What a fabulous day we had today - but we are now pretty exhausted! We caught the train to Ercolano (Italian word for Herculaneum), then a bus up another 3000 feet or so to the car park of the crater of Mount Vesuvius. There is a very good walking track that winds its way up a further 1000 feet elevation from the car park to the crater, and I noticed a surprising number of quite elderly people walking up it, setting a cracking pace to the top! It was quite weird walking alongside an active volcano given the disaster that happened completely unexpectedly in Japan recently, and I kept thinking about the large number of people killed by gas and lava whilst they were doing a similar walk to an active crater

The Mount Vesuvius crater was quite a bit smaller than I thought it would be, perhaps because half the side of the mountain was blown away when it erupted in AD79? There was a very small amount of smoke rising from just one area of the crater, and many trees and plants growing around the outside of the crater, and also lots of grass on the inside . No wonder people have become a bit complacent about a future large eruption (there have been further eruptions since the AD79 eruption (the most recent in 1944), but they have been relatively small). I was very surprised at how many hotels and restaurants are built along the road to the carpark, and looking down towards Naples, the spread of houses is enormous going right up the lower slopes of Vesuvius (apparently between 2.5-3m people would need to be evacuated if Vesuvius erupted!).

The path winds its way around the crater, but half of it was closed today because of restoration work. There are excellent views into the crater, and we could see the volcanic rock faces, loose scree, and some quite beautiful rock formations. There was a small tourist shop at the end selling exceedingly quite good and very cheap coffee (unlike the bar next to where the bus departs from Ercolano Scavi Station which charged $7 for my coffee, and it was awful!) and it was quite an experience to sit looking into a live crater sipping espressos!

On the winding bus trip heading back down, we got front seats so had a birds eye view of roads like the ones in Amalfi - narrow and windy - with the bus driver blowing his horn on just about every blind corner as the bus took up the entire road . But the car and bike drivers don't seem to have the same respect for oncoming buses as they do in Amalfi, as they are very slow to stop, or stay in the middle of the road so the bus cannot get past. And there were several people who crossed the road right in front of the bus, stopping to gesticulate while they talked on their phones, looking straight at the bus bearing down on them!

Then we walked down to the ruins of Herculaneum, which are on a much smaller scale than Pompeii but very well preserved and it was much easier to get a picture of the scale of the disaster. For example, the entrance is 60 feet above the ruins, at the top of the ash and lava that buried the town. When you walk down to the ruins, there is a big cliff of lava facing the town instead of the sea that was facing it before the eruption! The sea is now 250 metres further away.

The town has some beautiful buildings, with a lot of original frescoes especially of Hercules (for whom this city was named) but most remarkably it has a large number of original wooden beams and window lintels that are singed, but survived because they were completely covered by ash quickly. Also there are a lot of two and three story buildings set around courtyards, with mosaic and shell decorations. It was obviously a wealthy little town!

Finally in an arched boat storage areas on the original beach, there are skeletons belonging to many of the town's citizens who tried to flee the eruption by getting down to the sea. In 1980, excavators found hundreds of skeletons in this area. It is a very sobering sight.