I would have liked our tour to spend a much greater proportion of its time in Palermo. But scheduling oddities breezed us out of there and put us in Taormina for days on end. I had hoped to hook up with “mutual acquaintances” in Taormina, but that never materialized. So it was up the hill in the funicular to shop there every day. However one member of our tour group was especially resourceful and negotiated an unplanned boat ride for all of us. She struck up a conversation with an independent boatman who hawked his services along the beautiful beaches of Taormina. And for a very reasonable price, we all got to get aboard one or the other of his boats (like a very enlarged, partially motorized gondola), and glided off into the Bay of Taormina.
The waters of the Mediterranean were startlingly clear. I saw no signs of pollution or litter anywhere in the water or along the bright beaches. As I stared over the side of the boat, down about nine feet, I could see to the bottom as clearly as if I was looking through glass. I could see the multi-colored rocks and coral and the sea urchins clinging to them. I saw none of the red algae that I’d read was choking the Mediterranean.
We cruised around the Bay and into several of the caves that puncture the cliffs there. One cave was a mini Blue Grotto. Peaceful blue water was gently splashing in there – nature’s own Valium. We didn’t see any dolphins out in the water that day, but our boatman said that wealthy people often booked him to take them out dolphin-watching. He said he had conducted Bill Gates’ party out there recently, and that Bill Gates had acted like just a nice average guy, not like a “big-shot.”
Other than those picturesquely weathered men you see around Sicily, there seemed to be only handsome men. But there were two kinds of handsome. There were the well-chiseled men who looked like Marcello Mastroianni. Our tour bus driver, Giero, had that kind of face. Then there were those men who were handsome in a stockier, more rugged way. Our boatman was this latter type. He spoke enough broken English to narrate our trip for us, and he generally seemed an amiable, down-to-earth fellow. But he said two strange things, both of which struck me as being gratuitous lies.
One member of our group was very worried about getting caught in a “high tide.” She had been eager to get off the beach earlier, “before it hit.” I didn’t want to come off as sounding pedantic, but I had tried to ease her worries on this score. I briefly quoted the exchange I’d had with my German cousin when I’d thought there must be significant tides on the Great Lakes. He had written back to me, countering my assumption with two pages of calculations proving that the tides in the Great Lakes are less than a quarter of an inch. So quickly extrapolating from that, I guessed that the tides in the Mediterranean couldn’t be any more than a foot – except maybe in places where the water got funneled through some straits. (My subsequent research online proved me to be right on target. A number of sites on tides all said that water levels in the Mediterranean fluctuate less than a foot, except at the Straits of Gibraltar.)
However my reassurances didn’t register on this woman at all. When we got out on the water, she nervously looked around and said, “Wow, I’ll bet the tides are really high here! How high are they?”
I trusted the boatman would set her straight and vindicate me. Instead, he confirmed her worse fears. Without hesitation, he said “Yes, three meters!”
I gasped to myself. Three meters! That’s about nine feet! It couldn’t be! The man said that he had been fishing and conducting tours on these waters for over fifty years. How could he be so wrong!
Then, a little later, apropos of nothing (well, he was giving us a thumbnail autobiography), he said that he had been married for thirty-five years, and had never once cheated on his wife – or even thought of it. I don’t know if he threw that tidbit of information about himself in, hoping to get a bigger tip from us for being such a good husband, but I hardly think that could be the reason. None of us tipped him – there was no tipping in these situations in Sicily.
At any rate, we all applauded him – literally. It would have been nice if his declaration were true. But after that whopper of a misstatement he came up with about the tides, I began to think he was just picking remarks out of the air.
Come to think of it, maybe there was no Bill Gates either.
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