Most Inspirational Moment
Using the cable car to get closer to the eruption on Etna, hearing the booms of the explosions, seeing the ash cloud being blasted into the air and feeling the ash raining down on me as the cloud drifted overhead.
Thoughts on Group Leader
Alessandro was great, a geologist, so his knowledge was superb, and he know some great restaurants for our evening meals too. He also arranged some private boat transfers between the islands where possible rather than use the hydrofoils which really made the transfers special. Much more enjoyable lying on the roof in the sun than sitting inside the stuffy hydrofoil with face masks on. Exodus should consider this as becoming a permanent feature of the trip.
Advice for Potential Travellers
Know what you want to get out of this holiday and go for it, but be prepared for nature to dictate what you may or may not get to do.
Suggestions
First off, the hotels used throughout were great, particularly the Hotel Miramare on Stromboli with rooms that looked out over the sea, didn’t want to leave. The Gattopardo House hotel in Catania was also good and very central on a quiet side street, which leads me on to address the itinerary issue (as I see it) and ask the question ‘why were we in Catania in the first place?’. It was as if the itinerary designer just gave up on the last day, we were literally ‘killing time’ the whole day until 7pm when we were taken to the airport. This trip is called ‘Sicilian Volcanoes’, if I wanted a tour to see the towns or history of Sicily then I would have done a different trip. Obviously I knew the itinerary when I booked, but having now experienced it I can suggest a better use of the last day. The day before we had spent the morning on Etna and left at 2:30pm for Catania, not a lot of time on Etna, so why did we leave? Surely a better approach would be to spend the whole day there and a second night, we could then spend almost the whole of the last day also on Etna, transferring directly from there to the airport in the late afternoon. As it was the only thing the group thought to do on the last day was use the red hop-on-off bus to visit a couple of small towns on the coast, we literally spent two hours at each place killing time in cafes – a completely wasted opportunity to explore Etna and experience the eruptions. Regarding the time we did have on Etna, because it was erupting there were no guided trips to the very top, fair enough, so the plan was for Alessandro to take us on a guided walk from the hotel, but we realised this was taking us away from the activity, so five of us decided to abandon the walk and take the cable car up towards the erupting craters nearer the top. We spent a wonderful time watching and listening to the dramatic eruptions and getting rained on by the ash. If only we’d been there the whole day and the next day we could have done it twice and spent so much more time admiring the activity. We were also left a little disappointed by the guided walk on Stromboli, unable to get to the top we trekked across the lower slopes ending up very low down to watch the eruptions. The frustrating thing here was that we could have been higher, we know because three of us went back the following day after breakfast during our free day, we spent some wonderful hours watching the eruptions, hearing the explosions, and watching the rocks tumble down the slopes to the sea. I’m mentioning all this because there must be something wrong with the trip itinerary if the two best days (in terms of volcano experiences) were where we decided to do things ourselves, hopefully Exodus will read my review and consider my suggestions to help make this trip more volcano-centric. I'd love to do this trip again at some point, but only if more time is dedicated to actual volcano watching.