Wednesday, March 30, 2011

A Disappointing Winter

Leysin, March 30, 2011 It's a grey, rainy day and Leysin is swathed in a veil of cloud that makes it feel as though my mountain eyrie is completely alone in the world. Quite pretty, very uninviting for outdoor activities, and so a perfect day to reflect on the last three months here in the Swiss Alps, while listening to a backlog of BBC and CBC radio podcasts. (Yes, I am a nerd!) When I last updated this blog (yes, Kent, I am still the world's laziest blogger!), the winter term here at Leysin American School was about to begin. I was looking forward to it, as Tuesdays and Thursdays during the winter are half-days for classes, ending at lunchtime, followed by afternoons on the ski slopes. It sounded idyllic, and, being a huge fan of skiing, I was looking forward to being on the slopes four days a week, plus a few evenings of skinning up the Berneuse for a nocturnal ski down. In fact, the winter turned out to be a colossal disappointment. After a beautiful snowfall on Christmas Eve, it simply stopped snowing. In Leysin, it was almost two months before it snowed again, although it did rain once or twice. Leysin's ski slopes were appalling: icy strips of artificial snow, frequently soggy and wet, with rocks peeking through. In addition to not having any new snow, it was also remarkably warm, sometimes hot, throughout January and early February. On February 6th and 7th, I took pictures of some of our students sunbathing in hammocks, and having class outdoors. On February 12th, I had a great bike ride to Interlaken, through the ski resort of Gstaad, with barely a flake of snow to be seen anywhere. It was not just Leysin that suffered, although we had probably the sunniest, warmest weather. Most of Switzerland also had an almost completely snow-free winter. I did go out skiing a few times, searching for that elusive endangered species, snow. I had a few good days at the nearest high-altitude resort, Glacier 3000, up above Diablerets, about a 30-minute drive from Leysin. It went bankrupt a few years ago and was bought by a few Gstaad residents, including Formula One chief Bernie Ecclestone. The slopes on top of the glacier are generally not terribly steep, but between wind and very localized snowfall, there was often fresh powder up top. As well, the steeper slopes of the Combe d'Audon were open sometimes, and when they were in powder, they were truly excellent, despite the irritatingly long series of lifts to get back to the top. I went out on a ski tour to Le Metailler, a 3000-metre mountain south of the resort of Super Nendaz, in early February, but, although we were up high, and although the views were wonderful, the snow was mushy soup full of rocks. I did a very informative avalanche course with a local mountain guide, Roger Payne, at Glacier 3000 (since there wasn't enough snow in Leysin to even pretend that there could be an avalanche). I went with Terri to the lovely surroundings of the Gemmipass, up above Leukerbad, and had a great weekend playing on our inflatable Airboards. Another weekend, we hiked up the snowed-in road to the top of the Grand St. Bernard Pass, had soup and tea at the Hospice run by the local monks, and airboarded back down. Mostly I played squash and rode my bicycle, trying to make the most of a bad situation. My friends in BC and Japan kept e-mailing me to tell me about the epic snow years they were having, while I looked out at the flowers blooming in February and wondered what the hell I was doing in the Alps. A three-day weekend in late February had been pencilled in for some skiing, but with the drought continuing, I decided to add to my country count instead, and flew up to Copenhagen to visit my Yangon tennis friend Hans, who now works for the WHO in Copenhagen. It was cold and wintry and clear, and I had a great time, wandering the streets, visiting the Little Mermaid, gawking at the amazing displays in the flagship Lego store, and playing tennis with Hans. Neither a case of being poisoned by a dodgy kebab (in Denmark?!?!) nor the uniformly high prices put me off enjoying my 94th country. When I got back, it had actually snowed, and I had one week rather like the ones I had envisaged: skiing Tuesday and Thursday afternoons in Leysin, powder at Glacier 3000 on Saturday, and snowboarding on Sunday in fresh powder in Leysin. The following week, I toured up the Pic Chaussy with my sister Audie and a couple of my colleagues, and despite there not having been snow for three days, and despite the Pic Chaussy being perhaps the most popular ski touring peak in French-speaking Switzerland, we still had fresh tracks on the way down. That weekend, I did two ski tours near Leysin with Terri, one up the col beside the Pic Chaussy (some fantastic cold, deep powder on the shady north-facing slopes) and an eye-opener of the possibilities near Diablerets, when we toured from Isenau to L'Etivaz. A week after the last snowfall, and we still had great snow. I feel that if we could find that sort of snow in the worst winter in years in the Alps, next year I will have better ideas of where to go hunt elusive powder. A final weekend before the two-week spring break looked unpromising for snow in Switzerland, so Terri and I drove through the Grand St. Bernard tunnel to Aosta, Italy and its excellent food and general cheeriness. It was a much snowier world down there, and we had a decent day of skiing in Pila, before spending the next day walking and lunching in the snowy, pretty valley of Cogne as great fat flakes of snow belted down out of us. I was excited at the prospects of snow back in Switzerland, but as soon as the car poked its nose out of the tunnel into Switzerland, it became obvious that, as had happened several times this winter, the snow clouds had only peeked over the mountains into Switzerland before turning back again into snowy Italy. In places near the Grand St. Bernard, snow levels were only 20% of their historical average this winter. It amazes me that after a winter spent living in a ski resort in the Alps, I only once went to one of the famous Swiss ski resorts (Zermatt), since most weekends the snow was so miserable that it wasn't worth driving a couple of hours for more rotten snow. I certainly hope next ski season is better! For the spring break, I had tossed up the idea of abandoning the Alps in favour of the Persian Gulf, but the occasional snowfall that we had started to receive made me decide to stay in the Alps for two weeks of ski touring. I planned two five-day trips: first the Wildstrubel Route (click on "Prospectus" for the route) from Glacier 3000 to Kandersteg, then, after a day off, the classic Haute Route from Chamonix to Zermatt. The Wildstrubel Route was fantastic. With my colleague Sion, I skied east under perfectly bluebird skies, along the crest of the Pre-Alpine Ridge, bagging a series of 3000-metre peaks and skiing down through fresh powder (the heavy snowfall the day before we set off helped make for fresh tracks every day). It was a seductive lifestyle: an early breakfast, five or six hours of skinning up and then skiing down peaks, arriving at our comfortable Swiss Alpine Club huts in the early afternoon, having a beer and some rosti, taking an afternoon nap, eating a lavish evening meal, and then tucking up into bed at an early hour, ready for another day of the same. There were 19 people following the same route and same itinerary, and it was fun getting to know them and sharing ideas and travel tips for the mountains. The fourth and fifth days, around the Laemerrenhutte and the Gemmipass, were the highlights, with fantastic views of the High Alps and the best powder descents, with the Rothorn providing probably the single best ski run of the entire winter. After a lazy day in Leysin, I changed ski partners and headed to Chamonix with my colleague Paul. The plan was to spend five days ski touring between the twin meccas of Alpine sports, Chamonix and Zermatt. The weather forecast looked less brilliant than it had for the Wildstrubel Route, and so it proved. Getting to Chamonix on the little train from Martigny was a highlight of the trip, as we chugged up the spectacular Trient Gorge. Chamonix was a shock to the system after the quiet and beauty of the Wildstrubel trip, with the train filled to overflowing with hordes of skiers, and the city pulsing with the energy of tens of thousands of tourists. After a less than restful night in a local dive, we set off for the Grand Montet lift, where we found ourselves in the worst lift lines I have ever seen anywhere. We got to the bottom by 9 am, and skied off the top at 11 am. For such a mega-resort, Chamonix has some pretty antiquated and poorly-designed lift infrastructure. It was hot as we skied down a bumpy, unpleasant slope to the Argentiere glacier and put on our skins for the climb up to the Col du Chardonnet. The climb was relatively easy, but the weather clouded over and it began to snow. At the top of the col, it became apparent that we had been misinformed about the existence of a fixed rope, and our short glacier rope was clearly too short to get us down the 100 metres of 45-degree icy slope below us. We got halfway down by abseiling on another group's rope, before they abandoned us halfway down, and it took a while to be rescued by the guides from a second group. We arrived at the first day's cabane chastened, late and tired. The second day was more of the same, with an advertised two-hour climb and descent to Champex taking five hours, as we ice-climbed up a hard, steep slope to the Fenetre d'Arpette, having missed the start of an easier col. By the time we skied down rotten, bumpy slush in the Val d'Arpette into Champex, we had missed the last bus to take us to Verbier and the next leg of the tour. With the weather forecast looking gloomy, and our confidence shaken by two epic, rather unpleasant days, we decided to abandon the rest of the Haute Route and leave it for another time. After the spring break, less than two months of actual school remain, and I am busy trying to line up my summer's travels. I have bought a ticket to Tbilisi, in Georgia, and I'm trying to get my Abkhazian, Russian and Belorussian visas for a bicycle ride from Tbilisi, across most of the Eastern European and post-Soviet states that I have yet to visit, to Tallinn, the capital of Estonia. I'm really looking forward to this, as it will take me to a few places that I've wanted to visit for years: Svaneti, the Crimea, Transylvania and the Tatra mountains. I will certainly keep the blog updated during this trip, and maybe even before then, as the school year draws towards its close.

Monday, January 3, 2011

A look back at my time in Leysin so far

January 3, 2010
It’s one of the first days of 2011 and I’m at home, nursing an extraordinarily painful tailbone, memento of a heavy fall on an icy slope two days ago while trying to re-learn snowboarding. It's probably not broken, but the bruising and swelling make any sort of sitting down, standing up or lunging forward pretty agonizing. Luckily (in some sense), snow conditions are so poor that I don't feel as though I'm missing much by not being out there every day. I still need to write up a bit about my trip to Newfoundland this summer with my mother, Audie, Saakje and Serge, but that will have to wait for another day to do it justice. The past four months have hurtled past rather like a luge track, and it’s only now, two weeks since classes finished, that I’m starting to feel alive again. Teaching can be a draining experience at the best of times, and when my students are neither particularly gifted (in general) nor particularly motivated, running through the donkey work necessary to run a class can be mentally pretty tough. My surroundings, perched on a mountain surrounded by higher peaks in the Swiss Alps, is pretty spectacular and the recreation opportunities they provide have been a sanity-saver since my arrival here 4 months ago, but I still find myself a bit tired and de-motivated as 2010 winds down. My friend Kent, who visited me at the end of August, called me “the world’s laziest blogger” in a post on his excellent (and un-lazy) blog The Dromomaniac. The charge is true; keeping my blog up-to-date has been one of the casualties of teaching. Now that I have some time to myself, I should really bring you, my faithful and long-suffering readers, up-to-date on my travels this fall. Part of the problem with living in a Western European country is that it’s not really very exotic. Searching for the unfamiliar is one of the main motivations I have for travel, and so I have perhaps travelled less than I would have otherwise. As well, not having a car is an impediment to travel here, despite the extensive public transport network. I hope to remedy that later this year, although used cars are more expensive and less reliable than in Japan, where most of my car ownership and driving has been done up until now. Leysin is a great location for cycling, with lots of mountain passes available for riding, and small tertiary roads and logging trails to escape from the heavy traffic. I tried to get out regularly for the first two months I was here, although I should have done better at taking advantage of the terrain. One of my favourite rides was in early September, when I rode down to Aigle (a very rapid 1000-metre vertical drop) and then up to Villars (another ski resort/international school town nearby), over the Col de la Croix, down to Les Diablerets, up and over the Col du Pillon, down to the gorgeous glitterati gathering place of Gstaad, along a pretty valley to Chateau d’Oex, over the Col des Mosses, down to Sepey and a final 500-vertical-metre climb back into Leysin. By the end of the day, I had climbed over 3000 vertical metres and covered part of a stage of next year’s Tour de Romandie, a professional cycling race used as a tune-up for the Tour de France. I also did a bit of cycling down along the Rhone Valley, where a well-designed bicycle path carries cyclists through forests and along the Rhone, far from the maddening traffic of the main roads. A lovely ride up to Morgins and down to Evian with fellow teachers was another great day in the saddle. Perhaps my favourite cycling of the fall, though, was a weekend spent riding through Burgundy with Terri, the Kiwi teacher I have been seeing here in Leysin, reliving my time as a Butterfield and Robinson cycling guide. I had forgotten how picture perfect the medieval stone villages and high-end vineyards are, and, to cap it off, we stayed in an atmospheric old castle, the Chateau Bellecroix. I also played some good quality tennis and squash here; there are a number of keen and competitive players at LAS, including one teacher who played collegiate tennis and who subsequently was a teaching pro for five years. Leysin is also a perfect spot for running, with forests and fields traversed by a network of trails perfect for trotting along. With my sister Audie eight months pregnant, she and her boyfriend Serge and another friend Daniel and I headed out to the mountains one Saturday to climb the nearby Dents du Midi, the 3000-metre peak that dominates the nearby stretch of the Rhone Valley. It was a long slog, but the weather was perfect and the views from the summit absolutely epic. It couldn’t have been a more perfect day out in the mountains. Some of our students were on their way the following weekend to climb the mountain I got away from Switzerland briefly in October when I flew on EasyJet to Belgium to visit my friend Wido and his family. Wido is working for a company in Geel, a small town in the Flemish countryside, and it was great to see him again after a number of years. I spent a day poking around the city of Antwerp, which I had never seen before, and another playing tennis with Wido and his two boys, followed by a long ride through the countryside on the well-organized bicycle paths that run everywhere. The weather was perfect, and it was all in all the best possible way to spend a rare long weekend. Shortly thereafter, I took part in a couple of genuinely Swiss festivals. First of all I made it, slightly late, to the desalpage of Etivaz, a celebration of the seasonal migration of the cows that produce the famous local cheese from the high summer pastures to the warmer lowlands. The next day I went with my mother and Terri to another cow-centred event, the famous cowfights of Martigny. Swiss cows (the females; we’re not talking about bulls here, although these cows are bigger than most bulls I’ve ever seen) are bred to be territorial and aggressive, and in early October the local farmers bring their biggest and butchest to the 2000-year-old Roman amphitheatre of Martigny to test their alpha dominance against other cows. Ten or so of these bovine behemoths are turned loose together, and after lots of ritualized snorting and pawing at the ground, eventually pairs of cows lock horns and the losers are escorted back out of the ring. I can’t say that I followed all the niceties of the rules, but I don’t think the crowd, big on biceps, mustaches, tattoos, motorcycles and wine, did much better than I did. It was a fascinating display, and one that I’m not sure occurs in many other parts of the world. It was a nice physical-cultural combination to have a wonderful bicycle ride along the Rhone to get to and from the Combat of the Queens. I accompanied a group of high school students on a school trip to an Outward Bound centre in the Bavarian Alps in Schwangau, Germany, a few kilometres from Mad King Ludwig’s fantastical Neuschwanstein castle at Fussen. The setting was excellent, and we had heavy snow to make the surroundings even more fairytale-like. The students were, by and large, not terribly enthusiastic or good company, but a few of them enjoyed it. We did some rock-climbing, a ropes course and built a home-made flying fox across a forest ravine. The highlight (for me) was a three-day hike up to stay in a back-country hut and a climb to the summit of a nearby mountain through a wonderful sugar-frosted treescape. I think the mountain guide and I enjoyed the walk far more than our seven students. I was struck, not for the first time, by the fact that the children of the hyper-rich seem to lack a great deal when it comes to motivation, determination and toughness. A wander through Neuschwanstein on the way home and an evening soaking in 19th-century thermal baths added a veneer of cultural to this “cultural trip”. Having our van engine crack and die on the way home, necessitating a long pit stop and then piling everyone into one overcrowded bus for the long haul back to Leysin was some sort of icing on the cake of this experience. In mid-November, I headed south of the Alps on a one-day marathon expedition to see a soccer match, the fabled Milan Derby between AC Milan (Silvio Berlusconi’s team, the most successful Italian team of all time) and Inter Milan (champion for the last 5 seasons and last year’s European champions). It was a long drive, and the weather in Milan was rainy and grim, but the atmosphere at the game was electrifying without there being any real threat of violence. The chanting, the flares, the banners and the cheering was great to see, although the game itself was a bit of a damp squib, with AC Milan winning 1-0 on an early penalty (scored by a former Inter star, Zlatan Ibrahimovic) and Inter barely making a single meaningful attempt on goal. The drive back was interminable, and I was glad I had packed my pillow so that I could sleep most of the way back. We arrived at 3:15 am and I had to be at work by 7:40 the next morning. Sleepy times! The game was a definite turning point for the Italian soccer season, with AC Milan now 13 points ahead of Inter and marching on inexorably towards the league title. Now that it’s Christmas break, my family, who have been gathering in Switzerland over the past couple of months rather like a tribe of steppe nomads, have spent the holidays together for the first time in 20 years. It’s been great fun: building a gingerbread house (or actually, a model of an entire street), luging on crazy Airboard inflatable luges, skinning up the mountain behind us, drinking wine, playing cards and board games and generally enjoying life. As I age, I realize that gatherings like this might not happen too many more times, so it’s been important to take advantage of having everyone around. The only downer has been a distinct lack of snow, curtailing real skiing. I hope the new year brings a lot more frequent powder dumps! So as 2011 begins, I hope to find more time and inspiration for writing and travel, and more powder for skiing. I hope that the new year finds you, my readers, enjoying the things that are important in your lives. Bonne annee!

Sunday, August 15, 2010

Italy Retrospective--December 2009, January 2010

Leysin, Switzerland, August 25, 2010
I'm just going to post a brief summary of some of the things that Joanne and I saw in our two-part tour of Italy. The first part, visiting Trieste, Aquilea, Venice and Rome (before flying off to Libya), was great fun. We had places to stay in Venice (my friend Manuel lent us his apartment steps from the Ponte Rialto) and Rome (Joanne's cousin), so we had good bases for exploration. The second part was a crazy road trip in a rented Alfa Romeo, flying into Catania from Malta, circling Sicily, then driving up to the Naples area before the long drive back to Joanne's Aunt Severina's house in Friuli. I had been to Venice twice before, but I had never enjoyed it as much as this time. Having a place to stay, and visiting in the lowest of low seasons, made a huge difference. We didn't go into lots of museums and churches; we'd done that on previous visits. Mostly we wandered around taking pictures and exploring the backstreets, trying to get more of a feel for the city. Having just finished my Silk Road bike trip, I was keen to see Marco Polo's house, but it burned down about 400 years ago and now there's only the site, the Corte di Milione, to see. I loved the colours in the low winter light, especially with the reflections on the water in the lagoons. Rome was great fun too, armed with a wonderful guidebook to the ancient ruins of the Eternal City. The last time I wandered around Rome, the ruins on the Palatine Hill weren't open, so they were completely new to me. The guidebook pointed me the way to a number of smaller ruins that I hadn't seen before, and helped me visualize the layers upon layers of history that make up the fabric of the city. Joanne loved the photographic opportunities, although she was distinctly unimpressed with the Vatican and the ostentatious wealth displayed by the Roman Catholic church. After seeing part of the BBC travel series called Francesco's Italy: Top to Toe, we made time for the Galleria Borghese and its extraordinary collection of Baroque sculpture, particularly by Bernini. Sadly, cameras were forbidden inside. If you find yourself in Rome, you really should find time in your schedule for a visit to this gem. I had also hoped to visit the Domus Aurea, the underground rooms of Nero's vast palace that abuts the Colosseum, but we ran out of time. As the roof subsequently collapsed after heavy rain, closing the site for the foreseeable future, I now regret not visiting. I also, with lots of help with Joanne, finally manage to track down the infamous rubber stamp in my passport, translating the information page into Arabic. You need this in order to get a Libyan visa, and it's almost impossible to find someone who will do this service. I had been searching for this stamp since Sofia, Bulgaria six weeks earlier, and it was just in the nick of time. I picked up my passport from a translation agency one day before we flew to Tripoli to start our Libyan tour, followed by our brief sojourn on Malta. We returned to Italy in early January, when we flew from Malta to Catania. We had rented a small car over the internet, but when we got to the rental place, Joanne used her charm, blond hair and Italian skills to get us a slightly larger and much better car, an Alfa Romeo, which was our home base for the next two weeks. It also meant that we got to fulfil an old dream of ours, driving through Italy in an Alfa. The plan was to spin around Sicily before heading north towards Friuli, via the Naples area (Campania), checking out the great classical ruins along the way. Sicily was one of the centres of the Greek world, known as Magna Graecia, and features some of the best-preserved Greek temples in the world. We started off with a run up to Taormina. It was a tough job finding parking on New Year's Day in this popular resort. The weather was rainy and the scenery and ruins didn't inspire us too much; the peak of Mt. Etna was hidden from view by clouds. It was a pity, as I have a poster of a painting of Taormina by my favourite Hungarian painter, Csontvary, on my wall, and I had had very high hopes of spectacular views. On the drive back south, towards Siracusa, we passed by the offshore islands said to be the rocks hurled by the blinded Cyclops Polyphemus at the fleeing ships of Odysseus.
Siracusa, the ancient Syracuse, was quite nice. Syracuse was one of the largest, most powerful city states in the classical Mediterranean, and its extensive museum is chock-full of wonderful vases, statues and other art. We strolled around the ruined theatre and hippodrome, and drove out of town to see the large-scale walled fortifications that the city erected to ward off a Roman army in the late 3rd century BC. It didn't work, and the city was sacked in 211 BC, with one of the most notable casualties being the greatest Greek mathematician, Archimedes.
The next day, we drove inland from the south coast to visit the wonderful Baroque town of Modica. The town was destroyed in an earthquake in the 18th century and rebuilt in a riot of exuberant Baroque architecture. We saw plenty of wonderful, quirky detail in the balconies that overhang the stone streets of the town centre. It was only afterwards that we realized that we had forgotten to find what is rumoured to be the finest gelateria in all of Italy. We consoled ourselves with some great artisanal chocolate in Ragusa, then drove hell-for-leather towards Piazza Armerina and its extraordinary Roman mosaics, another great tip from Francesco's Italy.
I have seen lots of wonderful Roman and Byzantine mosaics all over the Mediterranean, but this was quite amazing for its scale and conception. The house, which seems to have been an Imperial hunting villa during the 3rd century AD, had floors completely covered with mosaics depicting hunting, and also the capture of live animals for the Roman circus. There are a dozen or more rooms, although some are closed for restoration, and we walked on overhead walkways to look down on the artwork. It was pretty breathtaking stuff, and deserves to be better known, although I'm not sure it could handle many more tourists on its narrow walkways.
We drove west along the coast, ending up in a campground near Agrigento, ancient Akragas. The next day we devoted to the wonderful Valley of the Temples (a strange name, as they sit atop a ridge), one of the best-preserved ensembles of Doric temples anywhere. The Parthenon, for all its fame, can hardly hold a candle to the Greek temples of Sicily and Campania. We started off in the museum, but the real highlight were the three best-preserved temples, which were like a course in the history of Doric architecture. The temple of Juno and the temple of Concordia are remarkably well-preserved, with Concordia almost completely intact thanks to its conversion into a Christian church in AD 597. The ruins of the temple of Zeus are impressive for their sheer scale, although they're hardly standing. Lots of other more fragmentary ruins testify to the size of the city in ancient times. Nowadays the town is apparently better known for its dominance by the Mafia.
That evening, we drove onwards to the next ancient site along the coast, ancient Selinunte. It was the most westerly Greek colony on Sicily; further west was the territory of the Carthaginians, and to the north were the indigenous and slightly mysterious Elymians. It has a wonderful seaside location, and walking among the ancient stones on a sunny day, with a sea breeze, was absolutely magical. The ruins came in two lots: a few enormous temples close to the parking lot, and a more distant ruined city core with a couple of temples. The size of the nearer temples was absolutely colossal, and the sight of the fully reconstructed Temple E, surrounded by the scattered enormous blocks of Temples F and G, was particularly photogenic. I loved the walk between the two sets of ruins, although Joanne rather wished we had taken the little shuttle train.
That same day we had a double-header of great temple ruins, as we headed to Segesta, located on a high plateau inland from the coast. There are really only two ruins of note here in the capital of the Elymians. The Doric temple is magnificent in its setting, even though it was never completed. The hilltop theatre has a magnificent view over the plateau down towards the sea, which would make for a great play-going experience.
From here we drove into the big bad city of Palermo, once one of the great cosmopolitan cities of Europe, especially under the rule of Arab kings and then the Normans, when it was the second largest city in Western Europe after Cordoba. Driving into town was more than a bit hair-raising, and we got lost despite our satellite navigation system. We parked the car and had a wander around the historic centre of the city, past the great Norman Gothic cathedral and the palace. Although the architecture is impressive, much of the centre is falling into ruins, a stark contrast to most of the other cities we had seen on Sicily. The usual explanation for this is that urban renewal money after the war was siphoned off by the Mafia and never reached the centre.
The next morning we visited the cathedral of Monreale, with its exquisite, large-scale mosaics. I loved them, although Joanne found them a bit over the top and too religious. Much of the Bible, both old and new testaments, is depicted in luminous gold, making for an overwhelming impression.
We spent the rest of the day driving east along the north coast, stopping very briefly at Cefalu to take a picture of the pretty coastal town, and then at the fragmentary ruins at Tyndaris. Although situated in a pretty location above the sea, and with an interesting history, the ruins could not really hold a candle to the wonderful series of ruins we'd seen up until then, and we left fairly quickly. Nowadays Tyndaris is better known for a church which attracts hordes of religious pilgrims.
That evening we made it to Messina and, unable to find a campground that was open during the winter, we ended up taking the ferry to the mainland and camping just up the Calabrian coast at Rosarno in perhaps the most beautiful campground of the trip, high above the ocean. Sadly, the next day, just after we had left town for Naples, the city erupted in a four-day race riot orchestrated by the local mob, the 'Ndrangheta, in which the local Italians chased out all the African migrant workers who usually pick fruit and work in factories, doing jobs that Italians refuse to do. The Italian press spent the rest of our time in Italy hand-wringing about what was wrong with Italian society that such an outrageous event could have occurred.
I had imagined that Sicily would be the poorest part of Italy, but I was, Palermo excepted, wrong about this. Instead Calabria looked a lot poorer, and the Naples area was absolutely dismal, with urban and suburban blight wherever we went. The city was a sea of garbage and urban decay, with suburbs that alternated between sad and menacing. We stayed at a campground in Pompeii, well outside the downtown, and after a good night's sleep in our tent, we moved inside to cabins as the heavens opened in a four-day downpour. The only drawback to being warm and dry was that we discovered the cabins were used by local prostitutes to turn tricks, resulting in some interesting late-night background noises.
Our four days of sightseeing were jam-packed with great things to see, although the rain took some of the fun out of photographing what we saw. We began with Pompeii, a place that I had skipped 21 years before in favour of Herculaneum. No place in the world better captures the feeling of a Roman city than these ruins, entombed in ash and mud in AD 79. Almost all the wonderful ruins that I've tramped through over the years have the problem that walls are not left standing to any great height, meaning that most of the city's urban fabric has to be imagined, rather than being seen. Pompeii, buried to quite a depth by the eruption of Vesuvius (a much smaller mountain than I had thought) lets us see the first storey and sometimes even the second storey of Roman houses, complete with frescoes, graffiti and mosaics on the walls. Much of the ruins are, sadly, out of bounds, but enough is open to allow a full impression of a prosperous Roman provincial town frozen in time. I particularly liked the brothel, and the amazing mosaic of Alexander the Great facing the Persian emperor Darius III in battle.
Herculaneum is a much smaller site, but even more deeply buried, allowing for even more detail on the upper stories. I liked Herculaneum a great deal, and the obscure villa, probably belonging to the emperor Nero's family, in Torre Annunziata was a great find. Torre Annunziata itself, however, was one of the most dismal towns I've ever seen, and driving around the back streets, foiled by a one-way street system, we actually felt a little concerned for our own security.
We spent a day in Naples itself. The town looks like a poster child for a failed attempt at civilization, amazing since it was, in the 18th century, one of the great cities of Europe. We walked from the train station and its population of druggies and street crooks to the archaeological museum, one of the great collections of Roman antiquities in the world, rivalling those in Rome itself. Fantastic sculptures everywhere, but the real highlight was the collection of mosaics and frescoes from Pompeii. There's even a Secret Cabinet, where the collection of Roman erotica was kept hidden from Victorian eyes. On the way back to the train station, we ate pizza at the Trianon pizzeria, allegedly the finest in Naples and, by extension, the world. I was skeptical: pizza is pizza, I thought, but I was wrong. It was exquisite, and made up for the misery of the city itself.
Our last day was spent exploring the most northerly of the great Greek ruins of Italy, at Paestum, an hour's drive south of Naples along the coast. Although I thought that the temple at Segesta was the single best temple of the trip because of its hilltop setting, the three large standing temples at Paestum may be the best, or at least the most educational, ensemble that we saw. The temples, all from the 6th century BC, allow the visitor to trace the evolution of the Doric style from its overtly Egyptian early phase, with lotus capitals and swelling, bulbous columns, to the austere, formal perfection of the classic phase. In the museum, we saw very rare Greek wall paintings, from the elaborate local Greek cemeteries. My favourite showed a depiction of death, with a man's soul making a perfect swan dive into the waters of the river Styx.
It was, of course, raining heavily by the time we left, and so our tour of the Amalfi coast was less spectacular than it might have been. I had been skeptical of claims that this stretch of coast, along a peninsula south of Naples, is the most spectacular bit of scenery in Europe, but it did largely live up to its hype. The towering, vertiginous coast, with villages and towns clinging to its cliffs, was stunning and I wish we had had more time and better weather. It's hard to believe nowadays that tiny Amalfi once rivalled Venice, Genoa and Pisa for mastery of the seas in the 10th century.
We drove north, taking advantage of the only clear day in the forecast, all the way to San Vita al Tagliamento and Joanne's aunt's house. We spent a few days resting up, with a couple of side trips by car, up to the mountains of Forni di Sopra, and to Udine, looking for the tomb of the little-known 14th-century traveller Fra Odorico di Pordenone. The church containing it was always closed, but on the last day, I managed to cycle to Pordenone, on my newly rebuilt rear wheel, and see the tomb and its stained glass. Odorico travelled to China about 25 years after Marco Polo's return, and wrote a book about his exploits. He comes across as rather more religiously zealous and credulous than the Venetian, although curiously several of his stories about more outlandish bits of the world are the same as Polo's account.
And then it was time to leave; Joanne to fly back to Canada, and me to ride my bicycle into Venice, to Marco Polo's house. Joanne and Graydon's Excellent Alfa Romeo Tour of Italy had come to an end.