Doing things the hard way in Pompei

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Greg: After our series of buses and trains to arrive late at Pompei, we were content with some serious relaxing before tacking the next day.

Greeted with a cold beer on arrival, free map for the local ruin site and a seat on the poolside sunlounger - we figured we had found the place to do just that. A quick cooldown swim later and all we had to do was wrap a towel around ourselves before sitting down at one of the small tables overlooking the water. We were in for a treat for dinner too, as it was put on by Giuseppe who ran the B&B (Italian chef who has trained in France) alongside his dad Domenico and all topped off with home made red wine from his grandfather - perfect!

Given we had fufilled the first part of our plan, the next day was set to get outdoors with great weather. What better to do than visit the local mountain, Vesuvius, which at one point had erupted and preserved the city in lava. We found the advertised bus route took you up the main stretch to a car park, from where you slogged the last 500m and claimed victory at the craters edge. Not being content with the easy way up (and having a certain New Zealand / Les Mills rep to defend) we did some investigating on an alternative route. We figured if we trained to the nearby town of Herculaneum, got a local bus to a small village at the base of the mountain and started from there - we could ascend Vesuvius ourselves.

　

Fast forward past a very confusing hour trying to locate the right bus route, a very packed bus to San Vito, a visit to a local bread shop and a 4 hour slog up the public access road of Vesuvius, we made the summit and found a english speaking tour to pretend we were part of. Afterwards, finding that we could only buy bus tickets for both ways (as hardly anyone believed we had actually walked up from the bottom) we slipped the bus driver $5 each and got a ride all the way back to Pompei. After exploring the new town for a while, we returned home for another well deserved swim and homemade dinner, since it had been so good previously.

　

For our final day in Pompei we did the obligatory ruins visit - a must do if you are ever in the area. As mentioned the whole of the old city was perfectly preserved from the eruption and has since been excavated (and still is!) even down to the carriage tracks in the road. We will let the pictures do the talking, but it spanned a whole day and was again very hot due to amazing weather.

All that was left to do was pack our belongings, visit the local station, find out we could drink in public and buy some beers for the ride to Sorrento!

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Comments

[Mum B]

Big lemons
If the lemons are that big, the gin and tonic glasses must be massive!

[Mum]

Yum
I'm drooling over the tomatoes and mozzarella...as the rain beats down here and snow to sea-level is forecast!