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Do you want to know what traveling Sicily is really like? And you want to know what's worth seeing on this beautiful southern island? We are The Budgeteers and we are actually traveling around entire Italy on just 1 000 euros. and right now we are actually hiking up mount Etna, the most active volcano in all of Europe/the world. so if you want to see this and everything else that this island has to offer enjoy this episode. This adventure series is made possible thanks to these amazing travel brands: Ortlieb, Komoot and TropicFeel.
in the last episode we arrived by ferry to the island of Sicily and on our bikes we explored the city of Palermo and discovered some of the most beautiful sights and incredible beaches. We ate some of the most delicious food which this part of Italy is famous for. however the next morning disaster struck because as we left our guesthouse we found out that our bikes had been stolen. the ones that we bought with our budget and traveled all across Italy with all the way from Milan. so that's a plot twist: this bike packing series just became a hiking series.
This was a huge problem but we Budgeteers pride ourselves in making the best out of these unforeseen obstacles so we continued and made it to Catania the city at the foot of the world's most active and dangerous volcano Etna so with only 138 euros left in our budget these were gonna be our last days so we wanted to do as much as possible and especially discover mount Etna and see if you can climb it on a budget is that our guide? It looks like our guide lina where are you from? how long have you been doing tours? -just this summer on this side.
if you're wondering how we got onto this tour we had booked our cool dreadlock tour guide Davida through our hostel. his tours promised a more unique and less touristy experience on the more rugged natural north side of the volcano which sounded great to us since we had no idea and just arrived yesterday the area where we're going was only accessible with guides so it was necessary to spend the money the funny thing is when you see the Etna from the level of the sea from Catania yeah you just see like the classic scholastic volcano yeah like this yeah it's like the with the lavender
you know it's completely another thing it's not like that so it's a big land yeah how are you feeling Lina? a bit of motion sickness on the road i didn't take my pills oh i forgot yeah so this is the start i can already feel that the weather is completely different like i can feel like a cold breeze a feeling that i'm not really properly dressed with the shorts
what is it? what does it have? Have a taste that's good of course it's good oh crazy it's good i'll buy some apparently it gets really cold so i'm putting literally all my clothes under them that i have i'm wearing three t-shirts put it on sexy oh see come on get the views oh you see oh it's good. let's do this yes with a little bit of dutch courage in the morning it was time to start climbing mount Etna we have started to track officially we're now walking on lava.
this is still lava dust. it's gonna be a lot trickier up there. this is it yeah this is it. i'm always curious at the beginning like how this trek is gonna go. yeah i love to do hikes and treks. yeah but every single one is different this landscape is already so different. we were in a pine forest and now we're something uh what looks like another planet. i feel like it's like the end of the world. actually we're doing another challenge because everyone's using hiking boots but we're using our TropicFeel shoes because we want to put these shoes to the test. we're putting them to the ultimate test today.
Yes TropicFeel provided us this series with carry-on backpacks and these comfortable and lightweight travel sneakers and for the past 19 days we've only worn these shoes so we've put them and ourselves through the paces and most of all a lot of kilometers and they've really been amazing but hiking up a volcano on razor sharp rocks is the toughest thing you can do to a shoe so let's see how they hold up today oh we're actually at the refuge that was destroyed in the last eruption and you can also see the roof of the buildings of the hotel was a
two-floor hotel right all the structure was moved from the lava. yeah okay literally push away. The hotel was destroyed in just one hour and the lava flow arrived here in like six seven hours okay. the crater are near the little forest. yes Davida was a fantastic guide he taught us so much along the track about all the rare plants that can only be found here and most importantly about the last volcanic eruptions and how geology and lava flows actually work and eventually he took us to see the actual craters itself.
Lina it feels like we're walking towards Mordor. where Mordor? the what's Mordor? the mountain the volcano in Lord of the Rings, where they destroy the ring. all right cover your ears i've never seen lord of the rings. who is this person?! what no. so one thing i notice the higher up we get is there's more plants i don't know about you but i think it's just such a beautiful contradiction of having like the black lava rock under and then like nice plants on top and he says in the spring like all the flowers bloom so i can imagine that's really beautiful one part where the lava stream was is like looks like death and this is like cool with flowers life in its life yeah that's
beautiful in it's beautiful you're such a poet yeah we're getting lyrical here on mountains right now god i thought we were gonna get athletic and we're getting poetic the athletic part is about to start here as the rugged terrain became more steep the climb up became a lot harder and a lot colder with strong and icy winds especially on a gray and cloudy day like today from one moment to the next you could be completely swallowed up by the clouds but once it cleared the views were incredible walking on top of an active volcano feels really special and it was really amazing to see things
you've learned in school textbooks actually come to life but knowing this volcano could start erupting again at any second was a bit of a frightening thought try to throw it at me yeah go away like a couple of meters and now yeah we were having the best time hiking and exploring crater after crater but then we realized we had made a mistake a really idiotic one as we were going down we asked david how long the remaining track of the mountain was when we finally realized our communication mistake and i heard that the track was actually only going around the craters but not the
creators at the summit those are all apparently different tours and you can easily confuse them if you don't do research like we did we don't have any plan or research when we're traveling so sometimes we're complete idiots due to the bad weather today all of the tours to the summit were cancelled so despite it being a stupid mistake we really didn't lose out yes we loved the experience and as a silver lining our TropicFeel shoes did pull it off in the end oh yes
there boy let's go driving back to catania we did realize we were now 60 euros poorer on our budget so making it to the summit was actually gonna be a lot harder now that night we relaxed and researched all the possible options of going up edna which are a lot and i came up with a new plan to budgeteer our way up with our last money bright and early next morning guys just taking out the last money yeah and uh i think we're gonna spend it all tomorrow going up to the summit which we weren't able to do today due to the bad weather but we will spend the money on it tomorrow and trying to do it in a budgeted way and then spend it all in one big goal [__] yes oh cheers
good morning it's still dark outside so it's very early it's super early so here we are in our new set of wheels a little bit of an upgrade to our previous two. talk about wheels winning garyvaldi like that. that doesn't even have a freaking mirror oh no me this card is the way they crap nothing else to do this is insane of all the transportation we've ever done this is probably the craziest like we've written the tuk in sri lanka but now a sicilian car which is falling apart like nothing works on this car in sicilian traffic it's so stressful it's crazy if we make it without an accident that's going to be a miracle if you're asking yourself why we're suddenly driving in a tiny rental car through
crazy sicilian morning rush hour at 7 00 am that's because the starting point to the track to mount at night is actually really far and high up it would take us hours to get there on a cheap bus but since today is the only sunny day on the weather forecast we rented the cheapest car to beat the crowds and make it there first seem scared we were gonna die made we need it we're now on a parking lot where it's supposed to be free but there's a guy here is telling us where to park which we'll probably have to pay for but now we're gonna go we have this much less climb the mountain that is mounted
yeah we're gonna try it without a guide without spending too much money we're gonna show you how um we've done a bit of research on the internet but we don't know what is right or what is wrong and what still about like what still works so we'll see we've got a next problem with the car it can be locked still opens what happens when you rent the cheapest car you can find on one day's notice so we're gonna have to leave it unlocked hopefully the guy is uh gonna look after it for us yeah so now we're at Refugio Sapenzia. that's where the cabin left should go up to where we can start the hike
it's 8 o'clock in the morning and already this place is buzzing you can see that all the people here are ready to go and get up that mountain is a very touristy attraction like everyone wants to get on normally you should everyone does this with a guided tour and it's extra but we're just gonna do this only the lift these are the cabin lift tickets cost 30 euros each get in it's going to be cozy right all right i'll put my backpack here we got up this early just for this so that we're here and straight up on the mountain let's go as you can see you can also like walk underneath the elevator and walk up but it's gonna take an hour and a half or so or maybe two hours to walk it
which we would do if you would have more time like it would save us 30 euros each uh but it's our last day it's the last day for more importantly of good weather like tomorrow it's going to rain again and i want to go to the beach yeah oh here we go again i'm not even afraid it just like let's wait the reason why this cable car is so expensive is because they've had to rebuild it multiple times because of ongoing eruptions and shifting rocks but luckily the cable car safely dropped us off another one thousand meters higher i'll let you go first and since we're now so high up we rented jackets for five euros because up at this altitude temperatures can get freezing cold that's a really cold wind here at this point normally
you can get picked up by jeeps but this is one of our budgeteer tips skip them and save the money they cost another 30 euros and you can easily follow the road they take up the mountain okay so this is where the real track begins i can already feel my food yeah uh demotivating to see everyone passing by in the jeeps going three times the speed but we're back to tears we're traveling and challenging ourselves to spend a bit less and experience a bit more oh poetic times i think it's the altitude brings it out that's where we're going we found ice is it cold it's cold we're way up high who would have thought that we would have found
ice take the ice with you and let's make ice cream oh yeah let's make our enchilada we'll make our own jalapeno hi that'll be our congratulations for making it up and down today we were really lucky with the weather and at some parts the wind even quieted down which made it comfortably warm to hike up okay we've walked all the way up and this is the farthest point that we're allowed to go this is where the buses drop all the tourists off and all the tours uh but you're not allowed to go beyond without a guy um but we'll go and follow these tours over here and see if you can
push it our way around and uh follow the guided tours that way here's another bus in this area you're only allowed access with guided tours but we used a classic travel hack and followed a guided tour along the path so we managed to sneak in but i would really recommend to be safe here don't go up any further up the mountain because aetna spews rocks regularly and you don't want to get struck in the face by one of those or fall off one of the many cliff sides
i think we managed to put it here our way up here what have you we made it up we're at 2750 meters yeah and this is the view that we've been greeted with it's amazing it's stunning we're above the clouds the sky is clear yeah there's there's not a lot of wind like it's actually warm yeah so uh that's good we were pretty scared we were gonna freeze here uh but instead it's like the ideal place to chill we just had a like our breakfast uh cereal bar here and uh relaxed a little bit
because you could enjoy this view for like a couple of hours it's amazing um this is actually as far up as you go so people come here with a tour but you don't really need to i think we got more value of um our tour with david yesterday with around the craters on the other side where there weren't as many tourists so i think we got the best of both and actually later on we're gonna go over there you might not be able to see it with the clouds but right behind it there's a like a little yeah a little incline into like the coasts surrounded by rocks and cliffs and that's
where we're going to go at a swim later on so it's nice to see that we can actually spot it from here this is amazing i can't believe how high up we are so insider tip early come really early around 11 this place fills up i would just recommend getting here on your own by like eight nine and then like there are some tours that come up early and like i'm sure you could just
pay and come on the first one you know sure instead of like booking it from down there thanks that we're allowed to visit thanks for your hospitality thanks for not erupting we know you're a little bit hot-headed at times but um we're very grateful that uh that you let us pass i feel personally attacked by that are you a volcano lina do you mean to say that you identify as a volcano i could be or a hurricane okay now we're back in the car of death a lot hotter here so hot down here the car of misery
because look at this [__] it's crazy like this car barely drives but we're gonna try and make it all the way up to that bay that we mentioned up on that mountain yeah which looked gorgeous but we can do it mate yes everything about this rental car was screaming that it was about to break down any second but eventually we did make it to one of the most stunning beaches of italy called izola bella named after the small island inside the bay which is also nicknamed the pearl of the ionian sea and it's now a nature reserve look at that crystal clear water
this beach is the perfect location to finish our trip relax and enjoy a nice lunch and wash off all that volcanic dust with a fresh dip in the sea do what the last day of the trip. incredible. we made it here all the way from Milan. we needed this lazy beach day so badly lazy afternoon it wasn't even a whole beach day it was just a lazy afternoon it was good we got some sun yeah and a nice wind this is one of the most beautiful beaches i've ever seen also one of the most uncomfortable
everything hurts if this beach wasn't so rocky i'd be asleep here the budget's finished so we gotta go home we're actually flying out of milan which is on the other end of the country 13 hours yeah that'll be just an episode in itself that's crazy yeah yeah but we made it with a thousand euros we managed to buy bicycles and travel all the way across Italy from Milan all the way to this little piece of paradise in Sicily. a crazy adventure of 20 days which means we did almost three weeks on less than 50 euros a day it's unbelievable. and we really didn't expect we'd make it this far we're just so grateful thanks to everyone who helped us along the way and who supported our videos we hope you enjoyed this crazy travel challenge as much as we did
and last of all we just want to shout out our sponsors for enabling us to make this series possible in the first place like our backpack and TropicFeel whose gear we can now properly review having reached the end so this morning at mount Etna obviously our shoes got filled with all the volcanic rock and so when we got here we just dunked them in the water and wash them off and um we just slipped them back on our feet and we were talking about how comfortable they are they're like still soaking wet but uh they're so comfortable like normally shoes when they're wet they're uncomfortable
you don't want to walk in them they feel really heavy they feel like they're gonna like i feel sometimes that they're gonna like leave me a rash we just jumped in the ocean we're putting them back on we're hiking up to our car again and they're perfect they do drive very fast that's what the marketing said and it's literally true it is true and they survived the volcano so there's that yeah they're budgeteers approved budgets here approved and now we have to take this car back into the city of catania which is gonna be another challenge we made it back safely and had a proper beer to celebrate what a long day a good day yeah
and we still had one crazy big challenge awaiting us the next day okay we made it at the train station it's now five o'clock in the morning very early and we are about to spend the last of our budget for a train ticket all the way back to milan which is gonna be the most crazy train journey of this entire series because it's also the longest and we're actually gonna try out the high speed trains yeah so if you're interested
in seeing any of that the train journey in seeing our thoughts on italy and seeing all of the behind the scenes that you don't normally see join us in our final episode yeah thanks for watching we'll see you in the next one bye we're so sad i'm sad it's over
