Neapolitan pt 2 or "Mt Bitch"

Derrick and I are screaming in terror. We each turn, look out the window, see another bus careening past, taking a sharp turn, tipping, tipping, righting itself and then continuing down the mountain road. We look back at each other in stunned silence and then begin screaming again. Our driver, Sergio, takes the next corner at high speeds and I can feel the whole van tilting over to the left side. Derrick crashes up against me, crushing me against the window. We speed around the next corner and Derrick is forced up against the window on the opposite side, I avoid falling against him only by holding on to the handle hanging down from my door. Never have I known the “oh shit” handles to be so aptly named. In the row of seats behind us Andy, Alex, and Matt are giggling like little children as they bustle and bump into each other. In the front passenger seat, sitting next to our driver Sergio, Jordan is pale and shaking. He turns back to me, his eyes wide with terror. “Chris,” he says, “how many miles are in a kilometer?”  It’s one of those metric conversions I should really known but I don’t.  “Well how fast is 85 kilometers per hour?” I do actually know the answer to that one and I tell him, “Way too fast!” [ed. It’s a little over 50 mph]

Somehow, against all logic and reason, our van makes it the top of Mt Vesuvius without any casualties. We actually lost a rearview mirror along the way when a tour bus passing by us on its way down tore it off our van, but other than that we made it through relatively unscathed. Shaken and disturbed, the six of us crawled out of the van and collapsed to the dusty ground, overjoyed at being alive and happy to be motionless for a few minutes. 

As the excitement over surviving our precarious mountain drive began to wear off, it was slowly replaced by the realization of where exactly we were now. For we now stood atop the infamous Mt Vesuvius. Okay, we weren’t exactly on top of Mt Vesuvius but we were pretty close. There’s a little parking/drop off area near the top, with a little dirt trail up to the mouth of the volcano. The path only ran about a mile or two but it was enough to give travelers the feeling that they had actually accomplished something, rather than just sitting on a bus the whole way up. Nonetheless, we were now standing at the top (near the top) of Mt Vesuvius, gazing down through clouds at the ruins of Pompeii and Herculaneum as well as the bustling port of Naples off in the distance.

But there wasn’t much time to stand there and gawk or to celebrate survival. Despite the heart-pounding race up the mountain we still had very little time before it closed for the night. Or forever. That part wasn’t entirely clear to me. Anyways, we still had quite the climb to go and not much time. We collected ourselves at the entrance and started up the path at a heavy run. Well it wasn’t long before we realized what a terrible, terrible idea this was. Now, Mt Vesuvius isn’t the tallest mountain in the world, but you have to realize we’ve just driven from the coast up to somewhere around 4,000 ft in elevation. And now we’re running as fast and as hard as we can. I think I made it about eleven steps before I was completely winded and had to stop. After that we decided maybe it would be best to take our time and just enjoy the view.

At the entrance to the volcano’s summit sat an old man on a stool, a wide smile on his withered old face. At his side lay a pile of long, wooden sticks and at his feet a small box littered with coins of various sizes. Smile still on his face, he handed each of us a walking stick and when I bent down to try and give him a couple euros from my pocket, he smiled even wider and said “No, no, no. When you get back.” Thanking him in turn we continued up the rocky path, glad to have the walking sticks for support in the thin air and in short notice we’d made it to the top. Though the view outward over the Bay of Naples and the surrounding cities was exceptionally beautiful, the view downward into the volcano itself was rather underwhelming.

I don’t recall if I was actually romantic enough in my expectations that I thought I would see some black pit filled with churning lava; spitting flames and noxious fumes into the air. I mean, it was my first volcano but still, they probably don’t let you climb up into volcanoes like that. It’s Mt Vesuvius not Mt Doom, for goodness sake. At any rate, the volcano’s crater was not what you’d call particularly interesting. A rather shallow pit, filled with little gray rocks and dotted with ugly little shrubs. In fact, it looked like little more than a rubble pit.

Although the site itself wasn’t as dramatic as I’d hoped, the six of us were still giddy from the experience and the lack of oxygen and Matt was quick to point out how we’d “Made Mt Vesuvius our bitch.” We took advantage of our short time at the summit by wandering around, cracking jokes, and throwing rocks into the crater. The two most exciting moments of the whole experience were when a low cloud passed through the mountain, engulfing us in a very cold, very wet fog for a few short moments. When it passed again we were blessed with our clearest view yet of the surrounding Italian landscape and for the first time I was actually struck by the dizzying height and majestic position of this mountain. Vesuvius stood above an otherwise flat coastal landscape like Gulliver amongst the Lilliputians. Standing atop the mountain now I imagined the power its sheer size must have held over the imaginations of the citizens of Pompeii living in its dreadful shadow.

The second exciting event, though less philosophical, occurred when we noticed a pile of rocks, jutting out from the wall of the crater begin to smoke. Finally, I thought, here was the kind of volcanic activity I had been hoping for! Sulfurous fumes billowing out of solid rock, poisoning the air and killing us all. Yes, this was the adventure I had been craving. Of course, we didn’t die, unfortunately. In fact, I would be very much surprised if the cloud we saw coming out of the crater was even remotely dangerous and not just condensed air or something equally mundane. Nonetheless, for a few short moments it enthralled us as the most exciting thing that the volcano had done.

While I had been peering over the lip of the crater, contemplating Gulliver’s Travels and the many ways that I wished this volcano could be more exciting, dangerous, and violent, Matt was next to me entertaining himself by throwing rocks into the air and hitting them with his walking stick, baseball style down into the crater. He’d been doing this for awhile to growing cheers from the other members of our travel party when I heard a loud crack and looked up to see Matt staring wide-eyed at the broken piece of wood in his hand. About two-thirds of the walking stick had flown off into the crater with the baseball rocks he’d been hitting, leaving him with nothing but a sad looking little bit of broken wood. Perhaps to rid himself of any evidence of wrong-doing he chucked this piece with all his might off the side of the volcano. It disappeared into the clouds and, hopefully, hit some unsuspecting bystander right in the head. Not that I wish death or bodily harm on some other poor tourist just trying to enjoy their time in southern Italy. It’s just that would be really funny. When we returned to the smiling old man who had rented us our walking sticks, the five of us returned them and dropped some change into the box at his feet. When Matt walked up sans stick, the old man’s face slipped from its broad grin to a look of tragic disappointment so heartbreaking I couldn’t bear to look at him. Matt, looking strangely unheartbroken, simply made a sheepish gesture, stammered something about not getting one, then changing his lie to something about losing his walking stick, then awkwardly gave the old man several euro coins and ran away.

Sergio, who had apparently spent the entire time of our Vesuvius adventure leaning casually against his van and chain smoking, literally greeted us with open arms. I’ll admit I half expected him to be gone when we got back but when he saw us coming down the mountain path towards him he emitted a loud, strangely high pitch laugh and then shouted at us in unintelligible but clearly friendly Italian. He waved us forward, asked us what we thought about the volcano without leaving us the slightest bit of time to answer and then hopped back into the van. On the drive up I had excused the reckless driving and casual endangerment of us and everyone around us to the fact that we were short on time. Yet on the way back down, with no rush whatsoever, I discovered that this was simply the way Sergio preferred to drive. Without any reasonable motive we still took the mountain turns at frightful speeds, we still passed other cars and tour buses on roads that hardly seemed wide enough to hold one vehicle, let alone two side by side, and still Sergio spent most of the drive looking back at his passengers and making casual conversation.

He now asked us what our plans were, specifically if we were staying here in Herculaneum for the night. I’ve often asked myself since this moment if we’d said yes if he would have offered to let us stay with him, it’s just always felt to me like that’s where the conversation was headed. At any rate, we weren’t staying. I’d booked us a couple of beds in a hostel in a small town outside Naples called Portici. Perhaps a bit of background before I go further in this vein:

Out of the six of us on this trip, I was the most experienced in international travel but even I had never travelled on my own like this before. Certainly none of us had ever stayed in a hostel before. In fact we weren’t entirely sure what the hell a hostel was. For most of us the only knowledge we had of European hostels came from the film Hostel which had been playing for some reason on the plane ride over from the United States. I’d found this particular hostel online from what I assumed was a reputable website. It was in a small town none of us had ever heard of before. And it was going to be well past dark by the time we arrived there. Needless to say, we were a little wary of the whole experience.

So it was not comforting that when I told Sergio about our plans for the night, he nearly crashed us into a wall. Looking back at me with terror in his eyes and shouting “Portici? Portici? No, no, no signore. You no go to Portici.” And now we were scared. “Why?” I asked, “What’s wrong with Portici?” He was talking rapidly in Italian now, utterly incomprehensible to any of us. The other guys kept looking at me and asking what he was saying but I couldn’t understand a word of his Italian ramblings. Finally, as he was struggling with the words he couldn’t find in English I caught the words, “terrible,” “dangerous,” and, most clear of all, he stared deep into my eyes and slowly drew a finger across his throat. Fantastic, I thought, Mt Vesuvius was a dud and now we’re all going to die in some stupid Italian slum.

Stay tuned for the gripping conclusion of our adventures in southern Italy on the next installment of Life, etc. But first one last view from the top of Mt Vesuvius:

As always, check out my shutterfly site to see all the photos from this trip at full resolution.

Neapolitan pt 1 or "Why I hate everyone"

It was like a mini-train platform. The grimy apartment buildings rose up on either side of us, elevated so that the floor for them composed steep walls for us. It kept us locked in this little rail area. So that should we want to escape the platform for some reason, for the company of other humans perhaps, or to buy a Fanta, it was absurdly difficult for us to do so. So here we were stuck on this mini-train platform, waiting impatiently for a train that, by all reason should have been by a long time ago. The six of us were crowded together on it and nobody was in a good mood, least of all me. It wasn’t my fault we were lost. Okay, so maybe I had the map, maybe I was the only one who spoke or read Italian at a passing level, and maybe I had planned this trip, but it sure as hell wasn’t my fault. It was Italy’s fault! Why would they name a city Sarno so close to Sorrento that are on completely different rail lines? It’s Italy’s fault we were lost and stuck on this stupid mini-train platform.

It was our first weekend excursion out of Rome and it had already started off so badly. It had been my idea, not to get out, we’d been there a month and we all needed to get out of Rome for a couple days. No, it was my idea for this trip. I had mapped it all out, picked the sites, bought the train tickets, booked the hostel rooms. This was my trip, my chance to show everyone how completely necessary I was to their having fun. All they had to do was show up on time, but could they manage that? Well, it wouldn’t be as interesting a story if they could. There were six of us going, all guys, the girls had their own trip this weekend. So it was the six of us: Derrick, Jordan, Alex, Andy, Matt, and me. Half of us were on time. The other half apparently forgot to pack ahead of time. Shouting and gesturing to my watch, I suggested that they could just stay home if they so chose. By the time we made it to the bus which would take us from our apartment, a stone’s throw away from the Vatican, to the train station, in the center of Rome, I was literally counting every second that we spent in transit. I cursed silently at every other commuter who dared to flag down our bus, and cursed quite loudly at every car and vespa that cut us off in traffic. Staring at the hands spin around my watch face, I couldn’t help but wonder if it wouldn’t have been faster to simply jog the whole way. The bus let us off at what seemed to be the furthest point possible from the train station and, pushing the elderly out of my way, I burst through the doors and went sprinting through the parking lot, the other five guys struggling to keep up with me, with my inhuman speed powered by frustration and an obsessive sense of punctuality. Not waiting for the automatic doors to slide open for me, I literally kicked them wide, eliciting plenty of stares and even a gasp or two, but I was deaf to everything around me except for my train. Somewhere deep inside I knew that after all this, after the delayed start, the late bus with its many, many stops, and that stupid automatic door, there was no way our train would still be there waiting at its platform. And yet there it was, the uniformed conductor smiling pleasantly and beckoning us forward. Safe and comfortable inside our train compartment, everyone relaxed after the stress of our morning, it was a long train ride to Naples. I pulled out my travel clock and set the alarm so I could catch some sleep myself. Then I laughed. For the first time that day I smiled and laughed and laughed and laughed. “Hey guys,” I said, “My watch is twenty minutes fast.”

What we saw of Naples, that is to say, the train station, was far from inspiring. We had our lunch there in the train station at a McDonald’s. And so, without a single picture taken of the famed city, I ushered us all onto a different platform where we waited to board yet another train. I don’t recall now what I had been expecting to see when we reached Pompeii. No, that’s not true. In all that I’d read of Pompeii, including fantastic descriptions of the city by Charles Dickens and Mark Twain, I had heard it described as a city “frozen in time”. Reading about it, I’d always pictured in my mind an exact replica of an ancient Roman town, a bit dusty, perhaps, a bit covered in ash, but otherwise exactly as it had been two millennia ago. After all, hadn’t the eruption caught everyone so unawares that people were perfectly frozen in ash, doing whatever they’d been doing at the time? Well that’s not exactly what the city of Pompeii looks like today. In fact, I rather think that it’s a problem of representation. The romanticized notion, which I’d succumbed to, of a city frozen in time, is nice but misleading. More accurate would be to say that Pompeii is a city completely destroyed by a fucking volcano. Pictured: hopefully not what Roman towns looked like.

Okay, I’m being unfair. And in fact, once I’d got over the initial shock that Pompeii wasn’t a literal time machine to the first century AD, I could really savor the beauty and mystique of what the city is and what it means for historians. So for those of you unfamiliar with the true story, Pompeii was a vibrant and bustling city in the Roman Republic and, later, the Roman Empire. It was where many wealthy Romans kept their vacation homes. In the year 79 AD, however, the volcano Vesuvius erupted suddenly, instantly killing the inhabitants of the city and covering a vast swath of territory around the mountain in a thick layer of ash and soil. The city was not instantly forgotten but was in fact lost to memory over the long passing of the centuries and only rediscovered by accident in 1599. Today much of the city, along with its less famous but equally important sisters (Herculaneum, Oplonti, et al) has been uncovered. The near instantaneous destruction of the city continues to provide archaeologists and historians with a look at what Roman life looked like at the city’s height. It also makes for a delightful afternoon of sightseeing.

We were immediately greeted upon leaving our train by souvenir vendors hawking little plaster penises with wings, decorative vases of all different sizes featuring penises with wings, coins, mini-frescoes, and parchments all decorated with little flying penises. This I was not prepared for. I opted instead for a full-color information booklet and map of the city and a bottle of water. I bought the six of us our entrance tickets and, leading the way under a marble arch and into the city, adopted my best tour guide voice: “Gentlemen,” I said, “Welcome to the lost city of Pompeii.” To which my five partners generously greeted me with oohs and aahs.
Once inside the city I stuck the over-priced map I’d bought into my pocket where I promptly forgot about it and we spent the next several hours wandering aimlessly through the magnificent city of ruins. We explored the ruins at our own relaxed pace managing to mix in the typical sightseeing of temples, villas, and fora with the more eccentric travel games of six college students running on a lack of sleep. And so as we ambled down the 2000 year old roads we made fun of the tourists in their sun hats and fanny packs. We made a habit of naming every one of the many stray dogs we found along the way and experimented with how many ruins we could climb on before being yelled at by security (answer: 2). Somewhere along the way we managed to stumble upon a magnificent assortment of ruins, beautiful in their own special, decaying way. I was stunned by the bodies on display, mummified in ash and frozen mid-scream, writhing forever silently, motionless in pain. The frescoes on many of the walls were remarkably well preserved, the colors as bright as anything I’d seen during my time in Rome. The faces in the paintings were strikingly beautiful and life-like.

I have no doubt we didn’t give the ruins all the time they deserved that day and I know there were many great sites we didn’t see, but in our defense it was obscenely hot that day and the six of us were sharing two bottles of water. Plus we had a lot more adventuring to do that day. We were going to climb Mt Vesuvius.

Back on the train we made the short hop from Pompeii to Ercolano (Herculaneum) at the foot of the volcano. This was actually as far as my preparations had gotten me. I know that this was the town where you started your trip up to the rim of the volcano but I didn’t actually have the slightest idea how one goes about climbing a volcano. I mean, it’s not like the train let us off at the literal foot of the volcano. No, we were in the middle of the town, a rather small, dirty looking town, the volcano towered above us but it was a good several miles away. Eventually we found ourselves in the town’s tourism center, a tiny little hole of an office in a back alley somewhere where I asked the man behind the counter how we get to the volcano. He looked at me like one would look at a small child asking where the bathroom is. My Italian being as simple as it was, I’m sure he actually thought I was asking where the volcano was, a rather easy question to answer. Finally exhausted from dealing with me, he gestured to a man standing outside the building smoking a cigarette and yelled “Sergio!” Sergio looked up and waved at us so we walked out to talk to him instead. Through my mangled Italian and Sergio’s mangled English I got across the point that we wanted to climb to the top of the volcano. “Ah!” He said finally understanding. He smiled. I smiled. The other five guys smiled. “You can’t,” he said. I was no longer smiling. “Pardon?” I asked. After more torturing of our languages he informed me that the volcano closed in about an hour and a half (“The volcano closes?” Matt asked) and that it would take at least two days to walk from here to the top of the volcano by which point the volcano would be closed. Twice. Instead, and boy was this a convenience, we could pay him to drive us up the mountain where we’d only have to hike the last mile up to the rim of the volcano. “I geet yoo,” he said smiling broadly, “beefoor eet closses.” I looked back at the guys and shrugged. We had to get to the top of that volcano today. “Okay,” I said, “Let’s do it.”

Stay tuned for part two of our adventures in southern Italy where we almost die climbing Mt Vesuvius only to be horribly murdered in Portici. And, as always, check out my shutterfly page for all my travel photos in full resolution.