After leaving Pompeii, the tour bus drove us up Mount
Vesuvius. The bus has to make dozens of
hairpin turns on a narrow road going up the side of the mountain. When you are approaching the turn you do not
imagine that it would be possible for such a long bus to make it around, but it
does every time, occasionally having to force other vehicles to back up out of
its way.
The buses let
the tourists out at a base station where a rocky trail begins which goes up to
the rim of the volcano. It is a hot, dry
and pretty steep trail that goes up in
three stages. At the end of each stage
there is a little refreshment stand and some shade. Looking down one can see the city and the Bay
of Naples and , off in the distance the
Amalfi peninsula. On the flank of the
present volcano a great ring of lava fields spreads out from the volcano. The remnants of the old base of the much
larger volcano that exploded in 79 A.D.are still are visible.
The crater is about a half mile wide, hundreds of feet deep
and almost perfectly cone shaped with a floor that looks like you could build a
house on it or plant a garden. Flowering
plants and grasses grow around the rim and down inside. It is said that steaming vents can often be
seen but we did not see any the day we were there. The trail follows the rim about half way
around the lower side. The higher side
looks extremely dangerous without a trail or safety railing. The sides drop straight down and there are places where you can see material
has broken off and fallen. I do not know
what geo-physical dynamic creates the perfectly cylindrical shape or the flat
plug at the bottom. And I do not know
what it would look like to see that enormous shape fill up with lava before it
broke through one of the sides and poured down the mountain. Evidence of such lava flows are all
around.
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