Underground Railroad

http://www.the-fly.co.uk/words/reviews/live-reviews/3208/underground-railroad

We went up to Toulouse yesterday to see Underground Railroad a French band we know quite well; I once organised a UK tour for them. My review for The Fly is above - it was an ace show and wonderful to hang out with Raphael, Marion and JB again.

Turns out they are playing Barcelona next month - we'll probably see them there too!

The Vines

When we embarked on our travels more than 6 months ago, at the beginning of April, the landscape that greeted us here in France was full of fields dotted with brown stumps. Gradually, over the following weeks, a few touches of green appeared on them and now, as we return to France those leaves are slowly turning red and the heavy bunches of fruit are visible from the roads. They are of course the vines, and in a way they have marked our travels around Europe, a natural calendar charting the time scale of our trip.

Yesterday was my birthday, my 27th, but instead of a lazy day after 3 days of driving, we were up at 7 to take part in le vindage - grape picking. Jean-Christophe and Christiane are a little like a French version of the Larkins, except they have fewer chilren and probably pay their income tax. Their little farm about 5 minutes from Cathy's is a menagerie of donkeys, horses, chickens, ducks, patridges, pigeons and finches, while they grow sunflowers, grapes, oilseed and plums.

We and about a dozen other people - friends, family, neighbours - were helping them pick grapes for their own home-made red and rosé wines. There was no cash payment involved, just endless food and as much booze as was safe to drink while wielding a pair of secatuers. Beers were handed round the vines by way of mid-morning refreshment, while the four-course lunch was preceeded by copious potent apertifs of which Pa Larkin would have approved. Lunch itself was accompanied by the house vintage and afternoon tea (complete with pastry turned into a birthay cake for me) was washed down with sweet cider. When we were invited back for dinner (along with half the neighbourhood) and of course, more booze. Perfick!

The work itself wasn't hard - 3 hours in the warm morning sun then another one and a half in the afternoon when there were even more helpers got the job done.
Christophe stacked the crates on his forklift, emptied them into a machine to separate the grapes from the stems and got the fermentation process under way. Naturally all this was done in a very French way - everyone watching, momentarily taking charge or giving advice. Vastly entertaining for us though. All the gloom and doom in the news about the financial markets seems a world away from this rural idyll of helpful neighbours, home brew and rustic feasts. A perfick birthday.

a bit of brimstone

Vesuvius might be a sleeping beast nowadays, but the area around the Bay of Naples is still volcanic, the west side in particular, which sits on a lava plateau. After spending the night in a campsite on the outskirts of Sorrento we decided we couldn't leave the area before getting a taste of some live volcano action.

Not far from the fishing town of Pozzuoli is the Solfatara volcano. Muttering "serenity, serenity..." to himself, Theo threaded Sheena through the Neapolitan vehicular nightmare and one wrong turning later, we were at the so-called Fields Of Fire.

It's not exactly a boiling caldera of molton lava, but Solfatara has some excellently bubbling mud flats, a few busy fumeroles and a pervading smell of sulphur. We were suitably fascinated by it all, although not as much as one lone Italian visitor for whom it was clearly more akin to a religious experience. She stood with closed eyes and a rapt expression, breathing in the swirling warm mists of malodorous vapours coming from the crater.

It's supposed to be therapeutic, but I'm not entirely convinced a chemical soup of arsenic, alum, sulphur and various hydrocarbons is really such a great thing to inhale. Still, there have been plenty of people in the past who've gone in for such a thing, as one of the sights at Solfatara is a now-derelict sauna building for people who wanted the full effect of all the thermal activity. The steam room at the Budapest public baths was about as much as Theo and I could endure, I don't think we'd have been first in the queue for the Solfatara sauna.

Pompeii

We didn't get as far as the Amalfi coast. But we made it to the Bay of Naples where we witnessed the inspired lunacy of Neapolitan driving, the warmth and volatility of southern Italians and explored the ruins of ancient Pompeii.

Vesuvius, the volcano which dealt out such overwhelming destruction on Pompeii and its neighbour, Herculaneum, still looms over the bay but dormant for many centuries, it now appears lost in its own memories rather than a source of any present menace. It's hard to imagine the mountain spewing out pumice, poison gasses and pyroclastic clouds in the warm October sunshine. Nowadays, its summit tends to be wreathed in clouds rather than smoke and fire.
Pompeii's preserved mosaics, frescoes and statues are all pretty impressive. But it's the city as a whole which exercises the greatest fascination. The streets with their cart tracks, the grid layout and the rows of dwellings, ranging from public buildings to shops, villas, cafes and whorehouses. More than two thousand years after its ancient inhabitants met their violent deaths, Pompeii teems with tourists rather than residents and if you close your eyes, the bustle and voices help conjure up an idea of the city as it once was. Without the fake shutter sounds of digital cameras and the SMS alerts of the mobile phones, though.

here comes the sun... again

It's hard to believe that only a matter of days ago we were bundling on jumpers and coats before going out and once the sun had gone in we were making mist with our exhaled breaths.

Now, here we are in Italy again and with every kilometre we go south, the air feels warmer and we are back in our short-sleeves and sandals.

We have just visited Mantua, granted its UNESCO World Heritage status within the last four months and buzzing with Sunday afternoon crowds visiting a regional produce market. It made for a lovely pit-stop on our journey down to the Amalfi coast.

Having a little more time at our disposal before we're expected back in France and Spain, we've decided to explore a bit more of Italy. Last time we were in this part of the boot, the heat was almost unbearable and the grapes were just forming in tiny nubs along the lines of vines.

Back here in October, we are warm and relaxed rather than fried and frazzled and the vines, stripped of their fruit, are turning into shades of bright russet around us.

It also helps that this time our rear windscreen is intact, which means we can open the back door for extra ventilation and thus avoid the sauna effect whenever we want to cook anything. The fact that Theo's window winder has also been fixed is another small but important element in our overall comfort. Shame neither of those

Feeling a bit land-sick

After three days in Venice I'm starting to feel a bit land-sick; when I get back to our camp on the Lido di Jesolo I feel like I'm still at sea, swaying a bit to remembered waves and generally feeling a bit woozy. The cold I have is playing havoc with my ear canal and that probably isn't helping, though strangely I feel fine when actually on the vaporetti or Venice proper. Odd.

Making best use of our 72-hour travel passes we've ridden the boat-busses (that's what the vaporretti are) all across the lagoon, visiting not only the six sestiere of Venice, but also the Lido di Venezia, Burano and Murano, other inhabited islands in the lagoon. In Venice itself I think we both liked the Carnareggio district best; not quite so spectacular as other areas, though still beautiful, we at least stood a chance there of escaping the worst of the crowds and finding a reasonably priced drink. Early October has been a beautiful time to visit, with brilliantly huge skies and warm sunshine and if there was sometimes a stiff breeze on the sea front, then we could always find a still, calm spot alongside one of the inner canals. We've done touristy things - looking around the spectacular Doge's Palace and St Mark's Cathedral, crossing the Rialto and riding a Traghetto - the 50 cent, 2 minute grand canal crossing in a gondola piloted by trainees - the budget gondola experience! But mostly we just saw Venice - on foot and on the boats, a sight to see and a marvel to gawp at.

This evening we were treated to the spectacle of two massive cruise ships being tugged down the Guidecca. As the sun set over the lagoon, lighting up the jagged peaks of the Dolomites, our vaporretto kept an easy pace with one of them all the way back to Jesolo. The silhouetted shapes lining the cruiser's rails probably had an amazing view of Venice, but I hope they had a chance to look up close too.

That Sinking Feeling

If I'm honest, I expected to be severely disappointed by Venice. I suspected it would be an overpriced, overcrowded tourist trap, existing only to feed the curiosity of its millions of visitors. In some respects, that is a reasonable summary. But it doesn't do Venice - the true city of Venice - justice. What surprised me most wasn't how touristy Venice is, but how touristy it isn't.

Oh yes, if you confine your wanderings to the area around Piazza San Marco, Ponte Rialto and all the other sights, you will be continually reminded of the main source of Venice's income. But Theo and I found ourselves quite quickly away from The Grand Canal and inside an area where ordinary corner shops sell ordinary groceries, where a group of children were playing football on a sports court and the people sitting drinking spritzis outside the slightly scruffy cafes were locals enjoying a gentle sundowner after work.

But no matter how ordinary are the everyday lives of its citizens, Venice is still, inescapably, like a film-set. The place where we chose to drink limonata and caffee macchiato may have looked at first glance like many a high street in many a European city, but the fact that it began, ended and was bounded by canals immediately set it apart. Venice is exotic and ridiculously picturesque, even in the districts where graffiti, dog-walkers and fast-food are more commonly found than churches in the High Renaissance style.

The whole city has a feeing of elegant decay as centuries-old buildings lean towards the sea, which is always, always ready to receive them once their resistance to nature has crumbled away. And one day, the sea will have its way again. We watched epic earthworks taking shape around the lagoon as man tries to outwit the rising water with multi-million pound feats of engineering. But one day the islands of Venice will surely be overwhelmed as climate change takes its toll. I just hope it isn't in my lifetime.

North American Chums

Lil and B are not Americans. They were, back when they first met at Woodstock in 1969, B using the awesome chat up line of "have you got any uppers?" However, a few years later they were Canadians, and now they're in Italy for a month and may even meet up with some distant relatives they didn't know they had down in Sicily. But yes, distinctly Canadian and keen to make the distinction, as had Thor, Monica and Matt back in Bremen. But regardless of their distinct North American identity, B and Lil are a lovely, chatty couple and we were very pleased our tiny table in the tiny Venetian Pleasure Cafe ("good things come in little packages") was pressed up next to their tiny table.

We had been equally pleased when we bumped into the International Student Brigade again on the shores of Lake Bled, having first met them up the top of the Ljubljana Castle the day before. Two of the Americans in their midst, Noah and Keith, promptly gave us their email addresses and told us to drop them a line if we fancied a trip to Trieste. Which we did, so a few days later we met up with both of them in Trieste's stunning Piazza Dell'Unita and were treated to a guided tour of the city plus a blagged pizza in the University Cafeteria.

Both Northern boys from up near the Canadian border (Keith from Montana, Noah from Vermont) they were full of enthusiasm for their new situation and stunned to find out how popular Americans are in Italy. (This may have had something to do with the fact that Trieste only remained Italian after World War Two thanks to the presence of Allied forces, otherwise the city - previously Venetian, then Hapsburg - might have been absorbed into Yugoslavia along with the rest of Istria.) We had a great evening hanging out with them and, depending on their travel plans, may very well end up seeing them again.