Mount Etna

 

Mount Etna summit

Nice I had the time to go ashore. I did some provisioning for the for the galley and then I sent the chef back onboard. Luckily, I managed to to negotiate a ride up to the Refugio Sapienza for €280. Then I paid another €68 for the cable car, ride up to the top of the the summit. At the summit there was guided tour to around the the lesser inactive craters. The live top of the volcano was still emitting toxic fumes and was very inhospitable for any kind of life. The weather was pretty cold upat 3000m above sealevel as expected but there there was still patches on the ground that was warm 40-50° after an eruption that had happened 10 years ago. The small children in the group entertained themselves by warming their bums onto the warm ground. You could see different colours on the slope that would signify different kind of minerals. There were quite for various salts, green colours for copper and red colours for basalt, there are all kind of minerals coming out of with the lava flows during pyroclastic eruptions. The guide showed where some eruptions had been most recently and how it changed the topography in matter of hours. He also explained how the mountain top could collapse and move from the top to 1000m above sealevel in just a few seconds when it really got going. So it was no place for play when things got bad but at the same time when there would be explosions of gasses higher up the lava would flow lower down. These pyroclastic explosions would cause projectiles weighing several tonnes to fly up in the air about 500 - 1000 m than they would fall down lower on the slopes, depending on where the wind was pushing them. Next to the the crater usually was quite safe from projectiles. He said that even at the the lava flows you could stand 1 m away and be quite safe. Walking around the 40min tour one could not smell it but slowly some kind of sulphuric taste was building in my mouth. Anyway,  we were soon back to the Unimog truck stop and piled in for the short ride to the cable car station where I disembarked and stated my descent to Refugio Sapienza. Since the previous eruption had been quite awhile ago I did not get to see any molten lava but the scenery was like from Mordor with barren black slopes everywhere. Going down with the cable car you could soon see vegetation growing in places and even lower there were plenty of trees.