What truly struck me as we walked around the ancient city of Pompeii was the grandness of the architecture. By the parts that had survived the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, we could see how beautiful it must of have been in its day.
It was like walking through a history book and we could picture the streets lined with people selling their wares or chatting to their friends about their lives. We could even see the looming shadow of Mount Vesuvius in the distance. It looked far away, but as it turns out, not far enough. No one really talks about it, but apparently a lot of people actually survived the eruption. Of course, a lot of people also died, but that was due to the fact that Vesuvius erupted so often and people watching it; just assumed it would be a minor eruption and nothing more would come from it. By the time they realised that things were different this time, it was already too late.
It was so sad to see the plaster casts of the people, children and animals that had died in the eruption and although we found the process very interesting, it still made the goosebumps stand up on my arms. To see the exact expressions on their faces as they died. Apparently, to get the perfectly preserved bodies, they had to pour plaster into the soft cavities in the ash which were about 30 feet beneath the surface. When the plaster then filled the cavities, the human bones were enclosed; ultimately trapping them in time, at the moment of their deaths.
We decided to do a walking tour through a company we had found on Airbnb, because it was with an Archaeologist. Honestly, I think it was the best decision we could have ever made, because she explained the history and structures that were seeing to us in such detail that we felt like we might have actually lived their in a previous life.
She showed us the Forum (main square) with its Basilica and some of the temples and arches that survived the eruption. She also told us about a boy that survived the eruption because he managed to get back to his mother in Naples just in time. It was fascinating to hear the history from someone who had actually dug on that exact spot and was so enthusiastic about all the new things that Archaeologists were still finding on a daily basis.
She also showed us the many walls leftover from shops, bakeries and restaurants that used to exist before everything was wiped out. I had no idea how advanced the people of Pompeii had been, but it was so interesting to find out.
Our guide was also a complete lifesaver when we were done with the tour and needed to find our way to Mount Vesuvius. Instead of just explaining where we needed to go, she actually walked with us to the bus station, spoke to the people their in Italian and found out what we needed to do to buy tickets and get on the next bus. She saved us a few hours of wasted time and we thoroughly enjoyed chatting to her about her life and how she wanted to visit South Africa with her husband in the next year.
She was the last friendly person that we met that day and after missing the first bus, because there were too many tourists jumping on, we eventually managed to get on the second bus and pay the driver directly. The only problem was, it was a 50 minute drive and the bus driver didn’t seem to care that the bus was entirely too full. So what did we have to do? We had to stand all the way to the volcano. This would have been fine if it hadn’t been winding roads that led all the way up the mountain. I was holding on so tight that I hands started to go numb.
Eventually we got there though and after making the mistake of thinking the path to the volcano started below us and backtracking our steps again, we finally found the 4 km easy enough path to walk around Vesuvius. We waited for 15 minutes because a guided tour was about to start and we were keen to find out everything we could about this fascinating place. As it turned out, the guided tour was just a guide giving us about a 5 minute talk about volcanoes and then telling us to walk around it alone. If we had known this would be the case, we wouldn’t have bothered waiting.
We did enjoy walking around the rim of the volcano though. It’s always been a dream of mine to climb an active volcano, so I was finally getting to tick this one off my bucket list. The problem was though, it just looked like a mine or a mountain with a whole in the middle. It didn’t have that active volcano vibe that I had been expecting. Luckily later on in our trip we climbed Mount Etna and that was exactly what I’d been looking for at Mount Vesuvius.
The whole trail itself only took about an hour, so I wanted to go down early and wait for the bus. Luch was keen to stay up in the fresh air, because it was seriously windy at the top of the volcano and just appreciate the view of Naples, so we did the latter.
What neither one of us had been expecting was the fact that the tourists would rush around the volcano to get down and fill the buses before anyone had the chance to. The bus had arrived early and was completely full by the time we got to it. Having just hiked up and down a mountain, I wasn’t keen to stand for another 50 minute ride back to Pompeii.
Our choices were, get on the already full bus and stand, or wait another hour or so for another bus to arrive and then we might miss our train back to Naples and who knows when we would finally get back to our dodgy accommodation. So, we decided to rough it. Only I couldn’t stand. My knees were shaking from over-exertion, so eventually I just decided to sit down in the middle of the aisle and stuff road safety. It wasn’t as if they even seemed to care about that with so many people shoved on and standing most of the way.
We felt like kids again, but the best part was, we were so tired that there wasn’t any embarrassment for sitting on the aisle or accidentally knocking people with our hands or feet as we tried to hang on around all the twists and bends on the road home.
If we had felt up to it at the time, we would have snapped a picture of the overcrowded bus with exhausted people sitting and lying in the aisles. We would have captioned it: “Welcome to Italy”!
