The guy above is yours truly Orestis, many years ago somewhere at Brindisi Italy. How come I post this now? Well, the "cons" of being a well travelled guy like me: There are still unpublished trips🙂
A bit funny how I got reminded about this one though:
A few days ago a lady commenting on how impressive is MY MAP with all these places I've been (most of them on my bike) said "you should visit South Italy with all these Greek elements around Puglia etc". How could she know that I've been there too but always thought I didn't have enough material to make it worth sharing. This made me browse my archives a little closer this time. Turns out that I had more stuff about it than I thought so...let's turn on the time machine and go!
Just before summer is almost gone I decide to make a last short trip still in good weather conditions. Ι've never been to South Italy before and some Hellenic elements there make the whole idea even more attractive to me, including the volcano of Etna at Sicily which is the biggest and highest active one in Europe.
The only good thing about the trip with the ferry is the very calm Adriatic sea. The ferry is terrible with the rusty deck semi captured by retired equipment that wasn't recycled yet. Beyond gross so I focus on the sea instead.
The whole area looks quite poor and abandoned which is the feeling you get from South Italy in general. I didn't have the chance to speak in Greek with anyone there except only one guy who approached me asking for money to buy “Cafe – Nero” (coffee and water). The local Greek community is recognised by the Italian state as a linguistic minority and their language is called Grecanico.
Taranto is the biggest city around there and has some interesting spots but the traffic is too heavy and this puts you off when you want to explore it. Personally speaking it looked to me like some mediocre version of Patra.
The locals are quite helpful but even more interesting for me is to experience the the sound of their speech and their behaviour in general: almost the same like the one you can find at the mountainous villages of Crete! Only the words they use are different and not all of them. This might apply in general for all South Italy but I find it more intense at this specific place.
South Italy is far behind from the central European average and this can result to not so pleasant experiences: for example as I stay at a 4 star hotel at Sibari, not only they have no one speaking English there but they try to cheat me as well on the use of internet. One guy tells me it's free and later when my connection goes down another one tells me that the free period expired and I should pay 2 euros per hour! Of course I refuse to do so and after fighting for a while trying to explain them that I am not as dumb as they might think I have free internet again. Oh, let's not forget he didn't miss cursing me in Italian, stupidly thinking that people from abroad (especially Greeks) can't get that. However, being solo with a bike unattended outside at night I decide not to pull this as far as possible...
From San Giovanni you can take the ferry to Messina Sicily which takes only 15 minutes to get you there. A bit weird system they have here that the ones driving a car solo in order to get a ticket they have to follow the queue that enters the ferry and if they're are alone it is not so easy as they block the vehicles behind them if they stop there unless they have a passenger to do it for them. On my bike I am more flexible (as usual). I just stop at the kiosk, get my ticket while the cars overtake me in the queue but I take my revenge later and overtake them again whenever I find space to split the queue's lanes.
Nice hotels too. Not so affordable though. I tried hard to finally find a room for 50euros (being solo) at a stinking old hotel at Ali Mare with no view and this seemed one of the cheapest choices I had around. Sicily is much more expensive than the rest of Italy's South and unfortunately the service is not that better. Good thing is that they speak a little English from time to time.
Never seen/heard of anything like this before!
However, this doesn't mean that the road is as scenic as you might think unfortunately. The area is bare and unpopulated, probably cause the local mafia doesn't allow much? Don't know but felt often spooky despite the unbelievably long beautiful virgin swimmable coastline.
As I digest this beauty I picture my iron horse later in the city:
At the check in for the ferry I find another travelling biker from Belgium who's also a guitar player so it was almost like one waiting for the other. Luckily cause the trip is an absolute nightmare and the reasons I'll never do this line again: the ferries of Endeavor Lines (unfortunately the only company on this line) not only are terrible, dirty and expensive but in addition, they tell me that they decided to go to Igoumenitsa instead of Patra due to truckers on strike blocking other truckers at the tolls of Patra (when I passed through Patra I saw nothing thing like this). They claim that their ferries mostly serve truckers so they had no reason to go there. Unbelievably disrespectful to the rest of the passengers who had to do 260km more because of this I ask them at least to give me some money back to compensate and they just refused! Fair enough isn't it? Less service, less cost for them, still same price.
South Italy in general looked to me like a less neat version of Greece somehow. If not much worse actually since for example there's full switchbacks around Etna where they form a full berm of garbage. Might add some safety if you lose control of your vehicle but jokes aside it's totally pathetic and disgusting. People throw shit out of car windows so often that it felt like I shouldn't be impressed if a diaper would arrive on my helmet at some point. Used not new.
Thanks for reading, see you on the next one!
