Italy - The "Scala dei Turchi" chalk cliff

Italy - The "Scala dei Turchi" chalk cliff

In the morning we wake up near Agrigento, directly at the sea. In front of us, the waves almost crash against our Felix (so waking up is easy today!), we sit comfortably on the wall facing the pebble beach and once again admire our daily changing front garden: the world.

During a walk - finally I can pick enough flowers again - we see that there is a marathon going on around us and through the whole city, oh no, what am I saying, all the way up to the Valley of the Temples. Hopefully we will still get out of here.

We try our luck. And indeed, just in the short break between the run-in and the start, we quickly wind our way out of the city through closed roads.

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Instead of history and culture, we now want nature. Nature is our healer when sometimes nothing else works. Only a few kilometres along the south coast of Sicily, we want to see the so-called "Turkish Steps".

The "Scala dei Turchi" apparently owes its name to the Saracen pirates, who were mistakenly called Turks by the locals (that's what the Arabs were called). The stepped wall, hence the name "Scala", made it easier for the pirates to land from the sea in a place protected from the wind and probably difficult to control.

We see a coastline sculpted by wind and waves with white, beautifully curved lines made of marl rock. Sediments of corals and other marine organisms formed the marl through thousands of years of geological processes.

The coast is quite fragile and only suitable for hikers to a limited extent. We learn that the steep coast suffers a lot due to the many tourists. We also read that this section of the coast was applied for Unesco natural heritage status in 2007. What has become of it remains hidden from us.

Today it is also so stormy that the whole area can only be seen from a distance, access is forbidden for safety reasons. So we stroll along the beach, enjoying the warm air, the fierce wind and this wonderful gift of nature.

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Merci for "travelling with us

We are thinking about taking another break from travelling in the summer and visiting our families in Germany and Switzerland. One of the ideas is to organise a Lecture about our long journey to the Persian Gulf to prepare. If you would like to, what would interest you the most? We will also tell stories here that don't find a place here on the blog. We're thinking of the Bern and Berlin area - simply because we have family there. But other places are also conceivable. Feel free to write to us.

By the way, we are travelling through Iran. It's possible that we won't be writing posts at all or will be late. We first have to see if it works for us. And whether we can even manage to write down all the fantastic impressions in good time.

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Gabriela
Gabriela
1 year ago

Hello Heike and Gerd
We met you briefly today at Akrokorinthos and had an exciting conversation about past and future travels. Now we have opened your website and listened to the podcast about Ireland and music. Very exciting, we'll be looking and listening to it over the next few days.
Continue to enjoy your 3rd phase of life to the fullest. It was nice to meet such positive people like you two.

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