Ever since we started travelling in earnest, I’ve scoffed at and ridiculed the stereotypical tourist. Tourists? Not us. We’re travellers! We wax on about how we like to live like locals, what with our choices of accommodation, cooking and shopping. Far be it for us to sit on air-conditioned tour buses as we’re whisked from major site to major site and like some duelling swordsmen, extend our selfie sticks for an endless parade of goofy “look mom, I’m happy” shots.

All that being said, and yes, I now feel better, there comes a time when even travellers become tourists, albeit at times rather reluctantly. Major sites that are quite distant from where we choose to stay, like our temperamental red-head La Grande Mamma, aka Mount Etna, is such a place. Erupting and singeing some dozen-odd tourists with hot embers two-plus weeks ago as if she was grumbling “Bugger off! I’m sleeping.” made her interesting enough that we temporarily donned our tourist mantles.

The Etna tour company that seemed sincere enough when we spoke with them the day we arrived were all booked up when we called them the day of. We deliberately didn’t pre-book a day or so in advance as you just don’t know whether she’ll have wrapped herself in a cozy cloud blanket the day you’ve committed your credit card to the trip. This minor hiccup turned into a blessing rather quickly though. Not losing a beat, we instead called Etna Experience Excursions, who, for very good reason we learned, are the number one among the Etna tour companies on TripAdvisor. Instead of being cattle-herded in aforementioned buses, our guide Alessandro took us and a young-ish Polish couple in a Land Rover Defender jeep up the mountain while continuously explaining both history and geology. He did this with inexhaustible enthusiasm in the jeep (sometimes needing to pull over to show photos and movies he’d taken at Etna and other active volcanoes like those on Iceland and Hawaii), on the mountain and while spelunking with hard hats and flash lights in a 200m+ lava cave round trip. For that ultimate jeep experience, he threw in some 4×4’ing to a panoramic vista of the huge 1992 lava fields  that left us with a sense that where the lava wants to go, the lava usually gets to go.

The volcano itself is such a rich and fascinating ecosystem that I cannot begin to doing it justice in these simple posts. I recall a genuine sense of wonder and amazement around the transformation process of lava flow; how it over a hundred-plus years transforms from a fiery inferno to what may just be the most fertile soil on the planet. Seeing the young black lava contrasted with older flows covered with lichens so as to turn it almost white and then with shrubs and trees where the lava had become real dirt gave us a compressed temporal perspective I’m not sure where else we’d see so overtly. Owing to the altitude, spring comes later than lower altitudes at higher latitudes. Got that? Visually this meant bare Chestnut trees whose branches reached for the skies as if in pleading desperation, gray and appearing to have succumbed to some unseen disease and frozen in time. However, in a week’s time, our guide assured us, the foliage even from the these trees would be as lush and green as the rest of them. All you have to do is give them time.

The image above is of a cactus that grows in volcanic soil. It’s colloquially referred to as Mother-In-Law Cushion ostensibly from the women looking for a place to sit that is not rock or snow only to fly back up in a flurry of Italian curses with their behinds thoroughly pricked.

For the Mount Etna photo stream see Meredith’s post.