Day 25 - Pompei

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After a pretty hot night at Robbies, we woke up, packed up and had some breakfast before locking up our room and locking our bags to the reception desk, ready to be collected later in the day. We headed out in the heat toward the large square in front of the central station for our half day Pompeii tour collection point.

After some waiting for later comers we were off, the coach Ride was about 30mins and our trip organisers Martina and Manuela were explaining the days itinerary, the views out the window and a little about Pompei and Vesuvius in English, Spanish and Italian as it was a mixed group.

Our tour guide, Elisa, took us around Pompei for just over two hours. We say an old amphitheater which was designed with acoustics in mind to allow the performers voice to reach the highest seats, as demonstrated by a girl/singer in our group who 'volunteered' to sing (something I thought took some stones, in front of a group of 50 or so strangers, good for her). We also past and heard about the roads, a bakery, communal baths and spa, the main forum, the brothel (and the little genitals mounded into the street to point towards it!) and the remains of an old pagan place of worship. It was all pretty interesting especially the plumbing and sewage systems etc and why the city was built on the hillside, as our guide put it "shit rolls down hill"!

Some of the tour were supposed to be heading on to a hiking tour of Vesuvius but that wasn't going to be possible as it was still on fire and being tackled by fire services including water drops from planes. The fires were man made and rumour has it that the mafia have started them in protest to the government not allowing them to make business from burning rubbish illegally. That group instead made a trip to Sorento but we headed back to Naples as we had a 17:00 train to Florence to catch.

We had plenty of time to recover our bags and get to the station, so we got some takeaway food in between to eat back at Robby's. Dan went for a local speciality of deep fried pizza, this didn't appeal to me (and Dan later confirmed it didn't agree with him either!) so I went next door to get a Capriciosa, one of my favourite pizzas. Lunch eaten and bags collected, we headed to the station and boarded our train to Florence, which was probably the nicest train we've been on so far, the station was also much better. Italy certainly has better rail infrastructure than Hungry!

Once we arrived in Florence (Firenze in Italian) we had a 25-30 min walk with our bags up to our AirB&B place. At least our host was there waiting for us when we arrived, but the 4 flights of stairs sucked! The apartment is big and the beds are fine however, the kitchen is t working (not quite sure what exactly, oven I presume) and totally bare (no plates, cutlery, washing up liquid etc) and there is not WiFi or aircon! I decided to buy a £2 add on for unlimited mobile data for 2 days so that we could continue to book up some accommodation and trains and not become social hermits!

We popped out to checkout the surrounding area and find the nearest bus stop, Co-Op, restaurant and laundrette and then it was back home to book some more hostels and get some kip.

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