Thomas De Maesschalck’s blog

Carmen and I went on a one week long holiday to Calabria, a region in southern Italy. We took a plane to Italy on July 16 and had to get up extremely early because we had one of the first flights that morning. I tried to get some sleep but that didn’t really work out that well as I’m used to staying up quite late so I watched a couple of TV series until we left to the airport in Zaventem around 3:00 AM.

About 2.5 hours later we were on the plane but unfortunately for us it wasn’t a direct flight, before we landed in Lamezia Therme, Calabria the plane took a stop at the airport in Brindisi. That was pretty annoying as we had to wait there for about 45 minutes but after a short flight we finally arrived at the Lamezia Therme airport in Calabria. The weather was warm and a lot better than in Belgium – usually the temperature in Calabria was in the high 20s or low 30s and one day it was even 36°C. When we got back we heard the temperature in Belgium dropped as low as 13°C last weekend! Clearly we picked a good time to go on a holiday

Once we had landed in Calabria and picked up our luggage we took a bus ride to our hotel but fortunately the Garden Resort Calabria hotel was only about 10 kilometers from the airport so we arrived there in about 15 minutes. When we arrived at the resort we were greeted by the animation team with a drink and after checking in we headed to our room. The room was clean and rather big, the hotel was build only three years ago and IMO it still looks pretty new. The only thing I didn’t really like about the room was the shower because it had a showerhead that was mounted to the wall instead of a handheld showerhead. Another minor issue is that the knowledge of foreign languages of most of the hotel and animation crew is pretty limited, many of them only spoke Italian and a bit of German.

After we had unpacked our bags we headed to one of the hotel’s restaurants as we were pretty hungry. Carmen didn’t really like most of the food but I think it wasn’t that bad. I usually ate a lot of pasta and sometimes they served good fish like gambas or a huge tuna. I tried the pizza once but didn’t really like it. The food could be better but I have to admit I never left the table hungry..

Garden Resort Calabria has two pools; a huge one and a small one but that’s an understatement as the small one was still pretty big. Both pools are gradually sloped and have a max depth of about 1.5 meters. Another thing I liked about the pools were all the rocks in and around the pool area and furthermore both pools also had a nice waterfall. There were lots of other guests in the hotel, mainly German and Italian, but usually there was still a lot of room. Here’s a panorama photo of the big pool:

To reach the beach you first had to walk about 300 meters through a nice pine forest. In the forest and in the garden of the hotel we spotted lots of small lizards. Fortunately these little creatures didn’t do any harm . Most of our days in Calabria were spend at the pool or at the beach but we also made some excursions.

On Saturday we visited Pizzo, a small village about 8 kilometers away from the hotel. This city has a small castle, a church carved out of a cave and is famous for its Tartufo ice cream. I tried a Tartufo di Pizzo and it tasted really good. Inside the ice cream was a molten chocolate core, covered by a layer of vanilla ice cream and a layer of brown ice cream with cacao powder. 

By the way, the only way you can get to Pizzo is by car or bus, it’s too far away to do it by foot and the road is too dangerous. This brings me to a negative point about the Garden Resort Calabria hotel: there isn’t much to do outside the resort – it’s basically located in the middle of nowhere and without a car you will not be able to explore the area. Fortunately the travel agencies offer a lot of excursions like the one to Pizzo which cost us 5EUR but also a boat trip to the Aeolian Islands (50EUR), Stromboli by night – which is a guided tour to the summit of the vulcano so you can see the eruptions, a visit to Tropea and even a trip to Sicily.

Tuesday was the last full day of our stay in Calabria and we wanted to visit three of the volcanic Aeolian Islands that day. We had planned to go to the Aeolian Islands on Friday but unfortunately it was fully booked and the only other day we could go was Tuesday.. The boat would take us to Vulcano, Lipari and Stromboli. The latter one is an active volcano, Stromboli has been in nearly continuous eruption for at least the last 2000 years! Small explosions and eruptions of Stromboli occur several times per hour. I’ve heard this is pretty spectacular, especially at night, and there are some really nice photos of the volcano at Flickr. Lipari is the largest of the Aeolian Islands and Vulcano is a volcanic island with three dormant volcanoes, sulfur mud baths and hot springs.

The boat picked us up at 7:00 AM at the hotel’s beach and I was really looking forward to visiting the islands but unfortunately the trip got cancelled after about 2.5 hours of sailing through the Tyrrhenian Sea. When we were probably just a few kilometers from one of the islands the ship suddenly reversed course and we heard we had to get back to the Calabrian mainland because a storm was heading towards the islands . We got to see about 30 kilometers of the Calabrian coast as the boat had to pick up people at other hotels and at the port in a town called Tropea but basically we spend nearly 5 hours on a boat and we didn’t even get to see even one of the Aeolian Islands. Fortunately we got a full refund but I’d much rather visit the islands instead. Here’s a photo of Stromboli from Wikipedia:

We had some bad luck on the last full day of our holiday but overall we had a pretty good time . By the way, some more and larger photos can be seen at my Flickr page.