the roofs of this mediaeval city are brand new.  You notice other things; a carved monument that looks far too fresh to be mediaeval, a wall dotted with patches of not quite perfectly matched mortar, an old shop above which the upstairs rooms are lined with bare plasterboard, and everywhere the star shaped indentations of shrapnel in stone.



Neither of us saw the area before the breakup of Yugoslavia, so we've had to get a sense of it from indirect sources.  In the late nineteenth century Dubrovnik and the coast around it was a popular holiday destination for wealthy people from the Austro Hungarian empire.  It had smart hotels and spas.  Rebecca West described it as “Too perfect and self satisfied”.  This has clearly been an orderly, prosperous, comfortable place for many years. 

Apparently it didn't have ethnic conflict, and wasn't militarily significant, so it didn't expect to be drawn into the conflict.  The shock seems to have been something like the shock people would feel if arguments over Scottish devolution led to a series of events that somehow led to the city of Bath being shelled by Welsh artillery.

We remember being shocked when we saw it on the news at the time, and it shocked us again now to be reminded how close we can be to chaos as we go about the familiar routines of our lives.

That's a misleadingly gloomy note to end on.  It's certainly no reason not to visit.  This is a beautiful, comfortable and welcoming place.  Maybe all the more reason to visit, as it's quite inspiring to see what the Croatians have built for themselves in twenty years.  Not just repairing so much of the war damage, but building all the services and facilities of a modern independent state.

Also, everyone we have met here so far has been unfailingly polite and helpful (and has spoken good English, which is a relief as we haven't got very far with learning Croatian) In fact the owner of our first campsite was so kind that she drove us the 10 km into Dubrovnik, then returned later to pick us up because Scooby wasn't allowed on the bus.

All in all, it's early days but we're loving it so far!

Home thoughts from abroad

Today we visited Punta Ristola, the most southerly point in Puglia.

We've still got a long way to go, a lot of time and a lot of miles, but from now on it's all more or less north.  We need to be back in the UK by the end of May, and we think it might be a bit of a shock.

As an exercise in optimism, we've set ourselves the task of listing ten things we miss about Britain.  It's odd that a lot of them turn out to be things that we grumble about in Britain, but during our travels we've found that compared to other places Britain isn't really that bad.

1. Friends and family.  We often used to neglect them when we were living in the UK, but it was good to know they were there.  We must remember to spend more time with friends in the future, if they still remember us when we get back.
2. Being able to speak to people using the past and future tenses, and understanding roughly how things work, or roughly how to find out how things work.  In Italy for example we don't even know how many police forces they have (we've seen Carabineri, Polizia Municipale, Polizia  Locale, Polizia Nazionale, Guardia di Finanzia, Polizia Penitenciaria, Polizia Forestale...), let alone which one we'd go to for help with a particular problem.
3. Road infrastucture.  Before we left Cardiff we used to grumble about the roadsigns in the Vale of Glamorgan, but places like Spain and Italy make even Vale of Glam look good.  Sometimes its caused by a lack of resources, but often doing it the UK way wouldn't have cost any more, it's just mystifying.  They must be working to other rules we don't understand.    Just three examples;
• two signs at a junction saying the same thing, pointing the same way.  That extra moment it takes to read them both, double take and re-read to check they really are identical, means missing the junction
• Numerous signs saying things like 'Motorhome parking this way' that lead you off into the Genoa one way system and then run out.  "Ha ha! Over to you now sucker!"
• Arrows painted on the lanes of dual carriageways that seem to mean nothing or to mean 'If you're in this lane, you might want to continue straight ahead or you might want to change lanes, it's up to you'.  One favourite, seen several times in Spain but never photographed (for obvious reasons), had the left hand lane marked as being for going straight on or turning right, and the right hand lane marked as being for going straight on or turning left.
4. Access to the countryside.  A source of much grumbling and campaigning in Britain, but compared to Italy the UK system of rights of way is brilliant.  At least in the UK you can spot a roadside footpath or bridleway sign and be pretty sure it's a place you can stroll with your dog for half an hour.  The bits of Italy we've visited have been nothing like as well supplied with country parks and marked walking paths.  In Italy (and parts of Spain and France) it's common for stretches of beach to be private.  That's not something we expect in the UK.  Bless the Crown Estate (which owns almost all the beaches and leaves them open to strollers).
5. Food.  Britain has a deservedly terrible reputation for food, but there are a few genuinely distinctive indigenous traditions we can be proud of and miss.  Specifically; pies (Spain has its empanadas, Italy its Calzone, but it's not the same as a hot meat pie, or even fruit pie), sausages (maybe we're missing our own sausage machine as much as anything), good mature cheddar, sweet pickles, rice pudding, salty Welsh butter and the variety of food from all over the world (particularly Asia) that you can get in Britain
6. Hikers' pubs.  Hard to find even in much of Britain, but the sort of place in the Peak District or Devon that serves bitter and pies (see above) to a crowd of walkers steaming infront of an open fire, firelight shining in those three bottles of single malt behind the bar that no-one ever seems to drink.
7. The BBC.  Before we left the UK the most value we got from our license fee was from their web site and 6 Music, but the output overall contains some really high quality material and it's all at least competently produced.  Italian telly makes you realise how high standards are in Britain.  In one place we had over 50 digital TV channels, but the only ones that weren't encrypted for subscriber-only access were poorly dubbed American B-movies, gameshows and poorly produced news programmes.  They often get their foreign news from American cable channels, broadcast unaltered with an Italian voice over.  Their news announcers struggle to read their autocue while gazing at the wrong camera.
8. Pavements.  In most of the places we've visited pedestrians, scooters, prams, street vendors, cars and trucks all have to share the road.  When there is a pavement, nobody knows what it's for, so scooters scoot on it, cars park on it and pedestrians amble about in the traffic.
9. The familiar people we've come to rely on and trust to help us out in a crisis; St Davids Veterinary Centre, our dentists, Rumney Hill Surgery, the physiotherapists at the DTR Clinic. Fortunately we haven't had any significant emergencies, but it just compounds the stress when you're having to look for help from strangers.
10. Scooby says he misses squirrels, cats that follow the rules and run away, and mud.

Arrivederci Bella Sicilia

It's very odd that Sicily has such a bad image in Britain.  If you mention that you're going there, the first things most people seem to think of are gangsters, then poverty and vendettas.  They'd have to think hard before they think of great wine, acres of fragrant citrus orchards, huddled clifftop towns, smartly dressed courteous people going out of their way to help visitors, blue and white wooden fishing boats pulled up on a sandy beach, Norman cathedrals decorated by Saracens,  gorgeous Greek and Roman remains, almond cakes and all things nice.

We'd heard enough good about Sicily to be really keen to get there, but were ready for it to be a bit of an intense and maybe scary experience.  The reality was warm and welcoming.  If we hadn't had other places to go to I think the only thing that would have made us leave would have been the summer heat.

There's something ridiculously thrilling about looking across the Straits of Messina from Reggio Di Calabria; such a famous stretch of water, so beautiful, and with so many other famous names on the other side.  When we saw it it was calm (no sign of the notorious whirlpool that nearly ended the Odyssey, although it's still there), blue, busy with ships (full of life and bustle and glittering wakes) with Messina glinting in the background and a clear view of Mount Etna off to the left (a perfect cone like a text book volcano, topped with snow).

We travelled clockwise around the whole island, sticking mainly to the coast but with a detour inland to Piazza Armerina and Enna.  We regretfully missed out the mountains as Stella's knee was objecting and the roads inland were hard work for a 3.5 tonne van.

A few highlights:

• Doric temples of astounding antiquity in astonishingly good condition.  It's an architectural style that is so well known and so often imitated that when first catching sight of one my first fleeting thought tended to be that a Victorian municipal library had been teleported to an uncharacteristically dramatic location.  Sicily has so many it's easy to get overwhelmed, but the group at Agrigento are as good as they get.  These date back to when Sicily was inhabited by Greek colonists, around 600 BC, and they're in better condition than the Messina to Syracuse motorway.

• Everywhere we went we came across frothy Baroque architecture.  The most famous sites (UNESCO World Heritage Sites) are the towns in the Noto valley which had to be rebuilt in the 17th century after an earthquake.  However, it's obvious that during the 17th and 18th century a lot of money was being spent all over Sicily building and refurbishing in the latest fashion.  I thought Baroque architecture was one of my least favourite styles, but it's grown on me.

• A group of eleventh century Norman mercenaries had the good fortune to find themselves in charge of Sicily. They built cathedrals and employed artists to decorate them with mosaics, most notably Capella Paletina and Monreale in Palermo.  The whole interior is full of saints, biblical scenes and geometric decorations.  Viewed close up, an astonishing variety of mosaic tiles have been used including many colours of glazed ceramic, glass and gilt.  With this, the artists have achieved amazingly subtle detail and tones, as well as a mass of shining gold around Jesus above the altar.  Some of the artists were local, some travelled in from Byzantium and some had a distinctly Arab style.  They were drawing on an ancient tradition – a Roman villa uncovered in Piazza Armerina has top quality mosaic floors from a thousand years earlier.

• Downtown Palermo.  A maze of romantically crumbling streets with mediaeval and baroque details peeking out everywhere.  A riot of life, trade and fun but with none of the feeling of danger we had in Naples, Marseille, or even Newbridge.
• And its natural heritage, a wonderful coastline.  All around the south and west coast there are sea cliffs and beautiful sandy beaches (no dog bans!)  In the northwest corner massive rock outcrops (actually marble mountains) loom over deserted grassy plains, rich in wild flowers – lovely poppies at this time of year - which merge into dunes and more sandy beaches. I'm sure their mountains are also wonderful, but not for this visit or this vehicle.

General impressions:

• Contrary to our preconceptions it seemed prosperous.  Apparently the Norman kingdom was the richest in Europe, and there was certainly plenty of money available in the 17th century to rebuild the towns of the Noto Valley (it clearly wasn't done on the cheap).  After Calabria the towns seemed well built and well maintained,  the people comfortable and the shops well stocked.
• It seemed friendly.  Everyone was polite and helpful.  People would go out of their way to help us with directions, advice, directing the van, even when we didn't need help. 
• With a few exceptions (driving, rubbish collection) it seemed well organised and orderly. Streets were swept, there was little graffitti, no beggars, no visible junkies or drunks, no jostling.  It wasn't obvious that anyone was enforcing any rules (but see below), people just seemed to be behaving themselves.
• Its culture is a wonderful cheerful mixture of influences from all over the Mediterranean and Europe.  A typical Sicilian town will have been a Greek colony with some Phonecian settlers, conquered by Rome, adopted by Byzantium, conquered by the Saracens who were ultimately expelled by the Normans, who ruled it until the Swabians took over, followed by the French, Spanish, British, French again, the Italians under Garibaldi, Germans for a short time, Americans for a while, then back to Italy.
• While Britons are a bit scared of Sicily, for some reason Germans have no such fear.  German is certainly the second language in the tourist trade.  We saw many many German registered vehicles during our visit, plus a fair few Scandinavians and Dutch, but only two from the UK in the whole trip.

But what about the gangsters? 

They're real, and they're still there, but they are serious professional criminals, busy people who have much more serious things to do than bother tourists. If anything the 'Mafia Peace' makes it a safer place to visit. Organised crime doesn't tolerate disorganised crime if it disrupts their own profitable activities.

The campsite we stayed at near Palermo was a few hundred metres from the memorial marking the place where Giovane Falcone, his wife and bodyguards were blown up by the Mafia in the 1990s.  According to some, the Italian state has made good progress disrupting the Mafia and weakening it (the bombers are in prison, businesses in Catania openly refuse to pay protection money).  It is also possible that the Mafia has changed its strategy, decided a war with the state is too much trouble and decided to take a lower profile.

"Don't pay preotection money" - poster campaign in Catania

Sicily knows it's known overseas for the Mafia, and the tourist shops are full of Mafia themed figurines and t-shirts.  Most of it seemed rather affectionate and romanticised, and in rather poor taste given the bloodshed.  I wondered if it really does come from affection, if it's just tourist shops giving tourists what they want or if someone's working a subtle public relations exercise behind the scenes.

These days the Calabrian gangs have an even more vicious reputation than their Sicilian counterparts, but it turns out that even they are not as bad as we thought.  When we crossed the Straits of Messina back to Reggio we called again at the post office and were delighted to find all our parcels were waiting.  The mafia gave us back our trousers!

Sicily is a wonderful island, we were sorry to leave and hope we'll be able to return one day.