“Travel makes one modest. You see what a tiny place you occupy in the world.”

For those that don’t know, Mount Vesuvius is an active volcano located just outside of the Italian town of Naples. I was about 15 at the time and on a family holiday with my Mum and Brother. It was such a beautiful, hot, blisteringly hot summers day (Well being in the middle of July, what else was it going to be) and we’d decided, as a family to go on an excursion from where we were staying in nearby Sorrento.
If you have ever visited an Italian town or city you will completely understand what I mean when I say Italian drivers are slightly bonkers. I learnt that nearly anything goes on a scooter and unbelievably it doesn’t really change for the coaches drivers of booked excursions either. I have visited New York and live in London and never had I heard the amount of ‘beeping’ that I did in Italy. Because Vesuvius is still an active volcano there is only so far up that vehicles can get before you have to venture on foot, meaning that the latter part of the journey up and the crater of the volcano can only be reached by foot. This is where my terrifying, yet apparently quite common tale, happens. As you can imagine the drive is quite steep and given that I refuse to drive in London, I would not ever consider the idea of driving a coach full of people up multiple, almost hair pin bends. We had encountered an issue- another coach, coming down the mountain. This was a single track road. As you can imagine, I had already spotted the problem when I first spotted the coach as had quite a few other passengers brave enough to look out their windows. As I said, this must be a pretty common occurrence because our driver did not seem fazed by the fact that the widest part of this single track was on one of these hairpin bends- which would have meant that one of the coaches would have to have best part of their back end over the outer edge and over probably was about a 500 feet drop. That coach was our coach. Obviously, nothing happened otherwise I would not have lived to tell this tale and we made the rest of the short coach journey to our drop off point to walk up without any other heart pumping situations. Climbing Vesuvius is an achievement itself and I would thoroughly recommend it aswell as visiting Pompeii. Having said that, Italy is this most spectacular country to visit and is actually my personal favourite holiday I have ever been on. But please, for my sake, bear in mind that Italians are crazy drivers.