Hi backpackers! My name is Rebecca and I am a digital nomad/backpacker who has been travelling around Europe for 1.5 years. I travel 6 to 7 times a year and enjoy taking both short and long trips.
Travelling so avidly has really made me more open-minded and a believer in fate. In fact, one of my favourite things about visiting new places is learning about new cultures, meeting people from all over the world, and embracing the surprises that come with the journey.
Do you believe that everything happens for a reason? I do.
My friends and I first planned to travel to Sicily in August of 2021, deeply wanting to explore the island by car. It was only after buying the plane tickets that we realized just how much it would cost to rent a car for two weeks. Since August is the high season in Italy for travelling, prices are through the roof. After seeing that a rental car would cost us over €700 EUR a week, we decided to trash the plane tickets.
I was very disappointed because I was already picturing how awesome it would be to drive around the whole island in our own car. But I’ve already learned that if something doesn’t come together, it’s because it’s not yet time.
Having kept the dream of this trip in my mind, I didn’t want to give up on our plan to someday visit Sicily, so this year, we planned to hit the road and try again. Learning from last year’s prices, we planned our trip to Sicily for the first two weeks of October, which is low season.
Dreaming about Stromboli
Before we booked our trip, we were sure of one thing: we wanted to visit one of the Aeolian islands.
We chose Stromboli, a small volcanic island because we knew that its volcano is still active. This means the volcano can erupt from time to time, but there are no guarantees on when the eruption could happen.
Since the island of Stromboli was just one stop on our two-week itinerary around Sicily, we only planned to stay there for one night. We were fantasying about how amazing it would be if the volcano erupted right when we were there… but we didn’t think that dream would turn into reality.
We were in Sicily for just 3 days – somewhere on the southern coast – when we read the news that the Stromboli volcano had erupted. We didn’t want to believe that we would be so lucky to be in Sicily at the time that it broke out again. We were going to be leaving soon for Stromboli and we really hoped that the eruption would last until we arrived.
Getting there was a thrill
Our arrival on the island of Stromboli was almost a complete fail when we realized that the tickets we purchased online were for the wrong date – a month later! Thankfully, we managed to rebook the tickets at the very last minute and leave as scheduled. We got lucky to find these last-minute tickets since we were already on route.
What happened next felt magical! Our boat arrived at Stromboli in time for sunrise and it felt like we had arrived in Bali. Palm trees, a black sand beach, boats crowding the shore, locals with motorbikes and tuk-tuks, and the clouds of volcanic smoke painted a breathtaking landscape of this Italian island.
We quickly checked into the hotel and rested a bit after getting up early in the morning. The island is very small, the largest part is the volcano itself, so we constantly saw the smoke coming out of the crater and heard the rumbling sounds.
Excited and hopeful, we set off to see if the lava was still flowing on the side of the volcano. Earlier on Instagram, my friend talked to a photographer who lives on the island and had been taking pictures of the volcano since the beginning of the eruption. We hoped we would be greeted by a similar view.
A Stromboli surprise
While my friend went on a guided volcano tour, Sebastian (the photographer), two of his friends and I went up about 200 meters high, from where you could see the lava flowing down the side of the volcano perfectly.
The road leading there was not so easy, because the island was hit by several natural disasters this year, among them a huge flood, as a result of which several roads were heavily damaged due to the rain pouring down from the side of the volcano and several residential buildings needed to be dug out of the mud.
We stayed at the lookout point until after sunset and watched together as the lava erupted from the crater in the new waves and flowed down the side of the volcano. Watching the eruption was like nothing I’ve ever seen. It’s dangerous and beautiful all at the same time.
If someone had told me before our trip in September that I would be drinking wine and eating cookies on the side of an erupting volcano with 3 really cool Italians, I probably wouldn’t have believed them.
Had we booked our trip to visit Sicily in August of 2021 as originally planned, the exciting thrill of hunting down the smoking volcano in Stromboli would never have happened. It would have been a very different kind of trip. I’ve learned while travelling that you can’t force things to happen. If they don’t, it’s for a reason, sometimes even better things are waiting for you around the corner.
This trip was fantastic because not only did we get to witness the eruption of the volcano, a phenonmon I recommend going to explore at least once in your life if you ever have the chance, but the memories of how we got to the island, the mix up of the tickets, the rush to volcano and the quiet stunning moments of watching the boiling lava erupt.
It’s moments of fate like this that remind me why I love to travel.