As the Wind Blows

I’ve never been so terrified during a Doctor Who episode until I re-watched the Fires of Pompeii with the knowledge that I would be there soon. Of course I was being ridiculous, because Vesuvius looked like a sweet and innocent mountain when we were driving up – though no doubt that’s what the citizens of Pompeii also though before they were suffocated by the something or the other on the 24th of August 79AD.

Past the car park and walking up Vesuvius you realise that it isn’t some sweet and innocent mountain it appears to be because the vegetation becomes sparse, the ground because sandier and there’s a lot of rocks around. They look like just your plain ordinary rocks from afar, but upon closer inspection they have a reddish tinge and look like the volcanic rocks that you see in movies. There was a part of the climb where I felt like I could’ve been an astronaut on another planet because of my surroundings (you have to look up the mountain and ignore all the other tourists walking up the hill! :P)

The views leading up to Vesuvius are incredible, however from the summit looking into the mouth of the great volcano, while it’s not yet dormant, looks like the valley of another mountain. I don’t fancy seeing it with lava inside though because it is quite large and could probably take out the city of Naples if it wanted to.  

I know it’s rather a flippant remark to make, but if Vesuvius hadn’t covered Pompeii with ash and dust we wouldn’t have had such well preserved remains of an entire town (I’d say it’s probably the same size as Hadrian’s Villa, in case you were wondering). At least, unlike the Colosseum and Hadrian’s Villa, it wasn’t the victim of Italian ‘recycling’, it was just victim to thieves and pilferers (in terms of jewellery etc). Apart from that the ruins are quite well preserved and quite technologically advanced for its time.

The only downside to my day was that my SD card had broken the previous day, so with my compulsion to take photos of everything was limited by the use of my camera phone, which did a reasonably good job making me look fat in some photos and skinny in others. However I mourn the loss of my SD card and the coma it put my camera for at least 24 hours. Now I’m stuck with an over-priced, smaller memory card but at least my camera is alive and well and hopefully will be able to take more photos in the future.