It must be time for an actual trip, right? Well, not today… Today I’m knocking off the penultimate post of my Travelling in the 90s series, which features extracts from my 1993-1994 travel journal — complete with bad photos.
I’ve enjoyed reliving this trip, which was my first overseas adventure. (It also remains the longest, at a length of around 12 weeks.)
The previous post took us to our final major destination — Rome. It’s been over a year since I posted that, as I’ve been focusing on the Mongolia trip, but it’s now time to wrap it up. Today’s post is mostly about our side trip to Naples and Pompeii.
[Friday 18 February, 1994] Today was dead, dull and boring. A real dud. It began with rain – that incessant kind you can’t hear until you open your window to witness the endless silver stream, and only then do you hear the gentle patter on the road or the roof top. The kind of rain that makes you slump inside.
Nevertheless, to Naples we were headed, so we shouldered packs – both large and small – and set off to the station. Large packs were deposited into the luggage store at the station, and we set off to find the train.
We missed one by about 10 minutes, and had to wait another 1.5 hours for the next (at 12:05). Not good. How do you fill in time at a train station? We went to Burgy’s for breakfast (King Chicken Burger) and sat around there for about half an hour, then we went and played with train times on the digital machines. We also browsed an Italian bookshop – most unsatisfying! When we finally got on the train, it was a two-hour, uneventful journey, save for the fact that the ticket man tried to tell us that our kilometrico ticket was invalid. It was valid, of course, but I’m not sure we convinced him. In any case he let us stay on the train!
It was, unfortunately, raining in Naples too. We wanted a coffee from our thermos, but there was nowhere to drink it (out of the rain). The tourist office provided a map, and we caught the metro to Mergellina, which is close to the shore, and near the youth hostel. We had a pasta lunch in a small restaurant – yummy.
Then it stopped raining! By this time, though, it was 4:00, the day nearly over, wasted. Oh well. We wandered down to the shore and walked along the beach front. From here, the view of Mt Vesuvius is astounding. Traffic whizzed past – much of it very liberal with the horn. (We had been warned this might happen in the south.)
The traffic in Naples is, in fact, extraordinary. Our LP guide book says that in Naples red means “go” and green means “go slow and carefully”. The amazing thing is that this is TRUE. Even for pedestrian crossings, which we attempted to use. The little green man is positively DANGEROUS if you believe him. I just had to laugh it was so incredible.
Aside from this, Naples apparently has its own guild of thieves, but we have not seen any yet.
[Sunday 20 February, 1994] First I must obviously write about yesterday. Yesterday was Pompeii.
We were up and out of the hostel early, and made it via train to Pompeii by 10:00am (a good thing too, because we needed the whole day). Armed with a guide book, we entered the vast site.
Pompeii is simply amazing.
It is literally an entire city – shops, houses, theatres, stadium, temples – the whole lot. Of course there is no way possible that you could carefully examine each building, so the guide books pick out the ones with interesting architecture, or well-preserved mosaics, statues, paintings etc. With almost no exception the buildings are all without ceilings. World War II caused some damage to walls and paintings, but an incredible proportion of the city still stands.
Clik here to view.
Amazing Pompeii
It is almost too difficult to comprehend it all. The paintings seem to be very much Greek oriented, as does a lot of the architecture. However, since Pompeii was Roman for the last 160 years, there are obviously signs of their influence as well.
I simply cannot begin to describe anything, and will have to refer back to the guide book when I desperately want to remember. But I loved it!
It was slightly disappointing that so many of the houses were locked up – very little sign of the so-called ubiquitous guards who could let us in. And even though it was the “off-season” the number of tourists was large. But I suppose nobody who visited Pompeii could fail to comprehend its uniqueness, and respect it.
The completeness of the city is so incredible! Every single shop and house there for us to see. I was very pleased to see a Temple to Apollo – and a quite substantial one at that, including statues of both Apollo and Artemis/Diana. All the council buildings, two theatres, stadium, and numerous baths were also there.
I shall cease writing about Pompeii now, as I fear I shall gush merely to describe what is indescribable. Pompeii is somewhere not to be missed by anybody within Europe!
[I have left this passage about Pompeii largely unedited, because I find my youthful exuberance amusing…]
Clik here to view.
Mount Vesuvius looming over Pompeii
After Pompeii we were quite exhausted. We caught the train back to Naples, and then back to Rome.
Today was Sunday. I’ve decided that Sundays in Italy are generally bad. Museums seem to close at 1:00pm every day, but on Sundays everything else seems to close early too. And the shops are closed! All this left us with a rather vacant afternoon.
But I’d better describe the morning first. Our first stop was the Baths of Caracella. Alas, it was impossible not to compare them with Pompeii, and they just didn’t live up to scratch. The mosaics were very nice though – covering the floors of the palaestra, changing rooms, and swimming pool area.
After the baths we wanted to find the Old Appian Way (via appia antica), which was one of the first Roman roads built. In this we failed. [I am so damned sad we couldn’t find it, because the pics online I’ve seen since look amazing…]
Clik here to view.
Rambling past the Palatine Hill (Rome)
Afterwards, we were fairly tired and dispirited, so killed time in Burgy’s for a while, recuperating, trying to decide what to do for the rest of the day. Eventually, we summoned up enough afternoon energy to visit Villa Borghese, which is not a house, but a grassy parkland.
Perched on the top of a hill, Villa Borghese must be the place to go on a Sunday afternoon, for it seemed the entire population of Rome (and their dogs) were there. There were kids on roller skates, bicycles, merry-go-rounds, row boats, Shetland ponies… the list goes on. The view from the top of the hill was pretty good too.
[now] It’s amazing how many people we met travelling who didn’t get to Pompeii, simply because of the extra effort it took to get there. They really missed something amazing. Pompeii was a definite highlight of this entire trip and is yet another place I would love to revisit.
As usual, terrible photo reproduction… When looking through the photos I’m frustrated by a) the poor quality of the prints, b) the small number of photos, because we were frugal with our film, and c) the fact we felt the need to be PRESENT in just about every photo! (Times have certainly changed…)
The next post in this series will cover our last couple of days in Rome and the journey home.
See Travelling in the 90s for more posts.