Bill-on-the-Hill

In which our geologically- and outdoors-inclined heroes see the ruins of Pompeii, mountains of garbage, and of course, the Vesuvius. Yes, I'm aware that customary usage in English does not refer to the world's most famous volcano as "the" Vesuvius, but there's a reason for this phrasing; more on that later.

We (myself, wife Emily, sons Bill and Pete, and World's Greatest Mother-In-Law, or WGMIL) spent our first night in Italy at the Best Western Plaza Hotel in Naples. Of it I will basically say nothing, because there isn't really much to say about it, pro or con, good or ill, notable or humdrum. It's just kinda ... there. To be sure, one thing in its favor is that it's within easy walking distance of the train station, which was why we chose it. Also in its favor is that we slept well, in a routine sort of way; of course, as fried as we all were from west-to-east jet lag, we'd probably have slept soundly on a good park bench. Anyway, the next morning we arose ready to see some of the sights of the Naples area.

A word here about WGMIL, whose praises I sang in the previous blog entry, and whom I will continue to laud as this tale unfolds (hoping she never reads this). She is quite an experienced world traveler, but as befits a woman of a certain age and income bracket -- not to mention a taste for travel objectives that are a bit, well, off the beaten path -- it has long been her and her absent husband's routine to arrange their travel to unfamiliar places via tour operators, rather than just winging it. Personally, that is rather contrary to my own style -- I'd rather go where I want to, not where the tour operator wants to take me. However, in this particular case, she wanted to join a tour group for Pompeii and (the) Vesuvius, and she had a point. For one thing, we were staying rather a long way from either of those two attractions, and didn't have wheels of our own to get to them. For another, although among us we're decently fluent in several languages, Italian is not among them, and the prospects of improvising our way to our destinations, particularly (the) Vesuvius, did not appear appetizing. Third, remember that despite the good night's sleep, we were still about half brain dead from jet lag, and this was the only day we were going to spend in Naples before heading south for our main destinations. Accordingly, I'd reluctantly allowed WGMIL to win this round of the pre-trip preparations, and engaged a tour operator to take us to where we wanted to go.

The tour operator in question was an outfit called Viator ( http://www.viator.com ), with which we had arranged a day-long Pompeii/Vesuvius tour distinct from the one being pushed by the hotel (I forget who operated that one). This turned out, frankly to my surprise, to be a Good Thing, despite a scary start. One reason why we picked Viator was that their web site promised tours in English, which was important to us; as previously mentioned, none of us speak any Italian at all, and although there were decent French, German and Spanish speakers among us, no one of these language is spoken adequately by all of us. English-language touring was therefore a requirement, and in consequence, it was highly unsettling when we called Viator from the hotel (as they'd requested) to confirm our arrangements, and discovered that the people in the office who answered the phone spoke almost no English at all. So what are we setting ourselves up for, we wondered -- if the customer-service people (to whom the web page directed us, remember) had almost no English, what was the "English-language tour" going to be like?

Well, the answer is "wonderful." The actual guides, Andrea and Juliana ("Julie"), spoke excellent English -- and French, useful as another family in the group were French-speaking Belgians with very little English. Andrea took us through Pompeii with both humor and more than a little erudition; we'd done considerable reading up on the site before the trip and had a pretty good idea of what we were going to see, but still learned a lot that's not in the books by having him around for explanations. He handed us off to Julie for the Vesuvius -- the term "the Vesuvius" being her own little bit of dialect, and we were so entranced by it that we continue to use the expression long after returning home. One advantage of Viator (maybe not invariably present, but certainly handy when we were there) is that the tour groups are quite small compared to the other tour-mobs we'd seen in Pompeii -- in our case about 18 or so people. Nearly all of these did everything presented to us, including the mild hike from the high parking lot on the Vesuvius to the rim of its crater, about a 200-meter vertical ascent on a wide trail approaching being a road. (The Belgian family wasn't prepared for the hiking and stopped a short distance up.) We lucked out with the weather and got nice views into the crater, despite strong winds, which however we'd come prepared for.

The only jarring note in this otherwise delightful first day in Italy was the other mountains that we saw -- mountains of trash and garbage. Apparently we'd arrived while Naples and vicinity were in the throes of one of their seemingly never-ending strikes, and this one was by sanitation workers. The consequence was that any neighborhood with more than two or three homes together was piled incredibly high with stuff that really should have been in a landfill somewhere. How sad for one of the world's most civilized countries to have more junk lying at the side of the road than I ever saw in any of the vastly more impoverished places I've visited. Hope they get that strike resolved soon before the piles start dwarfing the architecture, if not the mountains ...

All this said, we had a good time in Naples and vicinity, and were in a good mood to journey on to Sicily and our main objectives the next day, which is where I'll pick up on the next installment of this blog. One or two so-so photos of this leg of the trip:

Finally, Web Site du Jour: http://hvo.wr.usgs.gov/cam/ , the webcam showing current activity at another of the world's most active, and most tourist-friendly, volcanoes, Kilauea in Hawaii. We didn't see anything quite this spectacular on our trip, although Etna came durn close ....