Mt Vesuvius and Pompeii

It is an interesting thing, but when you use "Blogspot" in a different country, it comes up with the language of that country for all the headings until you sign in, then it changes to English! I am pleased you have all been working hard. I cant wait to hear about Mokee Joe.
I have been in Croatia, but now am in Slovenia. Internet was very expensive in Croatia, but tonight, in Slovenia, it is free!

Here is another update on some of the highlights of my trip:

These two places in the title are in Naples, a city south of Rome. The first thing I noticed was the huge amount of rubbish lying on the sides of the roads. It seemed that nobody cared to pick it up at all. It was a great shame because the area had some beautiful features. We drove up Mt Vesuvius, a volcano, which had erupted and spread ash over the Roman City of Pompeii nearly two thousand years ago. It was much like Mt Ruapehu, except that there were souvenir stalls along the walk to the summit.

The next morning we went to visit Pompeii. Because the city had been covered in ash and buried almost 2000 years ago, killing many of the people who lived there, when it was excavated, the city was actually found to be in very good condition, and shows what life would have been like in Roman times. It was an amazing place to walk around, because all the roads and many of the buildings were in such good order. Most of the people didn’t cook at home back then, because their houses were too small, so they used to go up the street to buy dinner (just like McDonalds in the olden days!) The Romans were very good builders, and knew how to build very good cobbled streets and stone buildings. Some of the bigger houses had beautiful paintings called frescos painted on the walls. We also visited a bath house (because there were no baths in the houses), which were also beautifully decorated, and even had a gymnasium!

This is the bathhouse!

That afternoon we drove along the Amalfi coast – a spectacular road high on the cliffs above the coast. It was a tricky road because most of it was very narrow, with just little walls stopping us from falling over the cliffs. When we met vehicles like buses coming towards us, we had to go very slowly, and sometimes stop, with literally inches to spare on each side (sometimes less!) There were lots of tunnels, and when we went through towns, there were shops just right out our window! The views were amazing though, when I didn’t have my eyes closed in fright!

This is how narrow some parts of the road was going through towns. This is TWO WAY, so meeting a bus in these bits was very tricky!

Yep.. just after I took this photo, we DID meet a bus on that corner just before the tunnel - we had only about one inch to spare on each side, and over that wall was a huge drop straight into the sea!

Looking back at some of the road we drove on.

Greece

The next day we had our 15 hour ferry crossing to Greece. It was overnight, so we got to sleep in the camper on the boat! It was a very big ferry, and we were lined up with all the enormous trucks on the deck. For once our camper looked very small.

Greece is very hilly, and also very beautiful, with lovely bright blue water, and nice houses along the coastlines, with lots and lots of olive trees (some are meant to be 2000 years old!) We went to Athens, which is the capital of Greece, a very big city which has as many people as the whole of New Zealand! We visited the Acropolis (I got you all a postcard from here, but sadly I STILL haven’t posted it!) – this is where the Parthenon is – a very big and very old Greek temple, which is being restored. It was a VERY big hill to walk up to get to see it, and at the top we got a fantastic view of all of Athens. There were school groups up there, on class about the same age as all of you, so they get to have pretty cool school trips over there! They were listening hard to their teacher, which is what I know Room 3 would be doing too.

We visited lots of other Greek ruins in Greece. The Romans have copied lots of the Grecian architecture in their buildings, but the Greek buildings are older.

One of my all time favourite places we have visited is Meteora, in Greece - a place where monks built monasteries up on the top of very high, and very narrow rocks. I walked in to one of them, and it was quite scary as you can see in the photo that the steps were carved out of the rock, and wound their way around the rock to the building at the top. It was a very long way down!