See Naples and ...

Today we were tour Brown 4. We found our way to the bus and were greeted by a man in a blue suit who looked like he was part of the mafia. He told us his nickname, can't remember the name but it was one of the top mafia men.

He provided us with a lively and witty banter on the way to Pompeii, and we were dropped off in among many other bus loads of people. We were not prepared for the Pompeii experience. The size of the town and the sophistication of the Roman lifestyle were just incredible.

We walked for around two hours up and down wide paved streets being told all sorts of interesting details about what we were seeing. One thing we found intriguing, presumably true, was how they collected rainwater for the household through the atrium roof which sloped into the centre, into underground holding tanks. They kept eels in the tanks to stop the water from stagnating.


This photo was right at the end of the tour and really doesn't do justice to what we saw, but we took plenty of video and camera shots!

We returned to the ship for lunch, then decided to walk from the port into the centre of town. We crossed streets squeezed in among locals and tourists alike. There were no lights for pedestrians, just zebras, and the Italian drivers were acting as though they gained points for knocking over pedestrians, especially tourists. Then we walked along a very crowded street with lots of people trying to sell us things, including iPhones, which made us pause briefly as we hadn't seen them before.

A few minutes later down a couple of old fairly dodgy looking streets we came to the square and Ann pulled her backpack round to get her camera. She found the zip undone and no camera. As you can imagine we were gutted, and were for the next few hours as we went through all the "if only"s. A momentary lapse of attention looking at the iPhones was all it took. The camera didn't matter, but almost 1000 shots of the first 6 weeks of our holiday gone. Ann had bought 3 memory cards so she could have one for each continent, but had she begun a second one after the US? Of course not! Curse that Scottish blood! Thank goodness for the video footage and the blog!

Anyway, we bought a nice little duty free camera and are back on track. There are many things that could have been worse, like being mugged or having the iPhone stolen with so much of our travel data on it. But we certainly do not have positive memories of Naples!


;-) Ann-a-Gram