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Tuesday - Fine
The waves must have been huge last night! For this big ship to be rocking and banging all night. I'm not so sure it's the best mode if transport after all. We Didn't get much sleep at all last night because of the surging. Up, down side to side all night!
We had our breakfast on the boat, no coffee though. We will have to make a coffee shop stop high priority once off the boat.
We had the morning in Palermo before we needed to catch a bus to Trapani. From the harbor we walked over to central station to store our bags. Then we stopped at the first coffee shop we could find.
We got some info off some friends who were in Palermo a month ago. One tip that interested us was the catacombs, because we didn't get to go to the Paris Catacombs.
We made our way across town and arrived at the catacombs, paid our €3 and went down underground. Wow what a freaky visit! All the bodies are put on display, like a painting hanging off a wall. They all have their Sundays best on, and some still have their skin! Especially the bodies in the glass top coffins. There was this young child down there that died 200yrs ago, but looked like she had just died.
I'm not sure if it was to early for this kind of thing or what, but Kim was a little spooked. There are apparently over 8000 remains down there, and they are organised into age, sex as well as social class. To preserve them, they have all their organs and any moisture removed, then this chemical is applied to their bodies, then they are stuffed with straw to give them their shape back.
It was a strange thing to do at 9am that's for sure. On the walk back into town we stopped off at cafe for some more coffee and pastries.
Then we headed back to the train station picked up our bags and jumped on the bus. I know it was a really quick stop over in Palermo. However from what we have seen (apart from a lot of corpses) of the city, we liked. The city has a nice colour scheme going on. The buildings and streets are nice too. There are lots of old roman ruins scattered around the place. I liked the look of the restaurants and pastry shops, the food in the windows looked amazing. As well as the food in the street markets set up on every corner. It's very clean too, much cleaner than Naples.
The bus trip was quick, we followed the north coast as far west as it goes to Trapani. The coast looked absolutely beautiful, with the rugged mountains a blue water.
Our apparent is in Trapani's old town, down some tiny road that scooters can only access. The staircase up to the flat was very narrow too. We could barely make the turns with our packs on.
The flat is perfect, its a big one bedder. The building is really old, and has ultra high ceilings with exposed rafters, all solid timber furnishings, doors and moldings and tiles on the floor that look like Persian rugs.
After checkin we went out and found a store and brought back some lunch. We then used the wifi to look up the local bus timetable to go to a nearby hilltop village. However we had just missed the last bus, damn us stopping for lunch! Ah well we will have to try and get to the village on our return back to Trapani.
We then used the wifi a bit more to write some emails and look up ferry times. We are catching a ferry over to one of the islands just off the coast tomorrow.
When we were ready, we went for a walk around town, and it's a very pretty town too. It has a nice old centre, we walked along the beach and watched the beautiful sunset, which turned the surrounding mountains pink.
After the sun had set and the long walk by the beach, we went back through the old town. We picked up some gelato and some typical Sicilian pastries for dinner as well as pizza and coke.
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