Vulcano island is located in the north of Sicily. You can reach Vulcano island by ferry from Milazo or from Lipari.
There are two island in Aeolian island which has vulcano mountain: Vulcano island and Stromboli island. Normally there is a night trip to Stromboli island to see the fire from Volcano in Stromboli island. However, on October, the time we went, the weather were extremely bad, that no ferry dare to go to Stromboli island. Luckily we got Siremar ferry to Volcano island which took around 10-25 min and cost 5.5€.
From port to Gran Crater, you can rent a cycle, car, or you can even walk to enjoy more the island. It only about 6.5 km and 1h20min on foot. There are several restaurant in the port and also on the way to the crater.
The view of the island from the the footpath to the crater is very beautiful. You can see Lipari and Salina island from here.
The strada provinciale street is a good small asphalt street, while starting from the foot of the mountain, the street is a small footpath with sand. So the mountain itself mostly covers with only sand and some of stone.
On the way to go up, the rain is started. It is quite chili and the the rain is the ice rain. The way is so quite, no one there….until near the crater, finally we met some Netherlandish group went down. They told us that it is very danger to go up as the smoke from crater is very hard and the rain id getting hard. But, because it is only 200 m more to go, why not just continue? So we insist to went up and finally reached the crater. The smoke is really a lot, we cannot see the bottom of the crater, just smoke and smelly.
We could not stand to long there and moreover the rain is started to get even harder. So we decided to went down fast. Due to the rain, the sand flowing like water from upper part, covering the footpath, made us find our own way to go down. We must jumped of the sand river, climb the hard stone, and race with the sand flow to reach down. It was the scariest moment of my life. I felt like the world can really end that time. The flood of sand could really buried us alive. When we arrived almost in the foot of the mountain, the small cafe we saw before was buried with the sand, only the roof was appear and all the table and chair were covered with sand. Luckily, we arrived safely back to port and warm ourselves with a cup of hot chocolate in the cafe while waiting for the ferry to go back to Lipari island.
(memory of October 2011)
Lucky 2B Here 