The trip of a lifetime

Hot Springs Hotel, swimming pool filled with ash. Volcano is in the the clouds in the background. This is inside the exclusion zone.

Before it all fades like old photographs, before I’m left with only digital memories, I ought to share a few highlights of this amazing journey. It involved a volcano, a shark, a bear, a six-seater plane, and 7 different places in just 2 weeks….

And so my Best Moments, some the sort to stay in the “Best Moments of all time..”

•  Exploring an abandoned hotel. I love the book “Beauty in Decay” where photographers explore urban settings being overrun by nature. The Hot Springs Hotel in Montserrat was once a spa hotel, with a swimming pool. It now lies in ruin, filled with ash, floors covered, keys rusting on nails, plants growing through the floor and walls. Fax machine frozen in time. A chip fryer in the dust. Desks as if someone just got up and left – and never came back.  (Photos are here on Flickr.)
• Swimming by the light of the Moon – with Jupitar, Venus, and Mars. As the sun set on Little Bay, in northern Montserrat, I dipped in and out of the waves. Darkness fell slowly. Lucy played on the sand and Nana waited patiently for dinner in an open-air beachside café. Everything was very open, very primitive, shacks thrown up in haste on the side of the island that was once less inhabited. The green, lush southern part of Montserrat is now the exclusion zone. Either covered in lave, lahar, or ash, or abandoned because the volcano’s flow makes access in impossible. So, the few people remaining are rebuilding, on the northern, more arid end of the island.
• Playing in fine black sand on the beach, the heavy smell of sulfur in the air. The sand is so fine yet so black. Pure volcanic sand. From mountains come rocks and from rocks come pebbles and from pebbles come sand.
• Seeing the ruined town on Plymouth from a boat out at sea. We had to stay quite far out, as the exclusion zone extends to the water. It was fascinating to see the destruction, like a modern day Pompeii.
• Staying in the most amazing place I’ve ever stayed, an open-porched villa in a place called Gingerbread Hill. Views of the sea, the mountains, the sunsets. And all open. No pumped in air conditioning. Ceiling fans and cross winds kept the villa cool. And on the last day we had a visit from the family parrot.  Such a gorgeous place to stay. The reviewers were all spot on. Excellent choice.
• 

  Swimming off the back of the dive boat

  Scuba Diving in Antigua, I did my refresher course on Montserrat, and the currents were hard to manage. A couple of days later I did 2 dives on nearby Antigua, where the water was clear and still, and the feeling of flying returned, drifting over reefs. And we saw a shark – only about 3 foot nurse shark. But still. It was just after the instructor was going over hand symbol for different fish. “This is shark” I said, making a fin on top of my head with my hand. “We won’t see a shark,” He said. It was the first thing we saw. (
  http://www.extrememarinescuba.com/
  )

• Drinking a cocktail IN the sea while watching the sunset on Antigua. White sand, and shallow, gentle water. And the sun slowly setting. Montserrat was extra special for it’s wildness and lack of other tourists. Antigua was  crowded by comparison, and staying in a big resort was almost like being back in a city. But still there were some special moments. Lucy loved the pool. And I loved my one cocktail of the Carribbean adventure (who needs cocktails when you have volcanoes?)

And so to the USA…more highlights…

•  Photographing the moon. A Danish friend staying with my friend Dave had bought a huge zoom lens. I noticed we had the same type of camera
  

  The Moon

  body… and so I got him to help me take a photo with that lens on my camera.

• Contra dancing with my cousin in Virginia, with a live folk band. I’ve always wanted to have a go. And it certainly was a work out  – and lots of fun!
• Seeing my daughter and niece do a mile fun-run holding hands.
• Seeing all the family for proper sit-down family meals with Aunts, Uncles, cousins, grandkids, etc. Not a huge family but enough of us to make it feel special.
• Seeing a BEAR in the woods! In the Shenandoa National Park in Virginia. I walked on up a path, alone, after my brother took my daughter back to the cabin. I had forgotten to ask my brother what to do if I saw a bear. He thought it was unlikely that I would see one. So, I moved to higher ground (must have got bears mixed up with volcanoes) and tried to climb a tree (which you shouldn’t do) and then slowly walked a bit and then ran (which you also shouldn’t do.) Later on my brother explained that you just have to talk nicely to bears and they will leave you alone. Lucy also pointed out that you shouldn’t feed them , because when you run out of food the bears will want to eat you.
• Walking on the ridge near the Appalachian trail. I didn’t quite get to the trail, nor did I see any more bears. But I had a superb walk, and saw no other people.
• 

  Lambert Cabin

  Staying in the second most amazing place I’ve ever stayed, Lambert Cabin, built in the 1806s and loved for many generations. Now a hiker’s cottage, it has electricity and running water, but very low ceilings. And a mouldering privy. A really great place, totally secluded down a nearly impassible rocky road.

• Seeing Lucy walk across 10^th Avenue , 50 feet tall… well, I will come back to that one…youtube video coming soon….

Day 3: Pompeii at last

11 April 2011

The hotel had metal shutters to keep out the light. Each day Lucy would sleep past breakfast time. I would get up, go down to the hotel dining area (locking the door; it was a small hotel anyway, and we hardly ever saw any other guests), and bring up a tray with coffee, juice, and croissants. For the uber-paranoid out there, I was gone a total of 45 seconds.

Finally the day arrived when we would visit Pompeii. I was waited anxiously for Lucy to wake up and finally opened the shutters, hoping the blazing sunlight would help the little princess into the daytime.

Basilica

Pompeii is 5 or 6 times the size of Herculaneum. I picked out highlights in the guidebook and planned to start at the Villa of Mysteries. But then I saw that the Villa of Mysteries is an exit only. So all day we had keep in mind that we had to leave enough time for the Villa. (Or rather I had to keep it in mind. I don’t think Lucy cared what exact buildings we saw. She just wanted to see the bodies.) We couldn’t just wander aimlessly as in Herculaneum or we might miss the highlights. Whoever said 2-3 hours is enough to see Pompeii is nuts. 2 or 3 days would be a pleasant pace. 6 and half hours is not enough. I would have gone back another day if Lucy had wanted to. But as it was, about an hour was enough for her.

Pompeii was also free as part of the culture week. We just had to pick up the free ticket and there we were, inside the most famous and most complete Roman town visible to the public.

Because Pompeii was buried for 1700 years, all the paintings, mosaics, streets and houses are in unimaginably good condition. Think about it: A Roman town built over 2000 years ago would have deteriorated, not to mention been raided and ruined over the centuries. But Pompeii was buried in 79 ad, under volcanic ash. No one saw it again until the mid 18^th century, when excavations began. The mere air itself would surely have faded the paintings far more than the way they are now.

I had strict plans to keep to the map but soon we found ourselves in the Basilica, which didn’t look that interesting in pictures but in real life was very impressive. Lucy posed her Scooby Doo toys on some columns. Next we went out into the Forum, also I place I’d not circled as a highlight, but unavoidable as it was the centre of everything. Good views of the volcano, too, dormant against the blue sky.

Then we wandered down a side street, and into a grassy area with trees, followed by the boiling hot large and small theatres (both on my list, horray!)

By the time we got to the big colesseum, Lucy was getting a little tired. We stopped for a picnic lunch which consisted of me eating the leftover dry biscuits from breakfast and Lucy eating… nothing. She didn’t seem to eat lunch at all most days. Instead she played with her toys, pretending Scooby and Daphne were gladiators.

Myths you find in the guidebooks, No. 1: Pompeii has no shade. We read that everywhere: be prepared to burn up in the sun, take a parasol, etc. But Pompeii has loads of shade. Maybe not on the long streets of the town centre, but all around the outskirts, by the Coliseum, in some of the gardens, in the houses that still had roofs, and in the tree-lined necropoli.

Necropolis Porto Nocera

The necropoli were fascinating. Here were buried the urns of people who died before the volcano erupted. They never knew about the eruption, died peacefully believing the loved ones that they left behind would continue life as it was. It made me think of my dad who died on 26 July 2001, never knowing that the twins towers of New York would vanish forever a mere 6 weeks later. One day the world is one way, and the next day it can change entirely. Whatever your feelings about major events, they are part of history. For Americans, the world was changed as much from 911 as the citizens of Naples and the surrounding areas were changed by the volcano. And anyone who died peacefully before those events had no idea what was to come.

Lucy liked the shady necropolis of Porto Nocera, but she became more interested in turning a pinecone into a hedgehog than in looking at any more ruins. Later on, she said her favourite parts of the day were resting outside the city wall (in the necropolis) and seeing the plaster casts of the bodies.

I was surprised that Lucy wasn’t more freaked out by the casts. There were only about 10 of them, in a glass case at the end of a walled garden. Some field of plants was being grown in most of the enclosure, then there was a small clearing, and the case of bodies was in the corner. You could miss it if you weren’t looking for it.

All my life I had thought that Pompeii was just a vast field of ash-covered bodies, lying as they had fallen 2000 years ago. But in fact the ‘bodies’ are only casts made from cavities in the ash, where archaeologists poured plaster into an empty hole where a body had been. The tortured poses are the way the body constricts when being burned to death. It is truly horrific. Yet these are mere plaster casts, not the bodies themselves, which somehow lessens the horror.

House of the Tragic Poets

We had more to see on my list, and Lucy was flagging as we emerged back on to the town streets. I told her to picture the people in Pompeii. She said, ‘running from the volcano?’ and I said ‘No. Imagine the people before then, just living their lives.’

Lucy then said she saw children playing by an apple cart. She described a little boy, and an apple cart. I told her that I thought the local fruits were oranges and lemons. “No, I see apples,” Lucy insisted. And bananas. (I later learned that Romans did in fact introduce apples to Britain. However, they never tasted bananas.
http://www.therthdimension.org/AncientRome/RomanFoodDrink/body_romanfooddrink.htm#Fruits
)

There were hoards of tourists in many areas of the town. I tried one of the bathhouses: closed. I turned up a street that I thought might lead to the only brothel mentioned in the guidebook. The narrow street was a bottleneck of hundreds of Germans. Lucy and I agreed we would hate to be on a tour like that.

We sat down in an odd little room that could have been a water closet if not for lack of anything resembling a toilet or plumbing. Was it

Villa of Mysteries

a waiting room for customers of the brothel? There was no marking to say what the tiny room was. We waited a bit. The crowd did not shift. So we backtracked on another route, passing the forum again but not stopping. Then, like a mirage, a sort of motorway service type restaurant appeared right behind some ruins. Someone obviously knew how to capitalise on hungry, thirsty and tired site-seers. Lucy was all of those, and ordered a 7.50 Euro pizza, drink and fries that were all grease and no potato. Still, it was good to let her have an energy boost before the last lot of houses on my list.

We took ages trying to find the House of the Vetti, the top of the list after the Villa of Mysteries. We finally asked an Italian tour guide who told us the Vetti was closed. The continuous sight of padlocked doors was frustrating, though in one case, the House of Tragic Poets, the front door was bolted while the back left open. It was an added thrill that maybe we shouldn’t be there.

And finally the sun was dipping low in the western sky as we walled past the last necropolis, the last set of monuments, on the last road leading out to the Villa of Mysteries. We saw the Villa, with it’s incredible frescos, though one had to crane one’s neck around corners sometimes to see the art. Lucy sat outside circling buildings on maps, too tired to keep looking at more paintings made over 2000 years ago.

It was all her idea to go there. I think it had a lasting effect, though at the time Lucy may have felt she had bitten off more than she could chew. Such a vast place, so much to see, so much to take in. I think we did Herculaneum more because we just plodded around. Lucy would later show the kids on the playground her diary, proudly explaining which pictures were Pompeii and which were Herculaneum. Yes, I think she did enjoy it. I certainly know that I did.

I fell asleep to Pompeii colours. And when I got back to London, I would paint in those colours for the next few months.

Drawing in the guidebook, outside the Villa of Mysteries

“Self Portrait with my aunt Ruth as the Two Fridas” An homage to Frida Kahlo

Last year I painted my friend Jane Ruby as Frida Kahlo, showing Jane with her pets the way Frida also posed with her animals. Jane

Jane Ruby as Frida Kahlo

and I talked about Frida and her life, and about the physical pain that the artist endured after a horrid accident in her teens. Jane also suffers severe back and neck pain, and shares a love of all things bright, colourful and Mexican.

When the Female Iconography show was being planned, I decided to do another homage to Frida Kahlo. This time I portrayed myself

and my aunt Ruth.

My aunt Ruth was born in 1917. She was 16 years older than my father. I have a large collection of photographs of Ruth’s life. She travelled the world, spoke Spanish fluently, and enjoyed dressing up, much the way many of my friends dress up nowadays. In this painting I have taken elements of Ruth’s life, and of Frida’s paintings, as well as my own life. The composition is mainly “The Two Fridas”. I have added the sun and the moon (day and night) from other Kahlo paintings. The monkey was one of Frida’s pets, as was the parrot.

Frida often portrayed her physical pain in her paintings. I have put in a painful foot operation. I have included elements of the feminine and masculine, as Frida herself possessed both qualities, openly having affairs with women as well as men. My aunt Ruth sometimes wore men’s suits. She never married, yet no one ever suggested what the reason for that might be.

In her hand Ruth holds a portrait of Frida herself. Mexico was a frequent travel spot for Ruth, although the background in this painting is from a photograph of Ruth in Alhambra. It was a black and while photograph; I have invented the colour.

The hairpieces on both myself and Ruth come from different Frida paintings. The little girl on my head is my daughter Lucy, shown in the way Frida often depicted her husband Diego in her paintings, always “on her mind”. In total I reference about 8 of Kahlo’s works in this picture.

Self Portrait with my Aunt Ruth as the Two Fridas

And last but not least, the far background shows a landscape of city and country. This is about Frida but also refers to other paintings I have done. Frida had to often live with Diego in American cities while missing her beloved Mexico. Behind me is the Dorset countryside where I got married, and where I one day might like to settle down. Behind Ruth is a picture of the house in Philadelphia where she lived for most of her life.  Ruth left exciting and dramatic photographs of her travels. But her day to day life was a different picture, staying in the same tiny run-down house in the slums of north Philadelphia, living with her mother until her mother died, and then staying on in the same house until her own passing in 1985. The buildings on either side are now boarded up; when my family used to visit Ruth the neighbourhood was a melee of gangs and noise. Tragedy often is found underlying beauty, a fact portrayed again and again in the paintings of Frida Kahlo.

Some of the Frida Kahlo paintings referenced:

“The Two Fridas” 1939

“Self-Portrait as a Tehuana (Diego on My Mind)” 1943

“Self Portrait with Monkey” 1948

“What the water gave me” 1938

“Self portrait” 1940

“The Tree of Hope” 1946

“Monkey and Parrot” 1942

Day 2 “A slice of real life, with ice cream on top”

10 April 2011

Was this a lawless country, or a lawless part of the country? I thought Europe had a universal smoking ban. But not Naples. Everyone smokes everywhere. On train platforms. In cafes. Outside, inside. Smoking all the time.

Sunday morning C was going to show us the local beach. After last night’s walk through the area, I had some doubts about this ‘beach.’ From what I could see, this area was certainly for locals and not tourists; the downside was, the crumbling roads were peppered with a generous quantity of broken mattresses and over-spilling rubbish bags.

I texted C a couple of a times, then just set off in what I thought was the right direction. C turned up in the street, and told us where to go, but added that he would not be able to show us around today. ‘I’m busy. It’s Sunday,’ he shrugged in a tone that for no particular reason reminded me of Tony Soprano. Sunday? Busy? With what? Church? Visiting his mother? Who knows.

So Lucy and I walked and walked, past the old mattresses and garbage. We stopped in a religious shop, hoping to find Sexton the glow-in-the-dark Virgin Mary, or the Pope pocket watch that he requested. Unfortunately the shop only sold candles and other cemetery decorations.

Once we reached the coast, we found the local beach even more littered than the rambling streets. It was like someone dumped

Finding ceramic tiles on the beach

skips full of trash on the beach, but then someone else piled up the rubbish in square pens at 100-meter intervals. It was a little tidier near the town centre, but the sand was sticky and black (volcanic?) and I could still see the piles of rubbish. Dogs roamed freely.

I should not be surprised to see a Dacia car dealer next to some Italian automotive dealer. This place has a lot in common with Romania.

There were very few people on the beach. It was warm and sunny, though I guess still not hot enough for the Italians, as I noticed quite a few puffer jackets.

We settled near some rocks. Lucy was perfectly happy. She found ceramic tiles on the beach that she thought were from Pompeii itself. We had fun collecting the best samples. Lucy paddled in the sea, and we finally found fresh gelato in an ice cream parlour.

The facades along the beach were pretty enough, but when we curiously wandered under an arch into the narrow backstreets we found another place entirely. Never had I seen such filth and squalor in Western Europe. I loved narrow European alleyways, but these were more like medieval England than touristy Prague, chic Barcelona or Brighton’s quaint Lanes.

I recently saw a TV programme about medieval London. The houses were piled so close together that you could lean out from the upper floors on one side of the street and touch the building across the way. Here this Italian town was just like that. The streets were so narrow and the buildings so high that no light came in, and the hot, dry air outside was replaced with a musty dampness. The occasional Vespa doing 50 kph was the only reminder of the 21^st century.

Sometimes a street corner would open up and more light would come in, but this was not due to town planning but because a building had half fallen down. Half fallen – the rubble was sitting there like a Roman ruin. Walls crumbled around old rooms. It was like ruins but far more frightening because people were living here, clothes hanging out windows and garbage spewing out on to the bumpy road. The road itself was made from small squares of rock similar to what they must have used 2000 years ago. What struck me was that the town, Herculaneum anyway, (we hadn’t seen Pompeii yet), was much more civilised and well-planned that this ramshackle mess.

Considering what appeared to be such a squalid living conditions, the people looked pretty healthy. Perhaps the houses were nice inside. Maybe it was merely that the city did not spend money on the outside of buildings. The historical ruins are preserved, while the modern low-end housing, city centre, is left to crumble.

After our day on the beach, I was determined to find something to eat other than pizza. We walked even further towards the harbour and finally found a fish restaurant with outdoor tables. The fish was very good though not what I would call cheap.

Afterwards it was time for more ice cream before heading back to the hotel. The sun had just gone down. The previously sleepy town suddenly came alive. Ice cream parlours were like discotheques with bright neon signs and queues of people spilling on the to the pavements. It seemed the local tradition for the entire family to come out for ice cream on Sunday evening. Lucy found the crowds distressing.  She wanted ice cream, not local nightlife.

We finally found an empty café that also did gelato, and after more getting lost in back alleyways, we also found a metro station to take us back to the hotel.

I’ve intentionally not named the town. It was a great location for the hotel, near the metro. The hotelier was very kind. We had croissants every morning, and a drink and/or pizza when we got in every evening. The trip was about seeing the sights, so the actual area where we stayed was not important. In fact, having a place to stay that is TOO nice can be a problem; in Bavaria, the house we rented was so great that it was painful to leave to go out every day.

We also saved a lot of money by not staying in a fancier area, or in Pompeii itself. All in all I was happy. I just wished I’d done a little more research about beaches, so that we could have found a slightly tidier one, though without a car we were limited.

Local transport

Day 1: Vesuvius and Herculaneum

9 April

My creaky old brain had some idea that another friend of the bouncer was meeting us at the hotel. I asked the hotel manager a few times and he appeared not to know this guy, who I’ll call C. Lucy and I had our croissants, and still no sign of C. It was getting late by the time I remembered that I was meant to ask the hotelier to phone a number that I had been given. By now there was no answer.

Lucy wanted to do Vesuvius first. So, what could go wrong there? Did we really need a ‘guide’? We set off for the metro station, which happened to be across the street from the hotel. That was good.

But brain was still not functioning on all cylinders. Next to the note on asking the hotelier to phone C, I had written detailed instructions for getting to Vesuvius. I neglected to look at this bit of paper until we were several metro stops past Pompeii. Some other tourists were headed to a station about 15 stops along, called Ercolano. You can also get up Vesuvius from there. And it has the added bonus of more ruins, known as Herculaneum.

Admiring the view from the top of Vesuvius

Blazing sunshine promised a glorious day. But I only had about 10 Euros. Needed to find a bank machine, and buy tickets for the bus up the volcano. Still feeling like brain wasn’t working. But after lots of waiting around, Lucy and I found ourselves in 12-seater minibus heading up the mountain. In 45 minutes we were in a car park near the summit of Vesuvius.

Lucy thought that ‘climbing Vesuvius’ would be like climbing the rocks in Dorset: huge boulders to be scaled with tiny hands and long legs. She had not anticipated a dusty, hot, dull plod up a sandy path. It’s about a half hour walk from the car park. With 15 minutes Lucy was screaming to go back. But I insisted that this was what she wanted to do. So we were going to stick with it. No matter what. Echoes of the trip up Ben Nevis with my mom came to mind. But unlike The Ben, Vesuvio had not one but two drinks stalls at the top. Not only could you spend 2 euros on a can of COLD fizzy drink, you could sit on a plastic chair and admire the view while sipping your beverage. It was almost like being in Austria. Lucy calmed down and then we had a look at the crater.

Lucy was fascinated by the equipment used to measure the volcanic activity. In 79 AD no one had any idea what was happening. A bit of smoke from the volcano meant nothing to them. They had no idea a major eruption was about to take place. Nowadays the eruptions can be predicted within a good 7 days to evacuate the 600,000 people living in the ‘red zone’ around the volcano. I told Lucy that if the volcano were going to blow, Nana would probably phone us, because she’d be watching something about it on the computer. She phoned me from the US when the London bombs happened in 2005.

Equipment for measuring the volcano

When we got the bus back down, I bribed Lucy with a promise of ice cream. We were in Ercolano anyway, and it was about 40 minutes from our hotel. We may as well make the most of the day and see Herculaneum as well.

I had been warned by guidebooks that the living town of Ercolano was poor. This was evident by the lack of fresh gelato. Not a real ice cream parlour in sight. No iced coffee either, at least not like I remembered from Venice 10 years ago, with overflowing whipped cream and chocolate syrup. No, here we found only processed ice cream in plastic tubs, and tiny cups of espresso.

Herculaneum: ruins beneath the modern town

My best part of the trip was Herculaneum on the first day. Every corner was WOW, and you could freely go anywhere, and there weren’t many people. We could play ‘house’ in the ruins, and sit and draw undisturbed.  We didn’t feel like we had to rush to ‘see it all’ because Herculaneum was small, and we had no agenda. AND it was free entry for some ‘cultural festival’ week. We enjoyed every bit all the more. And I bought a guidebook for Pompeii, to read on the beach the next day. After walking up the mountain, and traipsing around an entire ruined town, I couldn’t really expect Lucy to do more of the same the very next day. We would rest, read the guidebook, and prepare for Pompeii on day 3.

And now, from the ruins at Herculaneum, I phoned C, paying a squillion pounds a minute form my UK mobile. He picked up this time. And spoke more English than the driver.

Bathing pool, Herculaneum

We met at a designated metro station, and then walked for about an hour to the bouncer’s family’s pizzeria. Certainly the best pizza Lucy and I would have for our entire trip, yet such a long walk from our hotel, and from anywhere else, that we would not manage to return.

Pizza at the end of a long day

Backtracking… the start of the Pompeii trip

I wanted to show Lucy the Infanta Margarita, the little princess in the white dress in the Velázquez painting Las Meninas. But I’d missed the chance; as soon as she hit her 6^thbirthday, princesses went out the window, as she suddenly ended her 3 1/2 years of dressing only in chiffon Disney costumes from Woolworths. Now it was all leggings and Scooby Doo t-shirts. Lucy was not going to go to Madrid to see a princess. Not even the one in the white dress who she’d discovered long before Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty.

Setting off

She was so adamant about not going to Madrid, that I asked Lucy where she would like to go for Easter break.

“Australia.”

Out of budget, sorry..

“Pompeii.”

Um… really? She’d seen the ancient ruins on Scooby Doo. So Pompeii it was. I had never been there either, and always wanted to see it.

8 April 2011

As we get off the plane in Naples it strikes me that we are being met by friends of a bouncer whom I met in a crypt. It was an art show called Flashier and Trashier, organised by the fabulous outsider artist Sue Kreitzman, in the St Pancras Church Crypt in London. Although no one ever uttered the word “bouncer”, a tall, wide Neopolitan hovering around the doorway for the duration of the exhibition implied that his job was to keep out any trouble.

So, this bouncer said he would be our “gigolo” (!) during our stay in his hometown. But at the last minute he had to go away. So he was sending friends to pick us up at the airport.

I was expecting a middle-aged man holding a sign with my surname on it, like the taxi drivers who wait for passengers at customs exits all over the world. As we emerged with our suitcases I squinted at the small crowd of waiting onlookers. I felt like I was on a stage, all of them looking at me while I tried to find the magic sign. But no one had anything resembling my name.

As we walked out the final exit, Lucy and I were approached by two drop-dead gorgeous  men in their mid 20s. They could have been movie stars.  One whispered “Guru” under his breath, barely audible.

Of course they wouldn’t know my real name. Who does? Both men wore shiny black jackets, the sort of plastic synthetic jackets popular in that part of the world. The bouncer had told me these guys spoke English, but in fact they did not.

Soon we were zipping along a motorway at 110 kph. It didn’t surprise me that the boys in front didn’t wear seatbelts. Nor did it surprise me when they quickly pulled the belts across when spotting a cop car at the toll road. But I had to laugh when they immediately went to the effort of removing their seatbelts as soon as the cops were out of sight.

The shadowy, mountainous shape that Lucy and I recognised from Scooby Doo was soon visible outside the car window. We pointed, and the boys confirmed: “Vesuvio.”

Our hotel was down a dusty street a few miles along, still well within the proximity of the volcano. After some language confusion, the bouncer phoned the driver, and Lucy and I found ourselves in our hotel room. It was clean enough, though plaster was peeling a bit here and there. They had put in an extra bunk bed for the child, so, the room could have slept four. We ordered a pizza, ate it, and were soon fast asleep.

Vesuvio

Fugitives (part 2)

13 April 2011

(during a week’s trip to Italy, without the bike)

Lucy and I had been in Italy for 5 days. We’d been staying in a hotel outside Naples, two metro stops south of Pompeii. Not speaking Italian, I had been in a holiday-news-void. Unless Vesuvius would erupt, there were no world or other events that I was aware of. And in the bustle to leave London, with all the local news that was happening, I had somehow missed the story about Tunisian fugitives.

When my friend Stefy picked us up at Livorno station, I told her about the “twins” on the train, wearing identical clothes and praying. She said they were fleeing the trouble in Tunisia. Boatloads of North Africans were risking their lives cramming into ancient fishing vessels, crossing to Sicily, washing up on the beach half-drowned. The Red Cross was giving them new clothes, hence the identical outfits. One of the men had rolled up cuffs on his jeans, I recalled, as if the jeans were too long.

It all made sense now, why they had no luggage, no passports, and identical new clothes lacking any individuality. And why the police did nothing. How silly for it not to have occurred to me that they were not Italian. At one point after the police had left the words “d’où êtes-vous?” (where are you from?) crossed my mind but I did not dare speak them aloud. The police had only asked for Italian or English.

Why was I obsessing about this slice of 21^st century almost more than the history and art? History had been written infinite times. What was there to say about Pompeii and Herculaneum that hadn’t been  said a thousand times, and better? But Tunisian fugitives were a story happening now. Lives that crossed ours for a few brief hours. How crass and trivial we tourists seemed by comparison, spilling out our big bags full of books, maps, clothes, toiletries, toys and beach towels. The 3 men had one small suitcase between them, probably belonging to the one with the British passport.

I couldn’t help wondering where the men ended up. My friends told me that the North Africans were trying to get to France, because they speak French. They were fugitives. On the run. And here Lucy and I were, we couldn’t be more different, sitting across from them on the train. We have a nice home to go to, we are visiting friends in Tuscany after a few days of intense site-seeing. We are totally different lives in a train compartment, going the same direction for a few hours.