Sicilian post-corona blues

I was absolutely certain: corona is a mental illness and it mainly affects those who don’t have it. I was wrong. Just two weeks after testing free from my corona infection, I’m still finding it hard to breathe. I set off on my first big trip in two years and fly to Sicily for the first time with Ryan Air. The checkout is a true masterpiece of superfluous “offers”.

The taxi driver charges me €50 for an eleven kilometre journey from the airport to my first accommodation. The hostel manager confirms that the price is the same everywhere. Nothing mafia. Just Putin. The driver said it was because of the petrol prices. They are currently about 40 cents lower than in Germany.

On the very first morning, after a five kilometre walk to the hire car, I get my first nasty surprise. It is the first time that a car hire company does not accept my credit card. As a result, my small hire car, which is actually cheap, goes up to €60 a day – without full insurance as originally ordered. Frustrated, I pack 65kg of kite equipment and drive an hour to Lo Stagnone.

Endless dusty, desolate, poor villages line the straight country roads. Even outside the villages, there is almost always an idiotic speed limit of 50 kilometres per hour. As in Sardinia, absolutely no one adheres to it. But if the Sardinians at least kept a five metre distance at 90 km/h, the Sicilians really are permanently stuck in your boot, honking their headlights. 20 km/h too much costs just under €240 including the landlord’s handling fee. I forget how I would actually like to drive and practise yoga on the hob.

A Viennese finds me a lovely little house from a dear grandpa six kilometres above Lo Stagnone. Check in, set up the equipment and off to the lagoon. I like to ride wild. Many of my unsurfaced roads were defined by my passengers as “impassable”. The approach to the lagoon tops some of my dirt roads. The two kilometres of dirt road with holes up to 30 cm deep after the winter are a real experience – but they are probably not allowed to be improved for nature conservation reasons.

The Lo Stagnone lagoon is actually huge. But almost all 15 kite schools are crowded into just 700 metres of coastline. Now, in the pre-season, everything is easy, even though some of the no parking signs read like a self-defence system. I’m already dreading the season starting in April. After a fatal accident in 2021, helmets and life jackets are mandatory. The latter would supposedly be negligible, and the police would probably do little to no checking, especially towards the northern end. Nobody wanted to guarantee that the missing life jacket would not cost the official €200 anyway.

I cycle back through the deserted villages behind the salt pans. Masses of plastic rubbish fidget in a light breeze in the barren vineyards. The song of death forms in my ears. Sergio Leone waves down from a faded poster, grinning a little pained. Then John Wayne rides past at a crossroads into nowhere, disregarding the local rules of progress. After a futile attempt to get the air conditioning to heat the twelve-degree accommodation, I crawl under four blankets and fall asleep exhausted.