Except for brief stops in Montalbano Elicona and Randazzo, this day tour was an ABSOLUTE WASTE OF TIME, and a SCAM -- not in the least a tour of Sicilian villages, as it was advertised. More than half the day was spent driving through wilderness, and we ended up at some big rocks, forced to walk in the cold through dung-filled paths to more rocks, and were then offered a sub-par lunch with tap water and a few badly-prepared snacks, and then stood or sat on a few dirty straw bales.
The only interesting points were two villages, which we had very little time to visit. The food tasting consisted of a few slices of cheese and salami at a local deli -- clearly a ploy to get us to purchase food. There was absolutely nothing of any historical or aesthetic value in the majority of sites visited, and this trip was a complete was of time. The guide offered nothing of value, and when we asked about the original itinerary, she got angry.
WE WERE SHOCKED THAT A TOUR COMPANY COULD GET AWAY WITH THIS!
WE HAVE CONTACTED OUR CREDIT CARD COMPANY FOR A REFUND.
AVOID THIS TRIP! IT IS A COMPLETE WASTE OF TIME!
travelgeek33765
29 Sep 2018
Took this tour on September 14th and it was nothing like the description, which called for a visit to a dairy farm and cheese tasting, lunch in a medieval village, a stop to see prehistoric stones and views of the Aeolian Islands from a scenic overlook. I booked this tour primarily for the visit to the dairy farm; I have done day trips that included Italian farms and they’re always fun, the farmers are so friendly and seeing animals in their barn is a treat. The actual tour included no dairy farm visit; they substituted a picnic lunch, with the cheese tasting moved to a shop in another village, which had samples of cheese, it was selling. The picnic lunch was excellent, the only issue there were no tables…you either ate standing up, or sitting on bales of hay. The medieval village featured a pretty church, three restaurants and a ‘castle’ described by the tour guide, as “two rooms and a courtyard”, and admission was extra. NOTHING else was open in the village, not even the supermarket. When it was a lunch stop, that was fine, but because we had already eaten lunch, we were stranded in essentially a ghost town for one hour forty minutes…in that entire time, I saw two people in the streets, who weren’t part of our group. Many people never left the meeting point and nearly everyone was waiting for the bus to come back, at least a half hour before the pick-up time. The prehistoric stones are only prehistoric in the sense all stones are prehistoric; they’re not making any new stones. They were 4-5 meter high monoliths worn smooth by wind and rain, but had no historic, religious, astrological, or any other significance. Two had been eroded into ‘recognizable’ shapes, one was ‘either an eagle or a turtle’...and the other was a woman, with her head bent, hands folded in prayer. The rest look like…stones. The 'scenic overlook', from which we could view the Aeolian Islands, it was the road between the stops, where our guide pointed to several specks, perhaps 75 km away, some of which only she could see. The guide did her best to make the tour interesting, but she had so little to work with. It is telling that this is the only tour I’ve ever taken, where the guide never asked for feedback.
This tour was good but not as it was advertised. I too was looking forward to the cheese making and tasting but there was never an explanation as to why we would not be doing this. The picnic at the national park was delicious. Unfortunately the weather was not kind to us when we went so we were limited in what we did and saw. The guide and driver were knowledgeable and very good. The itinerary needs to be updated as too what it is that customers are going to experience.